.. and one of them might end up being Harry himself:
‘’I have never been tempted to kill him off before the final because I’ve always planned seven books, and I want to finish on seven books,’’ Rowling said Monday on TV here.
‘’I can completely understand, however, the mentality of an author who thinks, `Well, I’m gonna kill them off because that means there can be no non-author-written sequels. So it will end with me, and after I’m dead and gone they won’t be able to bring back the character’.’’
Rowling declined to commit herself about Harry, saying she doesn’t want to receive hate mail.
...
In her Monday interview on the ‘’Richard and Judy’’ show, Rowling said people are sometimes shocked to hear that she wrote the end of book seven before she had a publisher for the first book in the series.‘’The final chapter is hidden away, although it’s now changed very slightly. One character got a reprieve. But I have to say two die that I didn’t intend to die,’’ she said. ‘’A price has to be paid. We are dealing with pure evil here. They don’t target extras do they? They go for the main characters. Well, I do.’’
She should know by now that she’s going to get a ton of hate mail regardless of who she kills off as each character has his or her fans, but I’m less concerned with that than I am with when the next book will be hitting store shelves. No word on that as of yet though she does say she’s well into the writing process. Meanwhile the fifth movie, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, will be released on July 13, 2007. So at least we have that to look forward to.
Posted on 06/27/2006 at 11:53 AM 
Posted on 06/27/2006 at 02:10 PM 
I read the first three books but would it be too much like dowsing the fires with gasoline if I reminded you they are fairy stories for children?
Yeah, Rowling will have lots of problems from so-called fans no matter what she does. Just look at the whining and moaning, including a rather ridiculous petition drive, when Rowling had the temerity to have Harry hook up with the “wrong” girl in the most recent book.
But if she does kill Potter off at the end it will hardly ensure there are no non-Rowling sequels. After all in a series dealing with magic it wouldn’t be hard at all for a future writer to come up with some convenient deus ex machina to bring Harry back from the dead.