paulamcg

Reveals – and glorious winners and amazing banners – are up at firewhiskeyfic.


Check out all the masterpieces, most of which are hugely inspired by Hagrid! Once again I resorted to an animal's perspective and to dealing with a favourite character's situation in the PoA year.

Title: Not Fish But
Author: paulamcg
Characters: Fang and a stray
Prompts used: All the prompts: Hagrid, Forbidden Forest, Stripped Bare, Cuddling by the Fire, Ice and Snow, and “Guests, like fish, begin to smell after three days.”
Summary: In February 1994, Fang decides to venture into the woods, if only to escape a fishy smell and to encounter another.
Rating: G or M
Word count: 950
Author's Notes (if any): This was written for Not-So-Dry January Edition of firewhiskeyfic. The original version can be read here in the DW community – together with the wonderful feedback from generously-commenting fellow participants.

The cleaned-up version is here on AO3
as well as right here:
( a rare joy )

My fics from 2022 are listed in my previous post. I've been so glad to receive a couple of kind responses both on LJ and here: heartwarming congratulations on what can look like an impressive collection. (For quite a while I haven't felt like sharing anything about my headaches and heartaches – at least not anything beyond writing struggles – on these journals, but I trust you understand that behind these little works, there's a little, old and rather lonely person, whom your words make happier.) Here are my answers to too many meme questions.

This year I wrote:
31 100 words of fiction: 32 stories, including drabbles. (Around 4 450 of those words have been submitted to fests in which they will be revealed as mine only in January and February.)

Looking back, did you write more fic than you thought you would this year, less, or about what you'd predicted?
My writing had already got less and less every year since 2020 (after I'd written 121 500 words in 2019, when I returned from an eight-year hiatus). A year ago I had no goals. I just hoped I'd continue to write because I needed it as a source of joy. I was happily surprised that according to AO3 my word count for the year had become clearly over 40K. But now that I take out those fest fics which I'd included in my end of 2021 report even though they were still anonymous/not even posted yet at the journal fests, I'm startled to see that I've written barely half of the number of words I wrote in 2021. The number of fics is not fewer but actually four more than in 2021, and that's definitely a better achievement than I could have ever predicted. I made no fanart.

What pairing/genre/fandom did you write that you would never have predicted in January?
Argus Filch (in Being Not Normal) and Cuthbert Binns (in A Different Truth) are characters I had never thought I'd write! Petunia Evans (in Some Hopes), too.

( This year's theme and so on )

I have eventually managed to continue the Cho/Luna story which I first intended for Femmefest. Having enjoyed crafting the story in my slow pace (and allowing Luna to talk about Remus, whose role threatens to make the fic not pure femslash) and reached 2K words, I decided to start posting it as a WiP (as my third ever chaptered fic). Here's the (700-word) opening scene, which is now called:

For a Change, Chapter One

Publishing this piece now, I both increase my word count for this year a bit and make sure I'll write and post something in 2023, too.

Happy New Year to all of you who still see my infrequent posts!

Just as I'd hoped, some pairings firmly within my comfort zone and some open requests at hp_halloween as well as the wordcount limit and the deadline helped me come up with my first humble pieces of fic since the drunken writing about an unexpectedly inspiring ghost character at the beginning of October. The tiny Ginny/Luna story I've just shared includes something I hadn't done before, young Ginny and references to CoS, although the piece is set around the PoA year's Halloween, where I continue to squeeze fics. The first treat I wrote (this one, too, for a recipient whom I don't know at all and who has not responded), however, is predictably about my damaged-by-Azkaban Sirius in 12, Grimmauld Place.

Title: Not Fully Happy
Author: paulamcg
Pairing: Sirius/Remus
Summary: In 1995 Sirius manages to remember another Halloween he shared with Remus.
Word Count: 200
Rating: G
Notes: This was written for bererjs at HP Halloween.

Read here on AO3,
or right here:
( a prisoner in this grim old house )

Reveals are up at firewhiskeyfic.



Check out the other fabulous banners as well as the winners and all the other delightful stories. Firewhiskey and ouzo helped me write my first words of fic since mid-August, and I'm super glad that this fest is where I ended up sharing another odd story with a very minor canon character as the protagonist.

Title: My Friend Liripipe, or A Different Truth
Author: paulamcg
Characters: Cuthbert Binns & Remus Lupin
Prompts used: All the prompts: Nearly Headless Nick, Godric's Hollow, Jack-o'-lantern, Graveyard, Harvest Party, Bewitch
Summary: A week before Halloween 1993, when a colleague appreciates his company, Cuthbert may feel alive, even though he's dead and it's Saturday.
Rating: G
Word count: 2870
Author's Notes (if any): This was written for The Sleepy Hollow Edition of firewhiskeyfic. The original version can be read here in the DW community – together with the wonderful feedback from generously-commenting fellow participants. This time I've added a couple of sentences close to the end, in addition to fixing the typos and a few other errors. Exceptionally, I've also chosen a different title before posting the fic on AO3.

The final version is here on AO3
as well as right here:
( my voice can be heard )

I'm glad I dared take part in July 2022 Swap on concrit_x. I knew I'd need to give concrit to two writers with whom I'd have no fandom in common, but I managed to choose something where the canon was far from unfamiliar.

I'd loved A Little Princess decades ago, and the story must have somehow stayed with me, and this was an opportunity to reread it. And around five years ago, reading Sapkowski's novels and playing Witcher The Wild Hunt were one of the main sources of joy for me.

Now I completed my two concrit assignments by writing about a delightful, charmingly era-appropriate Sara/Becky fic, A Propitious Season of Living by regshoe, and about a challenging, fascinating story with an OC protagonist who convincingly belongs to Sapkowski's fantasy world, Such Things as False Truths and Honest Lies by farla.

And I've got concrit on two of my Remus fics: Was There Love Involved and The Angel of Charity, or This Awfully Long Month! No harsh criticism, just some suggestions for improvements. And, above all...

Well, the former comment, on a recent 700-word piece (written as an exercise at a punctuation workshop) means a lot in particular because of the praise for characterisation – and because it urges me to consider posting my “pièce de résistance ” – the long post-OotP story Remus Lupin and the Revolt of the Creatures – on AO3.

The latter piece of concrit is the first ever comment on The Angel of Charity. In spring 2019, soon after returning from my hiatus and before finding any contacts, I spent a full month working on this fic, and it's probably the story I've been more fond of than any other. It's a dream come true that this story has finally been received and appreciated. The feedback is amazing and makes me, too, understand better what managed to say in the story. I can simply revel in this consummation – or get eager to seriously self-rec this...

poignant, ultimately hopeful study of the subtler effects of poverty and discrimination … [in which I've] done a fabulous job grounding Remus' story in its historical era and intertwining the Muggle society of the time, the mainstream wizard society, and the part-human underground to create a rich, multilayered world.

Now (while I've been composing this post) that latter concritter has surprised me by reading chapter one of Revolt on LJ.

All this... when throughout another July I've felt almost totally incapable of writing and sharing new fics, let alone any that would be both hopeful and meaningful.

I hope to see you at this extra special drink-and-write all-day extravaganza which is arranged to accommodate more timezones:


Firewhiskeyfic on Dreamwidth

Beaides the drink from the HP world, any booze or your alternative to booze goes. And there are seven fabulous prompts, and only three of them clearly HP-related.

After completing the story made of the microchapters that May prompts on Tumblr inspired, I felt I needed to go on. So as to have some joy, I needed the daily writing challenges, small accomplishments, and the little bit of response to fic it turned out to be possible even for me to get on that platform. This is how I've ended up giving another try to the Wolfstar fandom.

( Back when I returned from hiatus )

At the beginning of June I came across wolfstarmicrofic. And now for three weeks I've tried my best to stay content with the small number of likes and reblogs I get when I only slowly gain one or two more followers and my fics can't possibly get much attention. Besides, I still stick to my own style and perhaps unusual scenarios.

I've posted something on the basis of twenty prompts (just not on today's yet), a couple of times using two prompts in one fic. All these fics are with the wolfstarmicrofic hash tag on my Tumblr, here. Because ten of the fics are based on scenes in my earlier fics, I've posted only eight on AO3.

These four stories are set before Sirius went to Azkaban and have been added to my series The Four Shapeshifters.
Secret Records (200 words)
Private Rainbows (250 words)
Penny Sweets (235 words)
Right Here Right Now (250 words)

These are the new post-Azkaban stories, and each of them is part of my series Escape, Lie Low.
Broken Memory (200 words)
Relearning Closeness (700 words)
Imaginary and Real (200 words)
The Album Remus Has Treasured (100 words)

The reveals are finally up at Remus Lupin Fest. I can take the blame for this canon-divergent-after-OotP gen fic.

Title: Timeless Like the Wolf's World
Author: paulamcg
Characters: Remus, werewolf OCs, the three Animagi in memories
Rating: G
Word Count: 2900
Summary: In May 1997, after defying the Ministry, Dumbledore and a werewolf leader, Remus Jaws Lupin invites some members of his pack to run with him under the full moon so as to reach and share memories.

Read here on AO3
or right here: ( he can remember names )

I can't resist mentioning Remus Lupin Fest, too, even though it's posting only on Tumblr and AO3, and it's not small enough for anyone to easily check out everything. There are a lot of different Remuses (and one of them is mine, of course).