Really enjoying this. Realistic characterization. Original plot. And great visuals between the dialogue and descriptions. You've got a very definite style. Keep it up.

Now it wouldn't be an Anise fic if Loki didn't pop up somewhere, would it? And rumor has it this story is going to wheedle its way into the JOTH universe as well? I don't know how you do it. Definitely enjoying so far. You've got such a talent for painting scenes and characters. Eagerly awaiting more...

*crosses fingers and hopes mysterious intruders are of the Pansy/Luna/Harry/George variety and not Lucius and Co.*

Sugary sweet and probably causing me teeth decay, but I like this story. I try and be cynical about love, but I'm a sucker for the all the giggly, googly happiness. It's a guilty pleasure, so don't give me any dark plot twists or I'll cry. Sex soon?

Author's Response: Lol! I'm right there with you. I'm what you call a realist, so I'm a sucker for fluffiness.

I'm sorry you didn't get more reviews, but I think you should be very proud of this. You're an excellent writer, and I think the depressing material really let it shine through. Solid one-shot. I'm a fan.

I've been meaning to read this story since it first popped up on the recently added list, but I didn't get around to it until tonight. Suffice it to say, I'm hooked. Dead-on characterizations. Original plot. Dialogue, narration, everything just flows. Very well written and the imagery is fantastic. All that aside, however, this is the Draco that makes me love this pairing. I love the OOC Draco just as much most of the time (considering I usually write him OOC myself), but your Draco is just -- just pure, unadulterated Malfoy. It's stories like this, in my mind, that really support a canon D/G. Amazing job. Can't wait for the next installment...and on a baser note, can't wait for the sex!

Author's Response: Thank you, thank you, thank you! I really tried to keep Draco just that - pure.

Intriguing, but Anise, you must wake her. Oh, indeed you must. There can only be so much creepy, mental Draco pining after her dead body before I'm going to start wanting him to fuck her anyway, dead or not *cringe*. Wake her up and get that famous Anise sexual tension started, would you? Just make it the unredeemable kind. Can't wait to see how this gets weaved into the others. Fabulously written as always. Really liked the landscape description of Malfoy Manor. Holla.

Well, hey there, Eskimo Friend. I've been waiting for someone to do a Damien songfic since, well, forever really. Glad you did something with Volcano. So appropriate. Well written. Hope to hear more from you in the future.

Hm. Interesting. Hardly new opinions on your part, but interesting to submit in essay form. I'm going to try and respond the best I can, because I feel like I should say something. I was going to just email you privately, but since everyone has agreed wholeheartedly so far, I decided to just go ahead and be a voice of dissent.


This essay rubbed me the wrong way. And I say that, I must stress, not in an offended, angry way, but almost with a sigh of exasperation. I love this archive. I've loved it since you started it up and always admired you as an author. But sometimes, Mynuet, I can't help but feel that Fire and Ice, and really the whole D/G fandom, has really conformed itself to a writing style that leaves little room for creative expression.


Fan fiction has been around for a while, yes, but everyone still have very different opinions of what purpose fan fiction should serve. You have them. I have them. But when you, as one of the most important people on the governing body of this self-loading and supposively diverse archive make a post like this, it really drives home the fact that, hands down, stories that don't fit the mold aren't particularly welcome, whether they are accepted for submission or not. D/G is very cliquey. And reading something like this and then trying to post on an archive that, bottomline, is run and frequented by the best and most popular authors in the fandom, knowing you might never have their real approval, is utterly terrifying.


I guess I'm speaking for myself, but then again, not really. Anything I've posted here has been received well enough by many readers, and for that I thank them. But as a reader and I fan, which is how I will always identify myself first and foremost, sometimes I crave something different from stories here. And I watch other authors try and do something different and come back with no reviews time and time again. If something fresh comes at the cost of a bit of canon-finagling, Americanization, and language experimentation, I'll be the first to jump up and down with excitement.


Writing, by its very nature, is an adventure. I've always thought of fan fiction as a framework for writers to express their own work and own style. Draco and Ginny have their canon personalities, but there is so much room for good character development that goes beyond some of the limits you just set. Fan fiction is an exercise. The Harry Potter universe is merely another tool, not a rulebook. Canon names and spelling/grammar, I completely agree should be accurate, but there's a lot of other things I'm willing to let slide for the sake of a good read and good writing. Sometimes a world like Harry Potter strikes something in the imagination that lets a person's personal creavity take over. Fan fiction lets that come out in many, many different ways.


I'm saying too many things at once, and I suppose, not really making total sense or having a definitive point, but I guess I just wanted to remind you that I know how you feel. You've made it very clear how you feel since the beginning. Being blunt about your expectations is something I respect, but I just thought you'd like to know that by being so straight forward in an effort to scare away the teenyboppers and bad writers who plague you, sometimes you scare away others as well for entirely different reasons.


I remain still, a truly devoted member of this archive and fan of yours who will always be lurking about enjoying what I can, and I guess, secretly wishing I could be part of the clique of talented authors that dominates D/G. Because it really is a clique these days, Mynuet. A "writer's circle" if you will, so as not to dredge up images of high school popularity wars, but still a clique. With its own expectations and its own image.


Keep up the good work with the site and your writing. -Kelly

Author's Response: I had to think about this a while before responding, because my knee-jerk response was "Nuh uh! I'm not in a clique!", and I figured you deserved better than that. I appreciate your posting it publicly so that other people could see that it's entirely possible to disagree with me and I really am not the end-all and be-all in D/G any more than I am anywhere else. That being said, I'm going to have to respectfully disagree with some of your points.



I really don't see anything I said as stifling anyone's creative expression. There is no ban on rapefic - I just don't like it. Mal-ferret is not against the "law", it's just, in my opinion, tiresome. Sloppy is the wrong word to use to describe a hairstyle for a formal occasion, period. I mean, I also don't like excessive angst or character death, but I didn't mention that because it's a matter of taste. Asking that there be an attempt to keep the characters as they exist isn't, in my opinion, restrictive or stifling. This is fan fiction, not original fiction, which means that part of the skill is maintaining the existing characterization. Belly shirts need not apply.



I can't help what other people are intimidated by. Part of the process of writing, and even of growing up, is to learn that not everyone likes the same thing. If you want approval in the form of reviews, it's not possible to force it, not without making the end result worthless. I can't make people like yet another "Ginny grew up over the summer and now she's totally hot and sassy with her Hot Topic wardrobe and Good Charlotte CDs that she's charmed to work at Hogwarts" fic - and I'm not interested in trying. I can, however, let the author know why her fic, which she thinks is so interesting and cool and fresh, is not being received with adulation. If that's terrifying, then perhaps a bit of terror isn't a bad thing.



Different how? And what do you think I could do to make them get reviews? I'm one person, and so if I like a story, it'll get one review. If I really, really like it, or it catches my attention, I can make it a featured story, which I do because I consider that an obligation, or I can recommend it on my Livejournal, which I only rarely do because there I'm responsible only to myself. Even with that, though, there is no guarantee of reviews. Reviews are a grass roots thing, and if I knew the peculiar alchemy to make them happen, there wouldn't be fics on my author page with only two or three reviews. If anything, I think this essay could help, because it clues some people in on things they might do without knowing that it's been done before.



I'll agree that fan fiction is a framework for writes to express their own work and style, and that both Draco and Ginny's personalities in canon leave a lot of room open for interpretation. That still leaves a wide world open for creativity without turning Draco into yet another tortured soul with a hot body and a skintight muscle shirt, or Ginny into a spunky girl who has a navel ring and a posse of five best friends with names like "Brittany" and "Jessica" who are obviously the author and her friends. I really don't see how anything fresh could be contraindicated by anything I said, considering everything I pointed out as bad has been done to death.



We'll have to disagree on the HP universe being a tool and not a rulebook. If you're writing fan fiction, the point is to have it take place in what is recognizably the existing universe. If something differs significantly from that universe, then there needs to be a buildup and an explanation for it. Anything else is lazy and shoddy storytelling.



Fan fiction, as opposed to original fiction, is written with existing characters and settings, and that's the main difference. Why write fan fiction and then distort the characters and settings into something they're not? If you want to write about American teens with magic, why not use the framework of Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Sabrina the Teenaged Witch? If you want to write within the HP universe about American wizards, why not make up your own, American, school? Well, for one thing, because very few people are interested in reading about OCs in a fanfic universe, and it won't get any reviews. Is that a reason to turn existing British characters into Americans? I really don't think so.



It's not my intent to scare away anyone, even the teenyboppers. It's my intent to lay out, clearly, what kind of things alienate readers like me. The way I see it, this is helpful, not because of frightening anyone, but because it lets them know, without having to be flamed by random reviewers who possess even less tact than I do, where they're going wrong. If they still want to go down that path, they can - but they'll do so with their eyes wide open, and they won't be taken by surprise when someone brings up the things I said.



Assuming, of course, they read this essay. I may own the archive, and I may have a degree of popularity as an author, but even within the D/G fandom, there's more than a few people who have never heard of me.



Lastly, there's the clique thing. Like I said, my knee-jerk reaction was denial, but then I thought about it. You're right, a lot of the biggest "names" in D/G, the authors who get fangirls wetting their pants, happen to be my friends. We chat on each other's Livejournals, we read each other's fics, and there's a lot of mutual admiration and lovefests going on. Looked at from the outside, it sure does look like an exclusive club, an impenetrable group... A clique.



The thing is, though, that a lot of why we got to know and like each other is because we like and respect each other's writing. I've been in the D/G fandom for two years. In that time, there've been a lot of people who send me email or IM me about my fic - this is mostly because I've written a fairly large amount of it, and partly because owning the archive makes me visible. There's several people who I've struck up friendships with because their email struck a chord; they liked my fic and sounded intelligent when they told me why. We talked, agreed on a lot of subjects, and became friends. Some of these I later (okay, not much later) bullied into writing, and the results have been downright spectacular in some cases (Exhibit A: ClanMalfoy). Some I met because I sent them email or an IM in which I expressed appreciation of their work, and with some there was just mutual admiration from the get go.



In other words, there's no real secret handshake to this writer's group, or if there is, I've given it out in this essay. There's a wide variety of moods and topics and themes and writing styles within the scope of who I call friends. "The Visitor" is nothing like "Portkey Party"; "Dark Directed" is nothing like "The Plan" - unless you consider that the authors paid attention to the craft of writing to be a similarity.



"It's just fanfiction", yeah. It's not like the fate of the world depends on how Draco is characterized. The fate of the story, however, does. If you (generic you, not you you) want to write about Draco talking like Eminem and listening to Nelly, and you find an audience, more power to you; I just have no interest in reading it. If that discourages someone from writing, that's too bad - but I'm not going to change my mind and want to read it, or think it's original, just because it hurt someone's feelings.

Yay! Something by Myanceris! (I'm truly pathetic when it comes to you. I get giggly like a fangirl if I see your name pop up anywhere.) Excellent drabble -- as always, you are a master of injecting raw emotion into your writing. This short piece is beautiful and realistic. I wish I could bottle your ability to convey so much through so little. Thanks for a satisfying read yet again.

Loved. It.