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 Sirius Black's attack happens on a Saturday Night. Now, I can't move the Quidditch matches (those will perhaps play a role in later chapters, so having them only on Saturdays is a good and consistent thing), so I think I'm going to move the day of the Attack to Sunday Night, from Saturday. And honestly? It makes sense. Sirius Black is well aware (even with his stay at Azkaban) that the night of a Quidditch win is a massive party in the winners' house, which would make his incursion time significantly small. He definitely shows guile, with only a smattering of impatience and rage, as indicated by the slashing of the bed curtains or the Fat Lady's painting. I don't think he'd attack that night. Instead, he'd attack the following night, since most people would be slumbering early to recover from the previous-night's party and to ready themselves for the school day.
Alright. Problem solved. Back to writing.
Alright, another thing I want to mention here. There's a scene in Chapter 5 where Harry involuntarily recoils at the thought of Ron going down on him. If read a certain way, it could be taken as a referendum on how the author (and by extension, Harry) thinks homosexuality is 'icky'.
It's not.
Personally, I couldn't give two shits on what people do for sexual gratification, as long as both parties are consensual. The entire point of this scene is more a point on the unfortunate power of imagination, that a mind conjuring a sexual fantasy is willing to change the small details of the fantasy, but keep the overall nature of the scene. Understandably (I hope) then, a cis-gender heterosexual male like Harry (and myself, unsurprisingly) would find another assumed cis-gender heterosexual male giving head to be, well, not erotic, not to mention jarring, especially when the transformation is as drastic as the Granger-to-Weasley one. It's why I deliberately chose to avoid negative words like "uncomfortable" or "gross" or anything else in the chapter, because it isn't that at all. It's just not something that a heterosexual individual would enjoy viewing (I should know, I've tried watching it myself.)
Probably made things worse with the above paragraph than if I'd written nothing at all. Meh.
Something else (there's always something else, isn't there?). I'm playing pretty heavily on the idea that Harry's been attracted to Hermione since their first meeting on the Hogwarts Express, but I actually have research to back me up ... kinda. It's fairly well established that high-stress childhoods tend to push children to start puberty earlier. There's an excellent paper on that subject, although it pertains specifically to sexual abuse among young girls, and between that and a few other articles (here's another one), it indicates that a potentially-physically abused and definitely emotionally abused young boy like Harry would almost certainly enter puberty early. Add that to the normal range of 10-15 for boys entering puberty, and it's more than possible that Harry's hormones could be rampaging not long after his eleventh birthday.
Chapters will be up soon, either today or tomorrow, as soon as I get the Author's Notes sections written. Next up for postings here? Images of the Hogwarts Schedules and responses to FFN reviews.
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 Sirius Black's attack happens on a Saturday Night. Now, I can't move the Quidditch matches (those will perhaps play a role in later chapters, so having them only on Saturdays is a good and consistent thing), so I think I'm going to move the day of the Attack to Sunday Night, from Saturday. And honestly? It makes sense. Sirius Black is well aware (even with his stay at Azkaban) that the night of a Quidditch win is a massive party in the winners' house, which would make his incursion time significantly small. He definitely shows guile, with only a smattering of impatience and rage, as indicated by the slashing of the bed curtains or the Fat Lady's painting. I don't think he'd attack that night. Instead, he'd attack the following night, since most people would be slumbering early to recover from the previous-night's party and to ready themselves for the school day.
Alright. Problem solved. Back to writing.
Alright, another thing I want to mention here. There's a scene in Chapter 5 where Harry involuntarily recoils at the thought of Ron going down on him. If read a certain way, it could be taken as a referendum on how the author (and by extension, Harry) thinks homosexuality is 'icky'.
It's not.
Personally, I couldn't give two shits on what people do for sexual gratification, as long as both parties are consensual. The entire point of this scene is more a point on the unfortunate power of imagination, that a mind conjuring a sexual fantasy is willing to change the small details of the fantasy, but keep the overall nature of the scene. Understandably (I hope) then, a cis-gender heterosexual male like Harry (and myself, unsurprisingly) would find another assumed cis-gender heterosexual male giving head to be, well, not erotic, not to mention jarring, especially when the transformation is as drastic as the Granger-to-Weasley one. It's why I deliberately chose to avoid negative words like "uncomfortable" or "gross" or anything else in the chapter, because it isn't that at all. It's just not something that a heterosexual individual would enjoy viewing (I should know, I've tried watching it myself.)
Probably made things worse with the above paragraph than if I'd written nothing at all. Meh.
Something else (there's always something else, isn't there?). I'm playing pretty heavily on the idea that Harry's been attracted to Hermione since their first meeting on the Hogwarts Express, but I actually have research to back me up ... kinda. It's fairly well established that high-stress childhoods tend to push children to start puberty earlier. There's an excellent paper on that subject, although it pertains specifically to sexual abuse among young girls, and between that and a few other articles (here's another one), it indicates that a potentially-physically abused and definitely emotionally abused young boy like Harry would almost certainly enter puberty early. Add that to the normal range of 10-15 for boys entering puberty, and it's more than possible that Harry's hormones could be rampaging not long after his eleventh birthday.
Chapters will be up soon, either today or tomorrow, as soon as I get the Author's Notes sections written. Next up for postings here? Images of the Hogwarts Schedules and responses to FFN reviews.
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