That WIP of yours sounds fascinating and challenging. It must be a lot more interesting both for you and for readers to make it canon-divergent in this way, instead of just retelling the book from another perspective. I wonder if it’s first-four-books-compliant. And if the reader should know the video game and the other book series – and I’m guessing no, as you say it’s not a crossover. Draco/Ron sounds intriguing, too. What amuses me is that there’s something your work and mine share in the opening: in my chapter one Remus comes to rescue Harry from the Dursleys’! (I had actually imagined something like those first scenes when looking forward to OotP being published.)
But no, Paula is not my real name. I chose the username when joining my first fandom home, The Snitch Forums (a month before someone asked me to read and review a fic and I decided to start writing mine). Paula refers to Paul Simon and to another Paul, another “favourite poet” of mine, an American guy I’d met briefly and stayed romantically in love with for a few years in my twenties. McG is from McGonagall, because like her I was “not exactly young”. (Funny, though, I’ve never written about Minerva although I like reading about her.) I suppose the age difference between me and some of my fellow writers and other readers must have been even greater than I thought! I did enjoy mutual reviewing also because it was wonderful to encourage young people to write, offering my concrit gently – while I could always learn a lot from them, too. English is not my mother tongue, and although I never lied about that, I didn’t (and still don’t) offer that fact publicly as I was afraid people wouldn’t give my fic a chance or would claim it was just good enough for a non-native speaker.
I wish PaulaMcG were known by now as a good writer. But I can’t expect that, as I went on hiatus for so many years. And I never had a big readership – because of the contents and the style of my stories, I guess. Most of the friends I made before 2010 have probably left fandom, or at least HP fandom. Some moved from LJ to IJ and here – and it looks like some who went to Tumblr want to become more active here now. I’d love more LJ type interaction on DW and sharing and dicussing our fanworks here (even though it’s great to have AO3 as the archive). Since the beginning of the year I’ve enjoyed discussion both on my DW and on other people’s journals, but on my journal people seem to be interested only in other than fic posts.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ninetydegrees
(no subject)
But no, Paula is not my real name. I chose the username when joining my first fandom home, The Snitch Forums (a month before someone asked me to read and review a fic and I decided to start writing mine). Paula refers to Paul Simon and to another Paul, another “favourite poet” of mine, an American guy I’d met briefly and stayed romantically in love with for a few years in my twenties. McG is from McGonagall, because like her I was “not exactly young”. (Funny, though, I’ve never written about Minerva although I like reading about her.) I suppose the age difference between me and some of my fellow writers and other readers must have been even greater than I thought! I did enjoy mutual reviewing also because it was wonderful to encourage young people to write, offering my concrit gently – while I could always learn a lot from them, too. English is not my mother tongue, and although I never lied about that, I didn’t (and still don’t) offer that fact publicly as I was afraid people wouldn’t give my fic a chance or would claim it was just good enough for a non-native speaker.
I wish PaulaMcG were known by now as a good writer. But I can’t expect that, as I went on hiatus for so many years. And I never had a big readership – because of the contents and the style of my stories, I guess. Most of the friends I made before 2010 have probably left fandom, or at least HP fandom. Some moved from LJ to IJ and here – and it looks like some who went to Tumblr want to become more active here now. I’d love more LJ type interaction on DW and sharing and dicussing our fanworks here (even though it’s great to have AO3 as the archive). Since the beginning of the year I’ve enjoyed discussion both on my DW and on other people’s journals, but on my journal people seem to be interested only in other than fic posts.