fell into my head. I had been writing almost continuously since the age of six but I had never been so excited about an idea before. To my immense frustration, I didn't have a pen that worked, and I was too shy to ask anybody if I could borrow one… I did not have a functioning pen with me, but I do think that this was probably a good thing. I simply sat and thought, for four (delayed train) hours, while all the details bubbled up in my brain, and this scrawny, black-haired, bespectacled boy who didn't know he was a wizard became more and more real to me. Perhaps, if I had slowed down the ideas to capture them on paper, I might have stifled some of them (although sometimes I do wonder, idly, how much of what I imagined on that journey I had forgotten by the time I actually got my hands on a pen). I began to write 'Philosopher's Stone' that very evening, although those first few pages bear no resemblance to anything in the finished book. When she had reached her Clapham Junction flat, she began to write immediately. [ 26 ] [ 48 ] In December of that year, Rowling's mother died, after ten years suffering from multiple sclerosis . [ 26 ] Rowling commented, "I was writing Harry Potter at the moment my mother died. I had never told her about Harry Potter ." [ 22 ] Rowling said this death heavily affected