User blog comment:JoePlay/Wizarding World Giveaway/@comment-4149095-20110715025552

When I was 13, my dad sat me down at the dining room table and attempted to explain to me that I could not read my favorite book series anymore. He was, at the time, a minister at a very conservative Christian church in the area. I had committed a grave mistake the previous Sunday when I had toted along my Harry Potter book to church with me. Upon seeing the travesty of fiction in my bibliophile palms, people threatened to leave the church. The elders, concerned with their attendance (and therein amount of offering given), explained to my dad that if I didn't stop reading the books, we would be forced to leave. As my dad told me this, I just sat in disbelief. Already, Harry Potter had inspired fanfiction out of my crazed preteen imagination, artwork and stories were blossoming, and in an environment where such creativity should have been welcome, I was being asked to bottle it up. My father, who himself was a minister's child, sat there and cried. My dad has never been a small man. Think body-builder sized, 6'4", huge. When he cries, something terrible has clearly happened. He changed his mind mid-conversation and said, "Keep reading them. Don't tell anyone. Don't bring it to church." So I promised. And in a month's time, I walked into my house after a strange Sunday at church, only to find that my father (crying for the second time I had ever seen) had been forced to resign his position at the church. Five years of friendships, of a home, of a city I loved, were suddenly torn away from me. We were banned from the church, unable to return to the place that was the center of everything my family (all six of us) was. For six months, we waited for my dad to find another preaching job. Though, to be honest, he didn't seem to want much to do with the church at that point. None of my friends from church would talk to me. In that small of a town, that meant that no one would talk to me or my family. What else could I do? I continued to read. I continued to draw and write and create and eventually, I moved into a sphere of my own, creating my own characters, worlds and stories. We moved to Colorado at the end of the six months. I walked into a high school my freshman year, knowing absolutely no one, when a girl approached me. She remembered my face from fanfiction she'd been reading. Then she introduced me to her friends. And 10 years later... after University in California, a move to Burbank and a real tattoo of a Dark Mark emblazoned on my hip, I can say thank God for Harry Potter. The series changed my life, but I would not be the same person I am today without it. When I had nothing, I had Harry. -Bri