JK Rowling was recently interviewd by USA Today, the only US newspaper interview ahead of The Casual Vacancy release on Thursday which has been released online today. Here a few interesting points from the article.

Jo responding to readers who demand more harry Potter books:

“Yes, I understand that point of view. If you love something — and there are things that I love — you do want more and more and more of it, but that’s not the way to produce good work. So as an author I need to write what I need to write. And I needed to write this book.”

On how the idea for The Casual Vacancy came to her:

“I can’t remember what triggered it,” she says. “It just came to me. It’s hard to sum up the idea, but it was for a disrupted local election, and I could see immediately that that was a perfect way to get into a small community, of examining a lot of different characters of different ages. I’m very drawn to that type of book. I like to get in among a set of people and get to know them very well.”

“It was an appealing idea because I could see that I could set it in the kind of town that I knew,” Rowling says. “Although Pagford is not Chepstow, the town where I grew up — it’s smaller and the geography’s wrong — still it’s an area that I know. It’s an invented place, but it does owe something to the West Country (southwestern England), which is where I lived all my life really until I was 18 and I left home.”

Jo on the prospect of a film about TCV:

“Personally, I don’t think this is a very filmable book. That is one of the things I like about it. I think it’s a very novelly novel in that a lot of what goes on happens internally. You need to understand what’s going on inside people’s heads. So even though a lot happens in the novel, part of the appeal of it for me is that so much of it happens in people’s interior life, and film isn’t necessarily the best medium to portray that.”

On what she’ll publish next:

“I don’t want to commit. I was simultaneously devastated and liberated actually by finishing the Potter books. I truly was devastated — ‘My God, it’s over. I will never again write Harry, Ron and Hermione,’ but at the same time there was a massive sense of liberation so, selfishly, I don’t wish to promise I will produce a book a year from here on in. I feel free now. Maybe that sense of freedom will mean I produce books more frequently. It could be. I just don’t know.”

And Potter fans will have to live with the fact that she’s not writing anything for young adults. “No. Nothing nothing, nothing,” she says emphatically, “and it would be challenging because of what I did with Harry. I have no plans to go there at the moment but never say never. If I had an amazing idea I probably would do it.”

Very near completion, she says, is a book for children. The ideal reader would be 7 or 8. “I think the next thing I publish will be for children, but I don’t really want to be held to that because I also know what my next book for adults will be and I really like that too so it depends. I’ve always had more than one thing going.”

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