Author has written 6 stories for Harry Potter. Updates: 13.04.2020 - The Path Not Tread is on hiatus at the moment, pending my completion of writing Part IV. The information below on the profile has been updated to reflect where I am with the writing as of today, but there should be some side stuff coming out over the next several months, including (hopefully very soon) a collaborative writing project with SilenceoftheSolitude, my writing partner for this HP verse, which will be posted into the story 'How Doth the World Perish' - I'll keep you informed on this, but hopefully it'll prove interesting for those who enjoy political spy thrillers. Big reader with big ideas that'll probably remain unpublished for years to come, because RL is super busy, and because not only do I dislike unfinished stories intensely, my writing style isn't linear enough to allow for much of a chapter-by-chapter posting if a big part of the whole thing isn't relatively done (plus, there's the fact that I find playing in someone else's sandbox about ten times more difficult than playing in my own, original-fiction one, as well as the fact that my interest tends to drift from one fandom to the next quite a bit...) Still, finally gotten around to publishing at least one or two of my stories; while I can't promise much, I can promise that they will be finished, which is the most I hope from the stories I read, too. As it stands, the updates should be coming out every two weeks, usually on Sunday, but I'll post any changes in that schedule on my profile. I've started my PhD project (which is a full-time job for scientists) so things are pretty busy in RL and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future, but I'll do my best to not let my fanfics fall by the wayside if at all possible. Also, in no particular order, some things about me: mid-twenties; geneticist and aspiring writer; big on character development; green-haired; have a soft spot for fictional jerks who end up being some of the most complex characters in the story (think Severus Snape, Logan Echolls, Jamie Lannister or Erik Lehnsherr); loud about social equality and scientific progress; not in love with large gatherings of people and night-outs; opinionated; bad at smalltalk but good at in-depth discussions; buyer of cute little pointless things (like plush flowers, giant microbe toys, slinkies, Dali's melted clocks, keychains, hibiscuses, and Marc Jacobs perfume bottles); verbose by nature (as obvious from average chapter length being upwards of 8.000 words) and as loving of wordy replies; European and proud of it; reads-a-lot though good movies/tv shows always get their allotted time; introvert; despise character bashing (that's just lazy writing and no one will ever convince me otherwise); atheist; tend to get hung up on actors/actresses/writers/insert-artist-type-here and devour everything they've done before moving on; open to constructive criticism (but not insults, those can go right on past me) as I think the only way to improve is to hear what might need improving from independent sources. I suppose mentioning favorites also goes here - heavy on dramas and thrillers (anything from The Americans to Sherlock to Person of Interest to Fringe to Fargo to Coen brothers to Brokeback Mountain to Shame to Parade's End to Anna Karenina to Naomi Novik to JRR Tolkien to... you get the picture), with a dash of simple fun action and some self-indulgent things that used to be good but are mostly crap now. I have a strong dislike of comedies that seem to be about humiliating the main characters, but I do love to laugh, especially when it is intelligently done (Cabin Pressure, for instance. Or George Carlin and Tim Minchin). Oh, and one last indulgence - my mom's aunt (and a woman whom I loved dearly and miss every day, perhaps the only person in my family with whom I had such an intensely intellectual, and thus highly fulfilling, relationship) used to say that her favorite composer was Johann Sebastian Bach, and she loved him so much that for her, he was at spot number one, with ten empty spots following, then Bach again, and then others. Well, I don't have a favorite composer (and am not very hot on Bach, either, being forced to play his compositions on the piano just about killed my appreciation for him), but if I were to use that analogy, then my favorite artist - in my case actor - is Benedict Cumberbatch. I love plenty of others (Michael Fassbender is a close second, and that's just from the 30-40 age group), but Ben bought my everlasting adoration through his work on a miniseries adaptation of a book called Parade's End, in which he brought the main character, an emotionally-constipated, deeply intellectual and painfully genuine, unhappy man, to such accurate life that I was blown away. Not many actors can with one silent scene, with only facial expressions, demonstrate such emotional turmoil and anguish and rich inner life as he did in that miniseries, and I have been floored over and over by it from the first time I watched it. His typecasting is rather regrettable because though they're always fun to watch, he can do far more than 'eccentric, antisocial genius' types, and hopefully as he moves from the young into mature actors category, he'll get a chance to show the full range of his talent. Just, please don't ever mention to me that horrid name his fangirls like to give themselves, it's detestable and frankly demeaning both to him and to his fans. Pet peeves in reading and writing: -Tense confusion. Stories are usually told in either the present or the past tense, and switching from one to the other mid-scene for a sentence or two before returning to the original one (more often, this tends to be going from past to present and then back to the past) completely knocks me out of the flow of the narrative, to the point where I go back to check if it's really happened, or if I'd just not noticed the other tense being used for the whole text (if it happens often enough, I'll either start skipping exposition or give up on the story completely). English is particularly strong when it comes to this aspect of its grammar, offering the use of four specific tenses (simple, continuous, perfect and even perfect continuous) for each time used (past, present and future), which means that there's plenty of variety possible without jumping back and forth from 'now' to 'then' or vice-versa to keep the narrative from feeling stale and repetitive. Pick a timeframe for a scene and stick to it, and if you want a part of your scene to be in one but the rest in another (I sometimes do this when I'm writing dream sequences, because present tense gives the feeling of urgency that the past tense can't), then use the transition from one to the other to signify where this drastically standout part of the scene stops. The same rule goes for embedding remembrances in the main narrative, which is done with past perfect. If you don't want to write outright flashbacks (I personally don't like them very much), then you need to shift the remembered part noticeably back tense-wise and this needs to be done for the whole segment, which means that starting out with two sentences in past perfect before switching to past simple for the rest of the segment doesn't work - how are the readers supposed to be certain when this remembered part stops and the normal narrative continues, if both end up being mostly in the same tense? It may seem complicated and a little one-note (perfect continuous isn't a very popular tense), but I feel it's absolutely imperative to keeping the narrative cohesion and the flow intact. -Pronoun cases. Most English native speakers probably can't truly appreciate how easy they have it with no noun inflection - by comparison, my native language has seven cases - and the only place where the remnants of Germanic cases exist in English today is in pronouns (i.e. he, his, him), not counting the 's for possessive nouns. From what I've gathered over the years, the mistakes in this segment of the English language happen mostly when it comes to referencing multiple people (e.g. 'I was speaking to Mom and he', when it should be 'Mom and him', which is at least a little bit less jarring than 'I was speaking to he and Mom'), and it's freaking annoying to me, perhaps because my language would fall apart without cases, so I see it as very important. Easy advice: If you're not sure, substitute the group with the plural pronoun that'd fit there ('I was speaking to them', not 'I was speaking to they') and correlate - it'll be the same case (in this instance, it's accusative or objective, as I've found it's called nowadays) no matter which pronoun you use, and all the words encompassed by the plural have to be in that case, not just one. Another example: 'between you and I' is wrong, because you wouldn't say 'between we', you'd say 'between us', therefore it has to be 'between you and me' (I imagine this one's hard because the objective of 'you' is, well, 'you', which might confuse things). Same goes for who vs whom: whom is objective, and if you're not sure, flip it around to see what you'd get if you were to put in a definitive pronoun (if it's he, then it's who; if it's him, then it's whom; and if it's his, then it's whose). Again, in this case, using who instead of whom ('people who I spoke to') is far easier on my ears than using whom instead of who ('people whom don't want me here'; ugh). -In-scene POV shifts. This is a lesser one than the previous two, but it's still jarring. Unless the story is from a third-person omniscient point of view (most aren't), telling a scene as one character sees it and then taking a paragraph or two to dip into the head of the opposing character before returning to the original one (or even not returning) can be extremely disorienting, depending on how deep the narrative has dealt into the original character's head. This doesn't happen in first-person POV (for obvious reasons), but it's rife in third-person POV stories, I suppose because writers want to show the readers what both characters in a given situation are thinking/feeling. However, due to the very nature of the limited third-person narrative, the readers get immersed in the head and views of one character, who has no way of reading the other's mind (unless it's their superpower, of course), and switching without a scene break requires them to reorganize their own view of the situation in order to accommodate what can be a completely opposing impression that the second character has. Saying that can be hard is an understatement. If you feel like you need to show both points of view (I do, frequently), then write the actual scene from one point of view, and show the point of view of the other character in a second scene through the use of recollections, thoughts, analyses or retelling by that second character. Scene breaks are natural breathing points for the audience, where things can get easily rebooted and they can be pulled into another character's head without them feeling whiplash from it. -Homophones. Honestly, I get that some of them are hard to tell apart (bear vs bare), but for everyone's sake, if you're not comfortable with differentiating them, google! Or read a grammar book, at least. Your vs you're and their like (e.g. there, their, they're; particular emphasis on its and it's) are so very easy to differentiate - just try to separate the contraction and see if it fits. If saying you are instead makes no sense, then it can't very well be you're, can it? Then vs than - 'than' is used only in the context of comparison; for everything else, it's 'then'. Too vs to - 'to' is a preposition mostly used to relate two things together; 'too' is an adverb that means 'also' or 'as well'. Could of makes my eyes hurt - I know it sounds similar to Could've, but come on! In what universe can 'of' have any similarity to a verb? 'Affect' and 'effect' mean very different things, just like 'lie' and 'lay' do. I give a pass to the more complex homophones, such as 'prosecute' vs 'persecute', 'principal' vs 'principle', 'forward' vs 'foreword' and so on. I know these can be simple typos, because word processors aren't always able to catch the distinctions used in specific sentences, but that's on the writer to catch, and trust me, some homophones can change the complete meaning of the sentence if one isn't careful. If these appear in the summary of the story, I tend to skip it without even a peek. -Incorrect phrases and idioms. Especially hard for non-native speakers, and even I catch myself either questioning or confusing these from time to time (most recently, 'nerve-wrecking' instead of 'nerve-racking'). However, there are certain phrases that are really common, and so I expect people to be aware of them: case in point (not 'case and point', as I've seen it here and there), use to. Unless it's in a question or a negative sentence, it's not 'use to', it's 'useD to'. No matter how silent that final D is, it's still there. Ditto 'suppose to', which functions in the exact same way - it's most often 'supposeD to'. 'One in the same' drives me up the wall - 'one AND the same'. 'Up and Adam', with some mysterious Adam in the mix? It's 'up and at'em (at them)'. 'I could care less' does not mean the same thing as 'I couldn't care less'. There are whole lists of incorrectly used/written/pronounced idioms and words online, so don't be afraid to look them up; some of them are hilarious, really. Harry Potter fandom As of 2019, this has become a collaborative project with SilenceoftheSolitude, my fellow fanfiction author, historian afficionado and great friend, who is lending her considerable knowledge and brainpower to the more political aspects of the story and whose contributions are enormous as pertaining to the events of the First Wizarding War. She's got profiles both here and AO3, just like I do, so if you're interested in her writing, don't hesitate to check her out (she's posting at the moment in the Downton Abbey fandom, and it's an absolutely amazing story I was privileged to beta for her). There are two series currently in the works, the prequel series 'The Butterfly Wings and the Hurricane', and the sequel series 'The Lion and The Snake'. They are, in chronological order: The Butterfly Wings and the Hurricane - The Path Not Tread (hiatus; progress report, Part IV: Ch 47-48 written; estimated length Ch 47-62, with two interludes) They can quite easily stand each on their own, meaning that the series themselves are not required to understand others (the stories within them, obviously, are, or will be once I get to having more than one for each series). I will add to this list as I publish, but the general idea is to cover extensively the period from 1976 to 1980 (TBWatH), and from 1991 to 1998 (TLaTS) in-universe, with a one-shot series for the events between and around these (BtG). Hopefully I can actually get it all done before we're old and grey. Also, DISCLAIMER for all my work: the characters and the worlds belong to their respective creators, I'm just borrowing them to play some what-ifs, and promise to return them as good as new when the time comes to give them back - so, no money in it for me, just good old-fashioned fun |