I'm Lanny Heidbreder, and I'm here solely because of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. The near-universal lack of acceptance (and frequent lack of comprehension) of this Reddit post of mine, combined with the existence of Innocence, which I thought had the wrong outcome, drove me to express that Reddit post in narrative form; hence, Proximity.

I'm not very happy with it. Part 1 in particular is an absolute mess; it consists of Dumbledore making the wrong decision for stupid reasons, followed by Harry making a wronger decision for stupider reasons. It basically equates to "blah blah blah, keep writing keep writing, okay has this gone on long enough that it's stomachable for Harry to make the random decision that I want? Okay cool end of chapter". I really ought to figure out something better before I publish, but writing is hard, I'm sick of staring at it, and I really need to get it out there before any new HPMoR chapters are published so none of it gets Jossed preemptively.

I eagerly solicit input on how to make Part 1 make any sense whatsoever, or on how to improve anything else about the entire story.

The story is under version control at Github, so you can forever see all the versions that are worse than whatever is published at the time.

UPDATE · 10 AUGUST 2014 — I just updated all three chapters with lots of fixes, Britpicking, etc. There are more changes I want to make but haven't had time to implement.

Feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, for which I thank everyone who's left reviews here or comments on Reddit. A few people have said things like "Looking forward to more chapters", to which I say "You are 'looking forward' to the heat death of the universe"; I consider the story as it is to be as complete as it's ever going to get. Writing fiction is hard and unpleasant and embarrassing. I wrote only three chapters over the course of seven months and got several easily verifiable details of canon and HPMoR blatantly wrong. I'm not cut out for this. Eliezer has an astonishing track record of correctness and consistency, given that he hasn't even read all the books.

So, TL;DR: thank you all for the praise, but don't hold your breath for anything else from me. :)

Finally, a request: I'm not sure if these story fixes triggered story alerts, or if my updating this profile will trigger author alerts; if anyone read this due to an FFN alert, could you let me know?