New in the Rumors section
This new in for her Rumors sect:
The questions and riddles we had to answer before retrieving the secret message behind the door on 20th December are clues to the plot of 'Half-Blood Prince'.
I was thinking of cracker riddles when I made up these challenges (crackers are a British Christmas institution; for those who don’t know, they are wrapped and decorated cardboard tubes that typically contain a paper hat, a present – usually something small and plastic – and a joke or riddle. Two people take an end of the cracker and pull it apart; it goes off with a loud bang, or crack, due to what a quick Google search informs me is ‘a strip of chemically impregnated paper’. You generally pull a cracker prior to eating your Christmas dinner, so that you can wear the stupid hat for photographs).Anyway: the riddles and jokes you find within crackers have no deeper meaning or significance and nor, I’m afraid, do mine. You all worked out very quickly that the riddle answers made ‘Half-Blood Prince’, but the three questions relating to Harry, Ron and Hermione relate firmly to past, and not future, books – nothing to do with the publication date, not an anagram, not a clue to the plot of HBP. I greatly enjoyed the facetious speculation about the corned beef-loving otters from Bristol, though.

The painting on the wall of the study Means Something
Well, it means something to me. Lightmaker asked me a couple of weeks ago who my favourite artist is and I didn’t know why until I opened the door myself, but there it was, a little Caravaggio hanging on my study wall – a fantasy Christmas present if ever there was one.

'Half-Blood Prince' will have 38 chapters
Listen carefully, I shall say this only once: the only sources you should trust concerning information on the Half-Blood Prince are official spokespeople for my publishers and my official website. As a spokesperson for Bloomsbury, my UK publisher, has already said, HBP is shorter than Order of the Phoenix, and I can tell you now that it has fewer than 38 chapters.Let's face it: it wouldn't be a new Harry Potter book if hoaxers didn't pop up regularly on the net claiming to know new characters or plot-lines, or to have found stray chapters lying around a printer's back yard. I can't waste time denying each and every lunatic rumour, because I've got editing to do! So let's agree here and now that each of these 'claims' comes with a free barrel of salt and rise together above the madness.