The book, which was Rowling's debut novel, was written between approximately June 1990 and some time in 1995. In 1990 Jo Rowling, as she preferred to be known,[lower-alpha 1] wanted to move with her boyfriend to a flat in Manchester and in her words, "One weekend after flat hunting, I took the train back to London on my own and the idea for Harry Potter fell into my head... A scrawny, little, black-haired, bespectacled boy became more and more of a wizard to me...