Salutare and good evening!

I'm Melody, I am twenty-three and my life is significantly less interesting than I thought it was four years ago. I have a degree in psychology and I'm saving up money for graduate school right now. I write whenever there isn't a crisis happening in someone's life. I prefer fantasy to sci-fi, military stories to simple every day life, and I am absolutely a cat person. I identify as a feminist and while I frequently get burned out, I always come back.

Things I Adore To Distraction:

Fanfiction -Harry Potter (exclusively)

Music - Celtic Thunder, Mortal Love, Dido, Enya, Anberlin, The Corrs, Ministry of Magic, Plumb, and lots of others.

Books - Jennifer Fallon, Tanya Huff, Megan Whalen Turner, Timothy Zahn, Lawrence Watt-Evans, and hundreds of others. My personal book collection of fiction is over 2000 books, so, there's a lot to choose from... curiously, I don't like JK Rowling's writing style.

At this point, I normally would put down a list of my ships from each of my preferred fandom, but I won't. To be honest, it took a lot of room, and I really could sum it up by saying that Hermione is the only female character in Harry Potter that was fleshed out enough for me to appreciate (although fanon has done a very good job with giving Daphne Greengrass and Pansy Parkinson complexity), and I'll ship her with any one except for Albus, Sirius, James, Peter, Arthur, Molly, Ginny or Ron. Severus Snape and Percy Weasley are probably my favorite characters, even though there isn't half enough character exploring fanfiction about them available.

Stories that redo Harry's childhood are my favorite--although honestly any AU works for me. I don't like stories where the main ship is slash unless it actually helps the characterization. I read for character studies, not sex, and in most of the stories, that's what slash amounts to. If I wanted sex, I'd go read porn. As it is, I'm here on a site that caters mostly to people underaged so I should hope it is apparent that that isn't what I'm here for.

Also: Ginny. I can sympathize with her, I feel like we have a lot of things in our histories in common, and it is pretty easy to put myself into her only-girl-in-large-family-constantly-cosseted-by-caring-wanting-to-leave-a-mark-on-the-world-but-dammit-it-all-feels-second-place shoes. This is one of those cases where familiarity bred contempt. I don't like her. She could be a good character and I've read some things that I felt did her justice, but overall she's an over-powered, dream fulfillment for How To Solve Emotional Growth And Issues that allows the story to avoid actually dealing with the ridiculously deep issues that were canon, never mind the ridiculous things that fanfics do. Because she's strong and determined and (if it's true love it'll be OBHWF) through the force of her heritage as a Weasley, her training at the hands of Molly, her unremembered experiences with being possessed by Voldemort and her Lily-like red hair and temper, she will save Harry. (Also: I don't like Sirius Black. At all. He has potential, but even fandom isn't examining him in interesting ways or they ignore the affects of Azkaban or they just don't think things through to their logical conclusion.)

Bah.

Harry's experiences should have left deep psychological scars and "The Power Of Love" is almost absolutely never enough to get through that, no matter what pop culture says.

...RIGHT. Rants aside, on my favorite stories list are a lot of stories. Some are clique, some are original, some are just silly and some are highly disturbing but I think they're still really good. The vast majority of them are Hermione/Slytherin HP fics but there are some others scattered through out. I highly recommend them all! The main characteristics I look for in a good fanfic are grammar, plausibility, formatting, and flow of details. The ones that are amazing beyond human comprehension end up in my C2 archive: Shadowlands.

I hope haven't bored you, and I do hope you enjoy the tales of magic that I have collected...