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 pair­ing^{[1](#fn1-what-i-write)} 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 canon^{[2](#fn2-what-i-write)} 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](http://www.pinqury.com/home/contact/).

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

> **[Warnings:](http://www.pinqury.com/about/what-i-write/#warnings “Click to see my warn­ing pol­icy”)** 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 out^{[3](#fn3-what-i-write)} 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 spoil­ers^{[4](#fn4-what-i-write)} 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](http://www.pinqury.com/about/what-i-write/#summaries) 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.