What I Write

Touchy-feely Answers:

The Short Answer:

Very Long Stories with Plot.

The Long Answer:

My favourite kind of story to read is one that is many stories. A series, hopefully, with strong characters and a solid plot and lots of stuff happening. The story– or what actually happens in it– has always meant more to me than the characters within it. So while I can and do fall in love or in hate with specific characters, it’s usually because their stories are awesome, and the story they are operating in is awesome.

It shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that that kind of story, with those kinds of characters, is what I like to write. This is one reason why I don’t participate in fannish activities/events that are common in Harry Potter (HP) fandom: fic exchanges, ficathons, fic challenges, and so on. I work best with stories and characters that are of my own choosing, and don’t like to limit what I will and won’t write when I’m writing something long. And, of course, there is the fact that I write best when I write long. A chapter of one of my stories is usually about 8,000 words long, which is about the length of a longish one-shot in HP fandom.

Lastly, I’m not a pairing¹ person. Or, as I’ve already said, a character person. What I remember about a story is what happened, and while characters and relationships and so on might heavily influence what does happen in a story, they are never central in mine unless they are central to the plot of the story being told. So if I warn for a pairing in a story of mine, say, Dumbledore/McGonagall or something, don’t expect the story to be anything more than the attached summary says. If the summary is all about them being expose as a couple, then you can expect me to focus on their relationship to some degree. On the other hand, if the summary is all about Harry being on his deathbed and recounting interesting memories or secrets to someone else, don’t expect more than a paragraph or a scene or two focusing on Dumbledore and McGonagall being together.

Alternate Universes

Yes, this is part of my long answer ;). My love affair with Alternate Universes (AUs) began shortly after I started reading HP fanfiction, and has endured to this day. I define AUs as stories that split off from canon² at a somewhat defined point and explore what might have happened if an event happened differently or a character died at some point, and so on and so forth. Alternate Realities (ARs), imho, are a further branch off the AU path, and involve the author changing the settings of the HP universe (or whichever universe they’re writing in or alongside) drastically. In my opinion, an AU where Harry and everyone else around him in the HP universe are muggles qualifies as an AR, while an AU where Harry ends up acting like a muggle and living in a muggle setting for whatever reason qualifies only as AU.

As I just said, I adore AUs, and so that’s what I tend to write. I like exploring away from the central thread that HP canon provides, and the HP canon creates a world that’s wide and unpainted enough for me to seriously go off the beaten path while preserving the feel and the elements that define the HP world. Of course, my stories are not canon, and because I am writing them, they will never feel exactly like what is in canon, and they are filtered heavily through my perception of how things went down in canon.

Technical Answers

Now, that was all the touchy-feely stuff. This section is more about what shows up in my author’s note section at the top of every standalone story or chapter I post, and what it means.

Summaries

For larger stories, I do my best to have a central summary for all of the story, and one-line summaries for each chapter, so you have an idea of what you’re getting into. I reserve the right to black out warnings that will spoil you for events that will happen during a story. Summaries in most of my stories will look something like this on the story or updates page:

Summary: Harry, near the end of his life, takes a journey into the past to cheer up his children.

If you read through a story and find that, for you, the summary wasn’t at all representative of what you actually read, please comment to that story and tell me so so I can at least consider fixing it. This site is here for my convenience, yes, but for yours as well, and if parts of it aren’t working well, I really appreciate you telling me about it.

Warnings

Warnings will be added above and separate from the summary, with spoilery bits blacked out.

Warnings: Pairings mentioned include Harry/Ginny, Harry/OMC, Dumbledore/McGonagall. Possibly upsetting elements include: adultery, references to sex, graphic descriptions of sex.

Summary: Harry, near the end of his life, takes a journey into the past to cheer up his children. He doesn’t quite succeed.

As for ratings in general, I use ratings on other archives and sites when I post my work. But here, considering that most, if not all, of the material I intend to post includes adult concepts and themes, I decided to not bother with them at all. Warnings will generally provide you with all you need to know to avoid or hone in on a story of mine, and they will include what pairings are referenced or mentioned or written about in the story.

Content of the warnings section

Now, I’ve gotten into the habit of taking as given certain things that I will and will not warn for. Just to make sure we’re both on the same page as far as what kind of content I’ll warn you about, I’ve listed what I will warn for and what I will most likely not warn for below. These two sections will be updated to reflect changes in my personal habits, so if you haven’t been by the site for a while, do check them out³ to see if they’ve changed.

What I will warn for

Things commonly considered squicks in the fannish community I’ve been writing in, i.e. sexual kinks (bondage, bdsm, watersports), plot points (male pregnancy), and general themes, writing choices or writing styles (crackfic, alternate universe, out-of-character[OOC] behaviour).

What I will NOT warn for

Swearing or “bad” language in general. Non-graphic references to sex. Homosexual, heterosexual or anysexual relationships. Character death in the specific (if I warn for character death, it will be under a spoiler tag, and it won’t mention who dies).

I also do not warn for canon spoilers⁴ unless I need to do so for plot purposes. If you’re reading a story that doesn’t have any identifying details about what canon I am basing the story off of, please assume that it will contain spoilers for all of the recent canon.

E.g. “This story was set before HP and the Order of the Phoenix, but contains canon spoilers up to the last HP book” means exactly that. And my sample story above is an example in the opposite direction, where you should assume that all of HP canon will be used since I do not explicitly say otherwise in the summary.