Thanks; I was quite overwhelmed! :-) Will reply ASAP, unfortunately Real Life has ambushed me and the last two days have been eaten up mostly by job hunting preparations and the actual running around involved in looking for employment. Arrgh. (And tomorrow the fun continues. But at least I'll have lunch with beebee852001 and we'll probably talk about the epic there, which may help me in replying to your mails and in developing the plot. I'm still scared shitless, though.)
And now for something completely different: oh how I torture my betas/people-who-didn't-run-fast-enough-when-I-asked-for-help: one of the three of you likes fluff and what do I send you? - angst; another one hates Sirius, and what do I send? - Sirius fic. Heeheehee... Well, at least they both seem to like it, nevertheless. I suppose that's a good sign. And the self-professed Sirius hater tells me that my story actually makes her feel for him, so... I think my new mission in life is now to make her like Sirius.
Glad you got the email - hope it helps some. There are times I enjoy fluff - gotta love that warm and fuzzy feeling. I'm not a terribly huge angst fan, which is why I didn't enjoy OotP. I like a balance, which JKR struck well in the other books. In the first books, sure, bad things happened to Harry. Evil dark lord, death-eaters, Dursleys. But good things happened as well. Cool magic, friends, a godfather. But in OotP everything was bad. Nothing good happened to the poor bastard the whole million pages! I hope you remember that when you write your story - angst is often very moving and very powerful. But you've got to give your readers little moments of hope, especially in an epic fic like you're planning. But I'm not worried. I know you'll do an absolutely fantastic job!
PS: I love Sirius. He's my favorite character. I love Remus too, but I've read so many 'Remus is perfect and Sirius is a bastard' fics that I've started to get exasperated with him. But yes - bringing Sirius back and having him be with Remus already starts you out ahead of the game in my book!
Oh, I understand the importance of hope. Mind you, it's going to be a very slim hope, given the premise of the story, but it will be there. It won't balance the despair - that's impossible to do with the kind of premise the challenge gave me, which is actually quite a bit darker than anything I would have come up with on my own, though by now I've added my own bits of darkness. But it will be there, in a light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel (and it's not a train ;-)) kind of way.
But at the beginning there won't be much hope. Frankly, I'm even wondering if I am not overly optimistic in my description of how they are right now, after all the crap that supposedly happened! But I want them to survive, somehow, survive psychologically, that is. It will be difficult to do - difficult to make believable, but I really want it, so I hope I will manage. (I won't sacrifice believability, though. If the story somewhere along the way decides it absolutely wants to go to a hopeless place, I won't force it to take another direction. However, since I am a great believer in surviving crap ;-) I hope this won't happen.)
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2004-03-30 04:47 pm (UTC)Yes, I got it!
Date: 2004-03-30 06:32 pm (UTC)And now for something completely different: oh how I torture my betas/people-who-didn't-run-fast-enough-when-I-asked-for-help: one of the three of you likes fluff and what do I send you? - angst; another one hates Sirius, and what do I send? - Sirius fic. Heeheehee... Well, at least they both seem to like it, nevertheless. I suppose that's a good sign. And the self-professed Sirius hater tells me that my story actually makes her feel for him, so... I think my new mission in life is now to make her like Sirius.
I think I might rather enjoy this mission. *veg*
Re: Yes, I got it!
Date: 2004-03-30 07:05 pm (UTC)PS: I love Sirius. He's my favorite character. I love Remus too, but I've read so many 'Remus is perfect and Sirius is a bastard' fics that I've started to get exasperated with him. But yes - bringing Sirius back and having him be with Remus already starts you out ahead of the game in my book!
Re: Yes, I got it!
Date: 2004-03-30 07:17 pm (UTC)But at the beginning there won't be much hope. Frankly, I'm even wondering if I am not overly optimistic in my description of how they are right now, after all the crap that supposedly happened! But I want them to survive, somehow, survive psychologically, that is. It will be difficult to do - difficult to make believable, but I really want it, so I hope I will manage. (I won't sacrifice believability, though. If the story somewhere along the way decides it absolutely wants to go to a hopeless place, I won't force it to take another direction. However, since I am a great believer in surviving crap ;-) I hope this won't happen.)