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I just read the boy who only lived twice and...wow I am just floored. I'm not sure when you intended readers to figure out/guess what was going on but I think you did such an amazing job of planting enough breadcrumbs that I felt pretty confident about it without it seeming like Harry was too obtuse about the whole situation. And THEN we get to the end and you had me second guessing everything for a minute there!! Such a fun read.

Plus also it ticked all the boxes that I'm picky about - good writing (or at least writing I like reading, who am I to say what's "good" lol), Harry and Draco as properly traumatized adults who are not the same as they were at 15, (relative) canon compliance, not too much gratuitous exposition or making up unnecessary nonsense about the wizarding world, sex scenes that aren't embarrassing to read lmao...anyway I'm off to read every other drarry fic you've written now <3

I'm so glad you wrote this fic and came to let me know about it! Thank you!

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the wicked scimitar e’ming is a cursed blade of misfortune; a weapon of such evil can only be forged by an exceedingly cruel sacrifice and a bloody will

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Aspen? What fic is that??? 👀

Aspen was an HP fic writer circa 2005. I knew them for their smut, but I don't think their fics are online any more.

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At some point I read that you are a professional writer, do I misremember? Do you think you'll ever disclose your og pieces? I would love to read them, be them any genre or medium - your writing is amazing.

I hope I do not come across as rude, Eng is not my first language and I use it mostly for reading monster smut on ao3 so my vocabulary collocations are kind of skewed

Thank you, you have all my admiration

ah, so, I've published, but I wouldn't call myself a professional writer. The book I published was kind of pastiche/literary criticism, not fiction/narrative.

BUT!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I have finished writing a book. Unlike the other books I've written, I love this one. I really do. I'm really proud of it. I am currently querying agents. I hope to post here when I publish it, so I'll let you know then. <3

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Is Piecemeal done for now? I saw something to that effect in the comments, but couldn't find anywhere you had said so.

It's been such a lovely read. Thank you for it.

Sorry to get to your ask so late. There will be a few more drabbles and then an ending, but it might be a few months. I was writing something else and have to get in the h/d frame of mind again.

I'm glad you were enjoying the story--thank you!

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Hi! I was going through your AO3 to re-read The Pure and Simple Truth, and realized that it's more than a decade old. I just want to thank you for that fic, and also for all your Drarry fics, for being such an amazing writer with imagination that for me is beyond compare. You're pretty much the reason why I ship Drarry so much, tbh. I'm glad to have discovered your writing.

Thank you so much! The Pure and Simple Truth is one of my favorite stories I've written--I'm so glad you like it, and thank you for stopping by to tell me. <3

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i really like this thing where websites will have separate "log in" & "sign up" buttons and if you click "log in" it takes you to a sign-up screen anyway so you have to click "i already have an account" and then it will ask if you want to sign in with your facebook account or with instagram or linkedin or deviantart or whatever, and if you choose "username & password" it asks if you want to put in your username or use your thumbprint, and once you put your username & password it emails you a confirmation code, and once you put in the code it says "do you want to give us your phone number for future sign-ins? do you want to sign up for facial recognition? do you want to give us your bones? give us your fucking bones?

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hey uhhh apparently another thing to add to the list of “human only” skills birds have: they can sew

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The biggest secret I discovered about writing, and you can see the quality jump between early Curse Words and late Curse Words/TTOU based almost entirely on this, is that you can just go to the next thing. Very early on I used to be all "ok but we have to properly bridge and pace things, we can't jump from the important classroom scene to the important beach scene" yes you can. If nothing interesting or relevant is happening between those two things you can just say "ten minutes later, at the beach" and keep going. If the bridge between them is boring you, it's also gonna bore the audience, and you don't have to write it. You can jump straight to the next interesting or important part and so long as you don't actually jump over any important parts it's fine. The audience wants to get straight to the next thing too.

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i just want to thank mr forster for making maurice a dumb jock and just absolutely owning it and rolling with it. like every other writer would make clive the nerdy repressed pretty boy to be the protagonist of their Groundbreaking Gay Novel but not my man e.m.! we’re sttraight up in the dumbass zone here and im loving it

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Hallo! after your recent post (retrospective?) on the fics you are happiest with/are most revealing; I read basically all the fics you mentioned. What really stands out for all of them is how deftly you handle the escalation. You are really skilled at teaching the reader the rules (tony is de-aged, harry is de-aged, steve's in a time loop, future!draco is helping harry+friends, etc); and then you 'simply' extend those rules in a really unexpected way to raise the stakes and really force the reader and the characters to grapple with them more deeply. One of the most impressive (b/c it's so subtle, almost) is actually in The Pure and Simple Truth, where Neville and Greg meeting again is such a heightening of the basic premise of forgiveness and morality and hurt and healing that it feels unexpected but is in fact an extremely rational extension.

I'm wondering, when you're drafting a story, how you approach/think about these escalations. Are they the seed of the entire plot? Do you only get to them after thinking of the basic premise? After plotting them, how do you approach actually writing them? (Am I reading too much into this entirely?) And of coure, thanks for all of your writing!

Thank you so much for thinking I do this well! You're not reading too much into it, in that escalation is a part of story shape, and story shape is something I think about all the time. But I will say that I almost never think of escalation specifically as a thing I want to do, because your first guess is the correct one: usually the escalation is in the first idea I get about a story--or actually, it's a combination of the first several ideas, because I was unable to decide and combined them. Take the stories you mentioned:

Tony is de-aged: I wanted to do an MCU de-aging story and couldn't decide whether I wanted it to be Tony de-aged and Bruce taking care of him or Bruce de-aged and Natasha taking care of them or maybe a group of them de-aged. So I conceived the story in a way to write them all at once.

Harry is de-aged: I wanted to do an H/D de-aging story and couldn't decide whether to de-age Harry or de-age Draco, and if it was Draco I wanted to see him at a variety of ages. I didn't want to do Harry at a variety of ages because we already know how he is from 11-17, but I did also want to do both H/D de-aged at the same time with a second chance at being friends while kids. So I conceived the story in a way to write them all at once, except the arc where they're both kids couldn't be worked in.

Steve's in a timeloop: I wanted to do an MCU timeloop story and couldn't decide whether it was more interesting to put Bruce in the loop have Bruce outside the loop trying to help someone, or maybe Bruce would be in a timeloop with a few others. So I conceived the story in a way to write first Steve in a timeloop, then a small group, then the world, except I got tired of the story so skipped the small group in a loop.

Future!Draco helping Harry+friends: this one was a little different because I didn't start with a single trope, but two tropes I love that are somewhat connected--time travel (and paradoxes that result from it) and multiverses (which can be created by time travel). What I really wanted to do was write the multiverses, but then it would be a much longer story than I had the energy for, so that story is really just trying to write the bare minimum of the paradox I was interested in and squeeze in multiverses because I like them.

The Pure and Simple Truth: this is the simplest one because I didn't even start with a trope. It literally is just what if Harry and Draco go to the pub with ever combination of their friends that is possible to create? I literally made lists: 1) Harry,Draco,Hermione, 2) Harry,Draco, Pansy, 3) Harry,Draco,Hermione,Pansy, 4) Harry,Draco,Hermione,Ron, 4) Harry,Draco,Hermione,Ron,Pansy etc.

For that fic, as well as all the other fics above, I didn't "plot" anything; I didn't come up with an outline or rough list of things that would happen. What I did was come up with these ideas, then write the beginning, then continue to write in a way that allowed the rest of the story to be guided by a) who I think these characters are and what they'll do in certain situations, and b) what works in the canon universe, c) what works in the universe of the fic I set up in the opening scenes.

What I mean is that while I thought TPaST had to be about the themes you mention--morality, hurt, healing, forgiveness--because that's what a story about Slytherins and Gryffindors becoming friends should be about, I didn't plan at any point to have the Greg and Neville confrontation. What I did was think about Greg, the way he comes across in canon and how little remorse or understanding or compassion we see from him, but how he is someone with friends and feelings and fears and joys. And then I thought about Neville, about how of all the Gryffindors in the group I was writing, he was the one who was explicitly tortured by the Slytherins in the group I was writing, and about how that should mean something for Neville; he should see things differently and have different feelings. (I will say Luna was also probably tortured, but she's Luna and so sees everything differently always.) Anyway, once you think through who these two people are and put them in a room together it feels inevitable, what will happen. And that's honestly how almost all my stories come together.

I want to say that if you do admire the way my stories come together it's not actually a thoughtless, directionless project that just happens to work in a way that some people enjoy. I think all the time about the shape of stories, and shape includes escalation. But I'm rarely thinking about how to escalate, because it's baked into the premises I conceive. Instead I'm thinking about things like pacing, and laying character development next to plot pacing, and where to places all the necessary foreshadowing moments, and how to ensure I've kept all the promises made by foreshadowing, that sort of thing. When you've got a premise that escalates naturally, and you're carefully balancing the rest of those things, the escalation should happen in a way that feels interesting and propulsive.

Perhaps obviously the thing I'm terrible at and never think about is de-escalation, because by the time we get to the top of the escalator I'm where I want to be and uninterested in climbing down. Like the climax is fun but wow anything after it kinda bores me, and that ruins the shape utterly, oh well.

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happy happy happy birthday to one of my favorite people, someone I met through fandom but have gotten to know in real life and makes me happy, @icmezzo!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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hi! I love your writing! It’s been a few years since I’ve graduated university. I’ve always wanted to write things, but I am not very confident in my creative writing. I think it’s because although I am a native English speaker, I don’t feel like I know the rules of constructing sentences that well, beyond some basics (I know what a dependent clause and a complex sentence are, but not much beyond that). Not knowing the rules makes it hard to follow the rules or change the cadence of my writing confidently. Wish they taught more grammar in school, ahaha, but I am curious - do u have a book or some sort of source you reference that helps you feel confident that you are putting sentences together properly?

Thank uuuu

sorry to answer so late! I don't have a book or reference I use for putting sentences together. Knowing what a dependent clause is is a good start, and it's more than many great writers know. I'm saying this because I have talked to many people who I think write exceptionally well, but if I mentioned anything about clauses they didn't know what I was talking about. I think they probably got basics in school, then read enough to develop some good instincts, and then they get editors like me who really know their shit. That's what I would recommend generally--lots of reading and lots of good betas.

However, since you're looking for recommendations, here are three more specific things to look into:

Sentence diagramming. I actually can't diagram a sentence from memory, and I'm not sure I could even do a very complicated sentence when I learned it, but learning to diagram sentences means you learn all the parts of a sentence and the different way words go together. Being able to identify the subject, predicate verb, direct object, indirect objects, appositives, and articles can really help you understand what a sentence needs to operate and how things like word order can be changed to vary syntax. A lot of mistakes in syntax happen because the writer forgot what the subject or predicate verb was by the end of the sentence. Here is an explanation of sentence diagramming.

Learning Latin. Just as I can't diagram a sentence, I can't read or write Latin. However, I did take a year of Latin at college, and it really beefed up my understanding of English grammar. This is because Latin is morphologically rich, whereas English is morphologically quite poor. This means that words in Latin change depending on what part of the sentence they're in, which in English is rare. As such if you're reading or writing Latin, you're paying lots of attention to what a noun in the sentence is doing, which can really start making you look at English in new ways. There are other morphologically rich languages, and learning another language in general can be a great way to make you think about the way we say things in English and how they can be said differently.

Reading 18th and 19th century English language novels. I mentioned reading above, but I wanted to specify these books because they tend to be syntactically rich in a way that can give you interesting ideas about what is "permissible" in an English sentence. I also think books in other languages can be great for this, but you're more at a mercy of a translator there. When I am striving to be more syntactically complex and interesting, I always pick up Jane Austen.

Now that I've said all this I want to say that I don't actually think correct grammar is necessary to tell a great story. Some of the best books in the English language are books that flaunt the rules we see as most basic. However, as you stated in your ask, a better understanding of the rules, such as they are, can help you think of ways to use them, bend them, or break them in ways that create meaning and make your message clear to the majority of readers.

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no one knows if art is good or not

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sorry but someone assuming you have "left a fandom" when you don't post about it a lot anymore feels like bilbo coming home to the sackville bagginses having him presumed dead and selling all his stuff. girl i was just on a little quest????

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This is absolutely no hate genuinely write whatever you want but Mean Dom Hua Cheng is so funny to me like Xie Lian literally burned his house down and Hua Cheng showed up with his crying sword and neck bared because he gave Xie Lian an ouchie that bitch is not doing punishment play.