I haven't really done anything with this profile in a really long time, so feel free to skip past the majority of it. Info about upcoming stories is at the bottom.

Love letter to Fanfiction (Feb 20, 2011)

My dearest Fanfiction,

Like most people, I think I first started writing for myself. Ideas floated through my head, and I wanted to write them down so that one day I could look back on them. In 2005 I started to make up stupid lines as I watched Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, and wanted to make a record of it as I thought they were pretty funny. After writing a full movie’s worth, I went back and gave the same treatment to the earlier films. The documents sat on my computer for a few years gathering whatever the digital equivalent of dust is. Originally I planned to put them up on a little comedy website that myself and my cousin ran at /thetteam and then try to get links put up on Harry Potter fansites and such. These were the days when I believed I was the only person to have ever done such a thing and that I would revolutionise the online HP world. That site soon died out, so I made an attempt to send the parodies to a site that specialised in Harry Potter humour, but they turned me down. In a sign of surrender, I threw them up on a livejournal account, where I had come across some other HP parodies before, just so they would have some form of online presence, and was willing to let them sit there alone to possibly never be read.

And then I found fanfiction. I can’t even remember exactly when I became aware of the site, nor the moment I felt I could post my writings here, but on September 3 of 2009 I uploaded the first four films at once. Next day, I had a bunch of reviews for them, which was a very unusual experience for me. People were actually reading my work and enjoying it. Reading things I had written years ago and didn’t really care about that much anymore. A little under two months later I put up Order of the Phoenix, which I had been working on prior to signing up to fanfiction, but again didn’t expect it to ever really be read. From that moment on, I had the bug, and embraced the world of fanfiction.

I guess fanfiction gave me a weird relationship with writing. I was no longer writing just for myself, but for a potential audience. I wanted the people who had already read my stuff to still enjoy it, and wanted it to be good enough that people discovering it for the first time thought it entertaining enough to come back to when I updated. I didn’t have one thousand readers, and didn’t get one hundred reviews per chapter, but I still loved being able to receive feedback for what I do. It gave me a reason to keep working, keep trying to get better, and keep producing new material. I think that’s the beauty of fanfiction; it makes writing exciting. It gives you an audience, and a place to hone your skills. I love reading amateur works, that either play with already established characters, or take them in completely new directions. Some of the most creative ideas can be found on the shelves of bookstores, and some can be found in the minds of non-professionals who write not because they need to make a living, but because they have a passion for storytelling.

I love looking at people’s profiles and seeing lengthy descriptions about themselves and their stories, showing they really take their writing seriously and want to develop a relationship with their readers. I love seeing people with profiles full of those copy/paste surveys, showing they like going through the profiles of others and having fun with the fanfiction world. I love seeing people with absolutely nothing on their profile page, but with a bunch of favourite authors and stories, because they’re here simply to read and support the work of others. I love people who say on their profile page that they one day want to be a professional writer, as I think that’s a fantastic goal in life and this website is a great place to get started. In short, I love everyone who is here to share and read, as they have created an incredible online community.

It may not be readily apparent given that what I write is somewhat silly, but I put a lot of effort into what I do, and tend to take my work more seriously than some would think. That may be surprising given the content and style, but it’s true. Not because I have any delusions of myself as some great writer, but because I love writing and want to produce good work. And that love of writing is in a large part due to fanfiction.net. I am now working quite seriously on a novel, with another novel idea being worked on occasionally, and myself and a friend of mine hope to work on a book of short stories in the near future. I don’t know a lot about what I want to do in the future, but I would absolutely love to one day be a published author.

And I guess if I have one more thing to say about fanfiction, it’s that I have done so much writing over the last year and a half that I can’t even write a new section for my profile without it being overly long and wordy. I’m not even entirely certain why I felt the need to write this, other than I wanted to show my appreciation for this site and all the people on it. So thank you to all those who have read, thank you to all those who have reviewed and favourited (spell check tells me that’s not a word, but I’m using it anyway), and thank you to all those who have never read any of my stories but keep the site alive and thriving.

I hope to be here for a few more years to come, as I certainly have some more stories in me, and it’s a great place to escape to when life gets a little uncomfortable. I hope this hasn’t bored you too much, and would love to hear from anyone with similar experiences, or have a story they think I’d like to read, or just wants to talk about life and/or writing and/or anything.

Thank you once again.

Yours in the anonymous world of creativity,

Project H

I am on Fiction Press at http://www.fictionpress.info/projecth
I will be adding some stories soon, that will mostly be short stories that continue my fruitless endeavour to be humourous via the written word.

I am also on Tumblr thusly: http:///
And I do a McLaggen RP as well. So if you'd like to interact with the man himself, you can find that here: http:///

Feel free to add me as a friend on Pottermore, although PM me first to let me know just so I know who you are. The first friend request I got came out of nowhere and have no idea who I am now friends with. I'm DraconisPhoenix13, which can be shortened to Draco, which makes me awesome!

I can be contacted at projecth@ if you have any comments, suggestions or wish to tell me to stop trying to be funny. Or alternatively you can just PM me, which I always respond to as quickly as possible.

Note: I have just realised that the script form I am currently using is not permitted on fanfiction, so I will rewrite the stories in a more acceptable form, keeping them as similar as possible, in the event that these get deleted. To any moderators out there, please don't suspend my entire account as I will rectify the problem as soon as possible.

Note 2: I apologise for the ending of Chamber of Secrets. I don't know what the hell I was thinking that night. I'll maybe tweak it a little in the re-write (Hey Dad..! was an Australian sit-com, for the many of you bemused by that).

The Three Rules I apply to my parodies:

1. Never break the fourth wall. A lot of people like to address the audience or make JK Rowling or the directors characters. That's always pretty funny, but I like to write my parodies as if they were things that could actually happen to the characters and plots if the Harry Potter universe were real. When I originally wrote the first four parodies a few years ago, there were a few instances when I broke this rule (including one of my favourite scenes in CoS in which Harry enagaged in conversation will 'Phil the cameraman') but I removed all these as I think the stories work better without them.

2. No outside references. Essentially, this means to not talk about real life events or other fictional stories, as this wouldn't happen in an actual Harry Potter stories. So don't expect Frodo Baggins to wander in in the middle of a scene. Such references in the original parodies included a cameo from King Kong in PS, which I found really funny but took out. I actually break this rule all the time despite my efforts not to, as I kept in Snape's Brangelina reference and make numerous confusing references to 'Hey Dad..!' in CoS (and I regret that tremendously).

3. The plot gets priority over jokes. I like for my parodies to keep as close to the plot as possible (excluding the horrible CoS ending, which was written long before I started writing according to these rules) and as such, if I think of a joke I think is really good but it involves sending the characters to a new location or doing something that doesn't make sense to the plot, I remove it. The closest I have come to breaking this rule was PS when Hagrid goes back to the owl shop to re-enact the 'dead parrot' sketch.

I know this makes it sound like I take these parodies way too seriously, but I think it's a lot more enjoyable to write stories that theoretically could actually be included in the movies themselves.

Several other notes I think are important to point out:

Disclaimer: I own Harry Potter. Please send royalties.

I imagine most people are intelligent enough to work this out, but I harbour no ill feelings towards the Harry Potter films. I love them (even the first two, which I have my criticisms of). They are undoubtedly my favourite films (and books) in the world and I write parodies are my own special tribute to them.

I would also like to point out that unlike other parody writers I have seen, I happen to think that Alfonso Cuaron is the best thing to happen to the films and that without him the series would have headed down an overly-family-friendly direction and would have robbed us of some of the best moments in the series (which I know to be true, as I recently saw an edited family version of GoF on TV which heavily cut down the scenes in the graveyard and Amos' grieving). I also think that even though a lot of important plot points have been removed from the films, I forgive Steve Kloves as I know that converting such descriptive books into films requires such editing (except in the case of HBP, as they really took the plot to pieces in that one).

Currently in the works (updated 15 March 2013) :

Project H: Breaking Dawn part 2: Haven't actually started on it yet, as I've been working on some other things recently (some fanfiction, some original works). But I do intend to do it soon, and hopefully I will be able to get it done reasonably quickly.

From McLaggen with Love: Well, its almost two years after I wrote the original, and I started work on it many months ago, but I've finally got it done. Will be uploading a chapter a week.

50 Shades of Green: I'm not even going to attempt to explain what was going through my mind when I came up with this. I'm very, very sorry.