Potter Who and the Wossname's Thingummy: Some Information To Help You Live With It

-8) Why the even more immense delay before Westward Ho! 7c? Other than life (don't talk to me about life), JKR decided to...well, retroactively undermine the whole world she'd so painstakingly built. I intended to do a simple throwaway gag and found myself up against a plot hole that threatened to swallow the whole enterprise. It's not that I stopped writing, I wrote and wrote and wrote, I wrote whole essays you may never see, and nothing worked...until...well, got my fingers crossed, and you'll see it in 7d.

-7) Why the immense delay before Westward Ho! 7b? Lots of things, although the most pertinent-to-the-text one is that the Potterverse turned out to have be a moving target and it took a long time to figure out how to make adjustments for that. Oddly enough the solution was contained in the problem and was too obvious to see.

-6) The name of the lake squid is stolen from Isaac Asimov. So is Asenion Izzard.

-5) I like reviews. I even like negative reviews. If you hate it enough to unfollow it would be nice if you said why. (Okay, that it's [taking] too long, that I know...)

-4) I really need to respond to more reviews...

-3) According to some reviews people are reading this and theorizing, which is both good and bad — good because there sort of are clues, bad because as, Steven Moffat could tell you, you can't predict what people will take as clues.

-2) Noodling around the internet (as you do) I came across an io9 review of Diane Duane's "Young Wizards" books, according to which, in the youngwizardverse, "perfectly and accurately describing what you want to happen, makes it happen". Great Montgomery Scott, that sounds an awful lot like what I've patched into the potterverse. I did read the Support Your Local Wizard trilobus once, a long time ago, but I don't remember that part of it. Nonetheless I seem to have nicked it. Well, I hope I put a twist on.

-1) It's boggling how many typos and thinkos don't become visible until after I post a chapter. Once I didn't see one until someone quoted a section en blog.

0) Typically this story is told in plain text, as with this sentence. When a sentence appears italicized, it's typically the Doctor doing internal monologue. (Since he has more than one internal monologue, the extra one goes in parentheses.) [Or square brackets.] { Text inside curly brackets, though, is always Harry himself mind-speaking. }

During extended flashbacks and such, this rule may be inverted. In which case the Doctor's internal monologue would be plain text. (And his extra ones still in parentheses.) [Imagine if supported full Unicode!] { Either way, Harry's in curly brackets. }

The plain text is typically third-person narration, but the Doctor tends to take over and start doing first-person things with it. Sigh.

1) It's even more painful to write, honest.

2a) I'm not James Joyce. It's not intentionally incomprehensible. As Jorge Luis Borges said, "Why be difficult?" Obscure, maybe, but obfuscated only for the purpose of easter-egg-hunting ("behold the utterly useless rewards of the fantastic!").

2b) If you wouldn't mind PM'ing me with a note itemizing the point where you started screaming and threw your iThing/tablet/notebook/desktop-and-dual-monitors-setup across the room, I'd love to know. I might be able to fix it. —I only said I might! Stop that laughing and weeping!

3) If you aren't conversant with Harry Potter I'd like to hear from you. If you don't follow current era Doctor Who, ditto. If you don't keep tabs on either and you're reading this anyway I'd really like to know. (I read Bored Of The Rings long before I read Lord Of The Rings...)

4) Early adopters may not get the best experience of a given chapter. I may discover that it reads differently in ff.n's formatting or that ff.n has removed some parts of the text without warning (as when I used centered asterisks to indicate short breaks in time between paragraphs), so I may twiddle a chapter after posting it.

5) I am not a rivet-counter, but I respect rivet-counting. I don't intend to break canon accidentally or for the sake of throwaway lines; if I break canon I intend to break it good and hard. If you think I've merely done the former, feel free to say so.

6) I did work out the ending of this story in advance, and am vigorously driving for it to the extent that I overcome my bad habits. It's not quite the same ending, now that I've passed the middle, but it's pretty close.

In the event you think that the reference to "Chime" by Orbital is gratuitous, I would like to mention that Orbital recorded "Chime" in a cupboard under the stairs.

What happened in Seeding A Plant III?!

That chapter reads the way it does because I couldn't do it any other way -- it just wouldn't come out.

The story is taking place in a magic universe, so things work magically, which means symbolically.

In this chapter, the Potter has an unconscious symbolic epiphany.

Some of what happens in there hinges on Doctor Who lore, so if you don't know Doctor Who lore it won't make sense, and there was no real way to explain it; maybe a way will occur to me later and I'll shim it in.

First off, in the Whoniverse the Doctor either was or will yet be Merlin. ("Dear Doctor, King died in final battle, rest is propaganda, signed The Doctor")

The Doctor has a mysticomechanical life-partner in the form of a box called the TARDIS, which is smaller on the outside, and the central functional facet of which is the Time Rotor.

He stole it, or she kidnapped him, or some arrangement of pronouns and verbs, it's complicated.

Merlin's esplumeor is smaller on the outside, and contains a rotating spice rack loaded with jars containing, well, thyme. When the Potter breaks into a and/or the Merlin's cabinet and eventually makes off with a merlin, literature teachers across the universe slam their heads onto their desks and say that's not how you do it.

Anyway, he's got a piece of the puzzle now.

Doctor Who followers may ask, hey! is the esplumeor the TARDIS, or not? It's gone all weird.

Yes, and yes. Also, yes.

They may further ask, Whose diary was that?