What?? James Potter and the Halls of Elder???

Moved from Roundtable.

Nothing on www.snopes.com yet, but give it time.

Hmm. I don't know. I'm going to wait and see. I know it can't have JK's involvement and I'm not sure if I would want to read something set in her universe written by someone else.

ETA: have just checked out the website. I dunno. Very professional looking, but a little rough in places. Also the whole "you are must be a friend here have the secret password but don't tell anyone" seems disingenuous. Like the person is pretending that this is something exclusive to make us feel special, when really anyone can get the password. Man, why does the Leaky Cauldron not have any info yet!

checking mugglenet.com and jkrowling site right now...

Mugglenet doesn't have anything.

But I'm inclined to not believe it. Anybody can make a website.

Yeah I saw that too. But it is easy to simply write a copyright at the bottom of a page. Then again if it is fake, why hasn't WB jumped all over this one, they are pretty strict about this stuff. I dunno. I'm still very skeptical. And I still maintain that even if it is real, I don't think I'm going to be that interested. Part of the reason I like HP is the writing style and voice. JK's sense of humour. I don't know how keen I'd be to read something by someone else.

Makes me even more suspicious. A little video that is supposedly leaked, hence the "internal promo video" heading, that conveniently tells you nothing but sends you to a website. One thing I think we can say for sure is that none of this was leaked accidentally. Doesn't mean it isn't legit, but personally I am starting to resent the makers of this whole exercise considering they think so little of my intelligence.

Toothpaste said:

Makes me even more suspicious. A little video that is supposedly leaked, hence the "internal promo video" heading, that conveniently tells you nothing but sends you to a website. One thing I think we can say for sure is that none of this was leaked accidentally. Doesn't mean it isn't legit, but personally I am starting to resent the makers of this whole exercise considering they think so little of my intelligence.

Click to expand...

Isn't that what marketing people are paid for?

Yeah. Pisses me off (though my cousin is in advertising, so I can't hate the profession . . . just . . . get . . . angry).

I don't really believe it's true, but I'm going to keep an eye on it. The Web site does look pretty professional, except for the secret password thing.

J.K. Rowling already said that there's no way she'll write an 8th HP book and she usually sticks pretty close by her word. As far as someone else writting it, wouldn't that be impossible since JKR copyrighted the hell out of everything?

Unless she approved it?

But I doubt she would.

I agree with those who think this is just fanfic.

Unless of course she gave permission. And I just don't see her doing that. And definitely not this soon after book 7, maybe years down the road.

Looks like fan fic to me too. Really the website, looks professional, but not quite if you know what I mean. Someone looking for their 15 minutes. And it's working.

Fanfiction. Elderscrossing is registered to a private person.
Mr. Turkey did a search on the domain registrars.

Good ol' Mr. Turkey!

Wouldn't it be great, though, if JKR did a recap book that gave specifics about everyones lives such as what careers they all ended up having, who married whom, etc.?

Actually I think she is planning just such a thing. An encyclopedia to be done sometime in the future.

And Turkey you rock! How does one perform such a search?

From Publisher's Marketplace:

"PotterWatch
Neil Blair of the Christopher Little Literary Agency tells HPNA.org, 'Jo has not written an eighth book in the series and is not doing so. So no James Potter book I'm afraid.' (Which is still an incomplete answer to the question of whether the Elder's Crossing site is legitimate, and what it means.)"

The site has split into a low- and high-bandwidth version. Someone's putting a lot of effort into a potential hoax.

This is the place to go to search domain names, although there are other sites out there that use this as well.
http://www.whois-search.com/
It helps to be married to a computer geek.

He also mentioned that she did write a short story for close friends. It was on one of his (many) RSS feeds so he can't remember the source.

man oh man....

Probably a hoax. It'll turn out to be some fan-fic writing 12 year old prodigy from Peoria. The site is derivative of JK Rowling's site in the interactive features. No way, no way could Rowling have written an 8th book--nor do I think she'd want to. I know the Encyclopedia is in the works, and there the Beedle the Bard book--handwritten--which I think is being auctioned off for charity. But this? Nah. Don't get excited.

Maybe it's a concept album...Harry Potter and Music from The Elder.

HPANA is following the saga of that site:

http://www.hpana.com/news.20263.html

ETA:An additional article is here:
http://www.news.com.au/mercury/story/0,22884,22729949-5005940,00.html