My husband and son are out of town until Monday afternoon, so I actually got to go to a movie with friends the other night. The Disney-Pixar flick Wall.E turned out to be just as adorable as the previews indicated, while also strangely apocalyptic and subversive. I enjoyed it enormously. I also wasted far too much time playing around online, steam-cleaned my carpets, and worked on my romance novel fairly late into the night. All in all, reasonably diverting, but I almost miss the sense of being on a schedule. Almost.

I have a notion in my head for a sort of "anti-Harry Potter" tale -- not an HP fanfic, but sort of a fictional "response" to the whole concept of magic boarding schools (of which there seem to be many in addition to Hogwarts). I just think there ought to be some challenge or alternative, in fiction, to the stupid social Darwinism that gets tolerated or even celebrated in this genre. Specifically the Marauders' attacks on Snape spring to mind, but I see this as a larger narrative problem, if that makes sense: popular fiction's passive acceptance of dog-eat-dog capitalism and its values.