Hello there,

I am Val. At the moment I'm writing two Harry Potter fanfics.

My main focus is on "Just Another Orphan". It's a dark, Slytherin Harry story where Neville is the BWL. The fic starts at the end of Harry's 4th year and will cover the school years 5, 6 and 7. Harry is not a dark wizard from the beginning, but will become one over the course of the story.

My second story is called "Heartless Harry". It's my take on a Harry Potter with sociopathic tendencies. I started this story after reading an article about children with callous-unemotional traits and I try to keep it somewhat realistic. This story won't be updated regularly.

I mostly read fanfics about Harry Potter. I prefer dark!Harry and independent!Harry stories, but I'm not too picky in general. I don't like overly guilt-ridden, whiny Harrys.

I don't like stories that have extensive character bashing - Dumbledore stealing Harry's money to pay Ron and Hermione to be Harry's friends? That's a bit much for my taste. If it's only a tiny part of the story and the rest is interesting I'll probably overlook it, but it's not something I would ever write myself.

An other thing that always annoys me more than it probably should is people using "parseltongue" and "parselmouth" as though they were interchangeable. Voldemort is a parselmouth and speaks parseltongue. It's not possible for him to be a parseltongue, because parseltongue is a language. And you can't very well be a language, can you?

Good stories I recently read were "The Lie I've Lived" by jbern, "Circular Reasoning" by Swimdraconian, "The Art of Hidden Personas" by whitedwarf or "Reign of Power" by Fayr Warning - among many many others.

If you feel like sharing a good story, just send me a PM.

All the best, Val.

June 21st 2015: Hey guys, I felt like a sign of life was in order. I'm still here, and still plan to continue Just Another Orphan. I put way too much time into planning this story to abandon it, but sadly RL got in the way. Summer will leave me with more time to write. You can expect an update by mid-July, and I'll probably rewrite the last two chapters. Rereading them, I realized that things don't come across quite as I imagined. But the rewritten chapters will be accompanied by at least one new one.