Gnome Hat

I'm sure I can hear your thoughts as the chapter e-mails go out: "Wow, OFaF finally updated! I thought that guy got scared off by the reviewers for sure!" Well, too bad suckers! (Please don't leave.) Seriously though, thank you everyone who left a review on Chapter 5. I got a ton of really good feedback, and it helped me keep my story on track to where I wanted it to go. Let's be honest here: Chapter 5, as originally written, was terrible. I've dubbed it the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Chapter, and rightly so. Ron is out of character, McGonagall is overly bitchy to Hermione, and Harry is completely absent from the story. I started out with a 3-person story, killed off two in the first four chapters, and ended up with a single character to follow. As you can imagine, that was not my original intention. That isn't to say that Ron being a giant, jealous prat isn't in the cards (he still is), or McGonagall won't being a over-strict in...

I'm going to try and keep a log of my thoughts as I go through the chapters here, rather than as a lengthy A/N on the actual submission. I figure this will keep the lengthy discussions to an offsite account that anyone can follow, rather than some vast series of PMs where I might recap or cover the same topics over and over again. First and foremost, I'm about done with chapters 5 and 6 as of this writing. Rewriting a chapter I've already submitted is, well, insanely long and difficult, far more than writing that terrible excuse for a chapter I posted first. I should mention that I'm quite a perfectionist, and in keeping with that I continue to check and recheck that my timings are correct. I even spent a few weeks fleshing out and completing a Hogwarts Schedule so I could reference it whenever I need to! Which brings me to my most important part here: I might have to rewrite the whole thing again. The reason? Quidditch matches are held on Saturdays, which means Sir...

After perusing the Hogwarts schedules that the fans have put together/deemed appropriate to put on the wikis, I felt they didn't carry the gravitas necessary to really call themselves "schedules." So I made one myself. Using a trial version of the aSc Timetable software (which can be found here if you're so inclined), I began to work my way through the classes, searching the digital versions of the novels for class names, specific dates, and days of the week. I attempted to get most of them, but there are a few instances where I simply didn't add the canon descriptions, more for simplicities sake than any sense of completion. Honestly, there were more than a few instances where the schedule is notoriously vague, and there are only a handful of descriptive course orders beyond the first Monday of the term. Once I had everything I felt I could extract from the novels, I placed it all in a rough list, by year and then by class. Now I had to make a few decisi...