Today’s Lake and Shed framed conversation is all about the Steve Kloves screenplay, The Secrets of Dumbledore, which is “based on a screenplay by J. K. Rowling.” Nick lays out the drama surrounding the third Fantastic Beasts franchise film and his favorite part of the movie (hint: it’s about “confusion”). John reveals why Jacob gets a Snakewood wand and one without a core as well as why he thinks Kowalski is the embedded author in this series.

New to the Lake and Shed Kanreki Birthday series? Here’s what we’re doing:

On 31 July 2025, Joanne Murray, aka J. K. Rowling and Robert Galbraith, will be celebrating her 60th birthday. This celebration is considered a ‘second birth’ in Japan or Kanreki because it is the completion of the oriental astrological cycle. To mark JKR’s Kanreki, Dr John Granger and Nick Jeffery, both Nipponophiles, are reading through Rowling’s twenty-one published works and reviewing them in light of the author’s writing process, her ‘Lake and Shed’ metaphor. The ‘Lake’ is the biographical source of her inspiration; the ‘Shed’ is the alocal place of her intentional artistry, in which garage she transforms the biographical stuff provided by her subconscious mind into the archetypal stories that have made her the most important author of her age. You can hear Nick and John discuss this process and their birthday project at the first entry in this series of posts: Happy Birthday, JKR! A Lake and Shed Celebration of her Life and Work.

Tomorrow? It’s back to real books, a novel written entirely by Mrs Murray, aka Robert Galbraith. We’ll be discussing Ink Black Heart with Nick covering the front and the back of making Lake readings of Strike6 without a lot of circumspection and John talking about the eerie feeling he had while reading this book that the author was ‘having a go’ at him. Stay tuned!

Links to posts mentioned in today’s Lake and Shed conversation for further reading:

* Snakewood: The Rarest and Most Beautiful Exotic Wood

* Snakewood as a Wand Material

* Wild ‘Secrets of Dumbledore’ Theory: Rowling Puts Pro-Trump Message in Script that Kloves Didn’t See or Remove

* MsMojo: Secrets of Dumbledore’s Answered and Unanswered Questions

* Secrets of Dumbledore: Predictions Fulfilled and Promise for the Future Elizabeth Baird Hardy

* Beatrice Groves – Secrets of Dumbledore: First Thoughts

* Fantastic Beasts: Secrets of Dumbledore The Rowling Library Review Is Up

* The Secrets of Grindelwald Screenplay: Three Quick Notes about its Publication

* YouTube Link to Film

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