"Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood. People everywhere brag and whimper about the woes of their early years, but nothing can compare with the Irish version: the poverty, the shiftless loquacious father; the pious defeated mother moaning by the fire; pompous priests, bullying schoolmasters; the English and all the terrible things they did to us for 800 long years."

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The heart-pounding, often harrowing tales of a young wizard and his friends battling the forces of evil have introduced a generation to reading. And with more than 400 million copies of the "Harry Potter" books sold around the world and earnings for the first five movies reaching $4 billion, Harry Potter has become a multi-billion dollar brand.

But before becoming a worldwide phenomenon, Harry Potter existed only in the mind of Joanne, better known to the world as author J.K. Rowling, who was a struggling, out-of-work single mom when she decided one day to write a book.

Though the series has taken her 17 years to write, when Rowling began putting words to paper, it was magic.

In November 2006, Rowling locked herself in the Balmoral Hotel in Edinburgh to work on the crucial final chapters of "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" -- the final Harry Potter book. As the most anticipated new book of this century neared completion, it marked the end of a personal project for Rowling, who had been immersed in the magical world of Potter and her characters for seventeen years. With its completion, Rowling says it's time to focus on her family and her own well-being.

"I am happier now than I have ever been in my life, I am happier now than I was as a child, teenager, young adult and I think middle age is probably going to be my time," she said.

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A terrified Heather Donahue would come to be “Blair Witch’s” signature image, building publicity and plenty of parodies.

Ten summers ago, a group of independent filmmakers came up with a Web-based, viral marketing campaign that proved so effective -- and influential -- in creating buzz and audience anticipation that it overshadowed the very movie it was designed to promote.

These guys were never heard from again -- but their promotional savvy lives on.

That's the conventional wisdom about the no-budget, exercise-in-imagination horror flick "The Blair Witch Project." But like most things surrounding a movie that trafficked heavily in mythology, the truth is a bit more complicated, not to mention happier (at least for some of the principals involved).

When it opened on 27 screens in mid-July 1999, "Blair" found an eager audience that had been primed for months through the film's innovative website and the free publicity it garnered at overflow screenings at Sundance and Cannes. Many at the early screenings believed that the film's novel premise -- three student filmmakers disappear in the woods while shooting a documentary about the legend of a local witch and their footage is found a year later -- contained some grain of truth.

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