TB Live Journal

In the three years of having this livejournal, and the however long it's been since my yahoo site was viciously deleted, I've had an empty 'Harry Potter' archive sitting here waiting to be filled. It was sheer laziness that kept me from committing the time and effort of posting twenty or thirty odd pieces of fic. But it's done. I even edited them a little. Yaaaay.

I will say that, having now read in particular my fic '1971' again, I think it may well be one of my top best-written fics. I was definitely trying to go for a certain style, which is perhaps more effective in the first third of the fic than anywhere else. As the scope of the fic is about thirty years, I started in the style of a children's book. As they aged, I loosened the style to be less dramatically narrative, and by the end allowed it to be simply character-driven. I had done a lot of ground-work and plotting for the fic, and I tried to match plot to style in that there's more 'episodic' events in the first third, and more arcs coming together in the second and third parts. Structure aside, I had also made a decision to keep the rating low, partly out of a desire not to alienate readers with an unusual central pairing (RL/LM), but also because it felt inappropriate to the tone of the piece, and to the books on which they were based.

I noted in my introduction of the fic that only three of the books had been published when I wrote 1971. I loved the adult characters and their apparently rich but woefully unmined back story. A huge amount of RL/SS and RL/SB fic hit the web in a giant slashy explosion, and that was consequently the first fic I read in the fandom, as that was the first time I felt compelled to read fanfic for Harry Potter. A lot of it was gratuitous sex, which is fine for some things, but it also stirred me to want to write something better. By the time I'd started on the sequel we had the fourth book and rumours about the fifth were swirling, and I lost interest in the series and the fandom, and I've never really got back into it, but I'm very glad that I at least got to go back to my own fic for it.

A few things worthy of note are the research I did for the faerie rings plot and the evolution of the wolfsbane subplot. The faerie ring idea came from two of my own childhood influences: I had read Lloyd Alexander's Chronicles of Prydain and The Perilous Gard by Elizabeth Marie Pope, both of which dealt with the underworld and the people who live under the hill. I don't know why I conflated that with Harry Potter, but I did. I did actual extensive research particularly on the Welsh traditions like tylwyth teg, and the character of Arawn in the Mabinogion. Why are they Welsh faries when Hogwarts is set in Scotland? There is no sound good reason except that I like to cram Wales down people's throats. Regarding the wolfsbane causing Remus' bad health as opposed to the werewolf condition causing Remus' bad health, I suppose that was an attempt at some realism in the story. Some of my beef with the books was that I don't think Rowling ever adequately indicated how we as readers were supposed to feel about various abuses-- are the Dursley's really hurting Harry or are they just inconveniencing him? Harry witnesses quite a lot of death and destruction, but it's not til the fourth book, the fifth book really, that he begins to really react to it in a psychologically revelatory way. Part of that, of course, is that the first three books were children's novels and the hurts inflicted in children's novels are not general so traumatising that the child hero fails to recover, but my personal preference would have led to a steadier development. Additionally, as a reader I enjoy the interjections of realism into fantasy, and seeing the 'real' consequences of things like chronic medical treatments on a young body even in a world where magic can fix almost anything satisfied some of that desire. I thought it was interesting in the books that Lupin, alone of all the characters we meet, is almost unable to survive in the magical world-- the business of him not being able to get jobs, of being poor in a world where no-one else is similarly deprived, and of being chronically ill when broken arms and petrification and so on generally don't keep people down for more than a day. Obviously Rowling wasn't taking the plot in a direction where she could explore that, but I think she left open the hints that the world Harry is living in might have been quite different outside the school, and even more different in the generation before.

Lastly, the decision to place Remus in Slytherin rather than keep him grouped with the other Marauders in Gryffindor came from a little blip in someone else's fic, in which Remus wished Draco good luck in the upcoming Quidditch game and Draco said why wish me luck, not Gryffindor? And Lupin answered, 'What makes you think I was in Gryffindor?' or some such, and that made sense to me. Again, Rowling obviously didn't go there, and given that the books focussed on Harry and not on the adults I think the lack of confusion there is perfectly reasonable, but it was still fun to think about. It also provided the opportunity to build a plot around the rise of Voldemort in a way I couldn't have done if they were all just fighting an evil monster. It also enabled me to bring in Lucius Malfoy and Severus Snape as main characters, keeping the rivalry between the Gryffindor and Slytherin factions but also making them real people with reasons for being so snotty all the time. In terms of characterisation, obviously at the publication of the third book we readers didn't know yet that James Potter would turn out to be a prat in later books, that Severus would be quite so much a favourite victim of the Marauders, etc. I think I managed to capture the general drift of Rowling's characterisations, however.

That's all I can think of for now. Fun stuff.