Inverarity is not a Scottish village

Yes, I kind of suck right now. No progress to report.

Really, I'm going to finish AQATWA. Honest. I haven't lost interest or motivation. Just... temporarily suffering from a lack of writing mojo. That's why the lack of AQ posts lately.

The book is maybe not quite half done, I just need to get moving again on the second half.

So as a reward for your patience (those of you still following my LJ), I will stop teasing you with the title. The title of AQ book five is Alexandra Quick and the World Away.

Still aiming to finish by the end of (this) year. Which will happen. If I can start writing again...

In other news, I received a stern email from Box.com, which is where I hosted my ebook downloads, claiming they had received a "complaint" about "copyright infringement."

I doubt J.K. Rowling and her lawyers are sending C&D orders to hosting sites, so either Box.com just started cracking down on fan fiction, or someone out there doesn't like me. Boo.

I'll try to find another hosting site with fanfic-friendly TOS soonish.

So if you're really pining away while you wait for me to finish AQATDR, and you like feisty heroines like Alexandra, I have a couple of recommendations for you.

The first is Marissa and the Wizards, by JCCollier. JC has only posted this on Mugglenet Fan Fiction, to my knowledge, so you might not have seen it before.

If you liked Alexandra Quick, or Hogwarts Houses Divided, I am sure you'll like Marissa and the Wizards. Marissa is a homeless girl living on the streets of Sao Paulo, Brazil, when she receives an invitation to attend Witness Stone school. So, it's another cast of OCs in an original setting -- Brazil in this case. In addition to all the adventures you'd expect as a Muggle-born homeless girl discovers magic and makes friends and enemies at her new school, there is a larger crisis threatening the entire wizarding world.

Marissa's story is sad, funny, imaginative, and touching. The author has created an original Brazilian wizarding world at least as detailed as my American one.

The only negative is that it's a WIP, and JCCollier writes very long chapters, very slowly. Yes, it's been over six months since the last update. I've talked to the author, so I'm sure the story hasn't been abandoned, but I'll admit, at this rate I'll probably be writing AQ4 before Marissa and the Wizards is finished. Still, if you all go over there and show JC some review love, maybe s/he'll be motivated to get that next chapter up. :)

The second recommendation is pcharmed86's Briallen Bevin and the Snatcher's Cave, and the sequel, Briallen Bevin and the Clocktower Guard. To be perfectly honest, I can't recommend Briallen Bevin's stories quite as strongly, for two reasons. The first is that although I love Briallen and find her to be quite an engaging heroine, pcharmed86's writing is a bit unpolished. Her American setting is, in my opinion, a little too derivative of Hogwarts, and her story isn't plotted as tightly as it could be. The second, and more serious reason, though, is that I'm pretty sure that it's been abandoned. I emailed the author many months ago, she promised an update was imminent, and then... nothing. It's been almost a year, so I'm not hopeful that book two will ever be finished. Still, I stumbled across this when I was looking for other American wizarding school fics, and it's one of the few that I actually liked, so you might enjoy it as well.

I greatly appreciate all the comments on what I did and didn't get wrong with Alexandra Quick. Most of you agree that I write too much (though many of you don't seem to mind). I'm almost of a mind to take the advice some of you gave me and forget trying to trim the fat. This is fan fiction, after all!

But I would rather not have too much meandering prose. (Already I have written some parts of Book Three that are going to cause some people to say, "Gee, that's an awful lot of dialog without a whole lot happening." How much of it survives into the final draft, we shall see.) Unfortunately, you people aren't much help when it comes to telling me what I should cut. :P Some of you love all the extra detail about Wizarding America, and some would rather I not spend so much time on description. Some of you could do without the adolescent hijinx subplots, while some of you seem to be looking forward for the shipping to start.

(I base this in more than just my public LJ, comments, btw.)

Anyway, this isn't really a poll -- I am not going to alter what I write based on what seems to be most "popular." But I do keep your feedback on my writing in general in mind, as I'm trying to craft the best story I can.

So, speaking of shipping and my writing -- I've made no secret, in the various forums I frequent, of my general disdain for "shipping." Not that I object to including a little romance in a story, but the whole notion of arbitrarily pairing character A with character B (especially if character A and B had little or no interaction in canon, or worse, hated each other) just strikes me as silly, for the most part.

But, I must admit, there is one HP pairing that just amuses me. It's totally a crack!pairing, because it would never happen, but when people ask me who my OTP is, I usually give them, as my smart-ass answer, Harry and Pansy.

Yes, I admit it -- in the books, she's vapid, unpleasant, unattractive, and just generally unlikeable, but I have a soft spot for Pansy Parkinson.

I think I just have a thing for brunettes with pageboy haircuts.



(Yes, I know, Pansy totally does not look like this.)

Anyway, I wound up submitting a fic to the Pansy Parkinson/Harry Potter fic exchange. (I blame ebilgatoloco.) So if you have a deranged fondness for this pairing, you can go vote for your favorites among the submissions. (You have to be a member of the community.) And yes, my story is in there among the nominees, and no, I won't tell you which one.

I have Google Alerts set to email me when one of my stories is mentioned, 'cause I'm egotistical that way and I like to know when I'm being recced, reviewed, or trashed. Of course I was expecting the latter when I saw that Alexandra Quick and the Thorn Circle had been mentioned on the Dark Lord Potter forums. As you might guess, a story about an 11-year-old girl going to an American wizarding school is not the sort of thing that usually goes over well with people who prefer to read stories about Harry tearing out Ginny's still-beating heart. On previous occasions when Alexandra Quick or Hogwarts Houses Divided have been mentioned over there, it wasn't pretty.

So I read the thread, expecting to see a lot of comments along the lines of "Icky! Girl cooties! It sux0rz!!!!" and "America + OC + no Harry Potter = FAIL!"

There were some responses like that, but I was pleased to see that after the initial wave of trashing, some folks actually read the story and liked it.

And there were some good critiques as well. Maybe I need to enlist a DLPer who kinda sorta likes AQ but doesn't love her as one of my betas next time.

So, I am going to address some criticisms I've heard over time (not just on DLP), and then throw it out to you guys (I know there are only maybe a dozen people reading this), but this is your opportunity to be brutally honest, as opposed to "OMG I love Alexandra!" Which is always nice to hear, but I think Rowling herself got way too complacent, being adored by millions of fans who'd squee at anything she wrote, leading to the poor quality of HBP and DH. I only have dozens of fans (maybe), but I still don't want to hear, "Boy, the Alexandra Quick series started to suck after Book Two...."

First, addressing some "canon errors" I've been accused of (and need I say, there will be spoilers below for both AQATTC and AQATLB?):
( Things I got wrong )

If you haven't checked it out yet, the Quickipedia is a wonderful project started by Anthony J. Fuchs. Anthony has done a lot of work adding information from my books to this wiki. I didn't start it, nor do I do much in the way of editing, other than to add images and occasionally correct misinformation (and typos and grammatical errors, because I'm anal that way). As tempting as it would be to take it over and fill in lots of information from the author, I'd rather that it remain primarily the work of fans, else it may become too much a reflection of my own ego.

Anthony's been doing most of the work himself, so I'm sure he'd like it if more people would join him in adding and expanding on the articles there. (And, let's be honest, I get a kick out of it too. ;) )

I have added some images to character pages there (including Abraham Thorn, Absalom Thorn, Ben Journey, Diana Grimm, and Alexanda) and will probably add more in the future.

There is also a more general Harry Potter fan fiction wiki: the Harry Potter Fanon Wiki. Anyone can add information from any fan fiction story there. You'll find my Hogwarts Houses Divided characters there, among many others.

Squeeing would be unbecoming. But Mugglenet Fan Fiction has added Hogwarts Houses Divided to the list of stories being read as Audiofictions!

Chapter 1 available here, at Podcast Alley, or iTunes.

Hogwarts Houses Divided is a next generation Harry Potter fan fiction, starring Teddy Lupin in his first year at Hogwarts.



You can read it at:

• FanFiction.net
• MuggleNet Fan Fiction
• FictionAlley

Listen to Hogwarts Houses Divided on your iPod!

Hogwarts Houses Divided is now being broadcast as a Mugglenet Fan Fiction Audiofiction!

Chapter 1 available here, at Podcast Alley, or iTunes.

Alexandra Quick and the Lands Below is the second book in the Alexandra Quick series.



You can read it at:

• FanFiction.net
• MuggleNet Fan Fiction
• FictionAlley

Alexandra Quick and the Thorn Circle was my first fan fiction novel. It is set in the Harry Potter universe, but takes place in America and stars an original character. It is the first of a planned seven novels.

A wiki documenting Alexandra's world is available at the Quickipedia. This project wasn't started by me, and I don't do much maintenance there, though I will occasionally correct errors.




You can read AQATTC at:

• FanFiction.net
• Mugglenet FanFiction
• FictionAlley