#i always physically pictured her as having a sort of southern european/mediterranean skin tone

[pebblysand]

Obsessed with your writing as always, so if you feel like it could you answer please: 11) Have you ever amended a story due to criticisms you’ve received after posting it? / 16) How did you come up with the idea for Giulia? (there's got to be a She Lives AU/Case Fic pls I'M BEGGING YOU) <3

aw, thank you soooo much <3! man, also those are two excellent questions. i apologise in advance for the long answers.

11) Have you ever amended a story due to criticisms you’ve received after posting it?

so: the short answer to this is no. at least, not that i recall. it may have happened when i was writing fanfiction at a younger age, but i honestly don’t remember if it did. i have, however, sometimes amended things in a story after posting it, but it’s always been because of a flaw that i saw or something that i wanted to change, rather than something someone else wanted to me to change.

i actually regularly do that. if you’ve been reading castles from the start and have recently gone back, you’ll notice small changes here and there. but that’s just me suffering from edititis (which i have dubbed as the constant will to edit and keep editing shit until i die. if i ever published a book, i think i’d still feel the need to go into bookshops and scribble changes into them). in castles, though, i’ve never (and don’t intend to) change anything major. it’s a couple of lines, maybe a scene, small stuff. however, in my previous long fic, children (not potter), i went back a couple of years later and rewrote the whole thing. but that was because i wanted to do that, not because someone else asked me to.

this, of course, aside from the obvious ‘oh, you wrote “lay” instead of “lie”’ or ‘oh, you put two p-s in “apologise.”’ i sadly don’t have a beta for most of my work and whenever someone points out a typo i get embarrassingly annoyed at myself cause god, i spend hours and hours proofreading these and there’s always typos that get through the cracks. it drives me nuts. but of course, if i get a comment pointing one out, i’ll obviously go back and change that.

this being said, i don’t necessarily rule out changing something on the basis of a comment in the future, it would just have to be something i agree with. this is a rather complicated topic for me actually because i do have a knee jerk reaction to criticism which i think is maybe different from most authors. i’ve seen in the past a lot of people on reddit or elsewhere complaining about authors getting very defensive/angry at criticism. i have the opposite flaw: i genuinely think everyone who criticises my work is right. so, my knee jerk reaction is to people-please, go back, and change the thing that made this person unhappy. i’m fighting constantly against that knee jerk reaction, trying to trust myself and my narrative choices haha. in a way, i do think my knee jerk reactions is quite a good thing because it clearly means i listen to people and don’t think i’m better than them, but i’ve recently come to terms with the fact that it also has a downside. i very quickly question myself, think everything i write is shit, and lose the will to write. i have alluded to this before but there is a reason why there was a four-month gap between chapter 8 and 9 of castles.

the way i’m learning to deal with this is two folds: first, i try to remind myself that everyone is contradicting themselves and there is no way i can make everyone happy. in castles, i have people in the comments who don’t want harry and ginny to end up together. i have people who think ginny should be ‘punished’ for dumping harry in chapter 3, and people who don’t. i have people who love the foreshadowing i do and my use of time in a non-linear way, then recently got a comment saying that person hated it. so i try to remind myself that i’m the captain of this ship and in the end, i need to make decisions lol.

second, i also frequently go back and check in with myself. when i got a lot of criticism about harry’s characterisation a couple of chapters ago, i went back and re-read the whole thing to make sure i still stood by what i had written. and, i think, while i didn’t at that point, if i had come out of it thinking i needed to change x, y, or z, i probably would have. i think that’s one of the gifts you have in fanfiction: interactions with your readers and the ability to go back and change things you don’t like. so it’s not like i’d completely rule out changing something after posting, it’s more that i’ve checked in and felt there was no need. it doesn’t mean it won’t/can’t happen in the future.

comments and criticism do influence future chapters though. like, i’ll read something and think: yeah, that’s a fair point, or here, that’s a good idea, and take that on. for example, i think that had i not gotten certain comments, i would have written harry’s reaction to ginny’s letters as a lot less ambivalent in chapter 9 that i ended up doing. i might have reached the same conclusion in the end and it didn’t influence the overall plot, but criticism and comments do have an influence on future developments, yes. not all of them, but some of them.

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16) How did you come up with the idea for Giulia? (there's got to be a She Lives AU/Case Fic pls I'M BEGGING YOU) <3

aw, jules. that’s also a very interesting question. so, for her i feel like there’s two things.

first, there’s her function in castles as harry’s work partner. i won’t lie, that was sort of born out of a reaction i’ve had to many other post war fics that always rang a bit wrong to me. in a lot of post-war literature, when harry joins the aurors, he’s just partnered up with ron. and i always felt that was weird because… they’re both newbies!! they need a more experienced partner, someone to teach them shit! and, so once i’d decided that, i sort of started digging into who that partner could be and what he or she could bring to the story.

i very quickly decided she’d be a woman. first because the only other auror character was robards and i wanted to balance it out, and also because she comes in at a point where harry is actually more comfortable with the women in his life, than the men. there’s a very weird post-war dynamic with the weasleys with a lot of the unspoken ramifications of losing fred, of everything that he hid from them regarding the war, as well as his relationship with ginny. his relationship with kingsley is … complicated, and at that point, he doesn’t really trust robards. he feels much closer to hermione (who is also on the outside of the weasley dynamic) and i just think that in a weird way, the relationships he has with women in that part of castles are a lot more honest than what he has with ron, for instance. so, i also wanted giulia to be part of that.

on that same note, the one thing that i knew when i started thinking about her is that she’d be honest, no-nonsense because at that point in the story, it was what harry needed. he’s navigating blind in the middle of a storm for most of the first half of castles and i think he needed someone he could trust and who would be honest with him. everyone around him is trying to protect him but harry’s always preferred having the information just laid out in front of him - i wanted giulia to provide that. it was also particularly interesting because, as he says himself at one point, she is the only person in his life who hasn’t known him for years, and who hasn’t been through it all with him. and, then he’s paired up with this person and told: you have to trust them with your life. and, of course, that doesn’t work like that. and so i wanted to giulia to be honest and no-nonsense because that inspires trust.

and then… there’s what every writer in the world will say, which i appreciate is very frustrating if you’re trying to come up with a character formula: she just shot off the page. i have no explanation for it. the main character who i had planned and for whom i had an extensive backstory was mia, not giulia. then, i started writing her with those two things in mind and she went from being a work partner who was going to appear in a couple of scenes to, well, giulia. that’s the part i can’t really explain. i remember writing that first scene where she meets harry in the patrol car and jokes about him trying to change his appearance and i was like ‘ohhhhhh who is this?’ giulia basically stole the show and wrote herself. i had very little hand in it. which, when you think of her character, is incredibly fitting. i had to dial back mia’s story (although, i’m now developing it for the next couple of chapters so it just got moved rather than deleted) because giulia just took so much space. it’s one the joys of writing where a character you thought would be minor just takes on a life of its own. and, the whole thing about her being gay (and sort of a player), and her slytherin past, and her relationship with harry all just became strangely self-evident. i wish i could say: ‘oh, i had the idea for giulia by doing x, y, z’ but it really wasn’t intentional. i had a baseline but she created herself.

obviously, then, she did end up filling a very important role of having harry understand that the guilt he felt over the things he’d done during the war shouldn’t plague him forever (‘you’ve done shit things, do better,’) but that was a role i gave her after she shot off the page, not before.

regarding her death, that’s sweet. i’m still sad we lost her. i was writing her for chapter 9 and just felt sad. this being said, it’s kind of hard for me to think of an au in which she doesn’t die because she always was going to die. from the very first time i wrote her, i remember i wrote the chapter from the moment harry meets her to the end of chapter 4 in one sitting. and there’s this line she says which is: ‘we’ll all die and fall into oblivion but you won’t’ (when she’s trying to get him to talk) and i remember writing that sort of instinctively, stopping and thinking: oh shit. she dies, doesn’t she? and, once i’d thought it, i couldn’t unthink it. it was set. and, i remember getting a tonne of comments from people who loved giulia at that point and biting my tongue because i knew, i always knew she was going to die. that too was self evident because in the end, harry has got to learn to stand on his own, she can’t always be there to tell him what to do. and, obviously, that becomes clearer after she dies, in chapter 9 where he’s just found out about ginny and he’s trying to figure out how to feel but all he remembers are bits of conversations that don’t really help.

and, like, she’s far from perfect. she’s impulsive and can sometimes be a bit too honest. and, while a lot of the things she tells harry about sexual assaults are correct, the way she teaches him also sort of backfires because it’s so prescriptive he feels terrified of doing the wrong thing and ends up, for most of chapter 9, doing nothing. and, generally, i tend to think she was the right person to teach harry at the right time, but her style of teaching would have completely backfired on most people. like, ron wouldn’t have taken to her. at all.

but man, i really miss writing her.

anyway, thanks again for your questions and sorry for the essays, haha. they were really good questions! if anyone wants to ask more, the full list is here and my ask box is open.