Why I'm not writing anymore yet new stuff is still showing up:

Those who have followed my writing for a while know that I have a complex chronic illness, and it's reached the point where I'm too distracted and on many days too muddled to write in a sustained way. I prefer to spend my time with family and friends, and maintaining my professional work. As such, I have no plans to return to writing fanfiction. If I do ever take up the word processor again, it will be directed toward original work.

I promised a number of people along the way that if I ever decided to walk away, then I would find some way to provide an ending or at least a sense of where everything was heading.

With respect to Harry Potter and the Years of Rebellion:

I have three 3-inch binders and a couple CDs' worth of drafts and scenes and drabbles, as well as a 40-page treatment of the remaining arc. I am getting a lot of help to organize this mess into something that can be posted - it started with one person and has mushroomed into three. It's a difficult job and I make it as hard as possible. :) More or less, I'm just reviewing the assembled "chapters" and writing the occasional scene or lines of dialogue to pull ideas together. So far, everything in Years of Rebellion Part 5 is a result of this effort. There is no designated beta for this enterprise and much of the content is coming from initial drafts that never saw the light of day. None of us make any promises with regard to quality; it'll become progressively more sketchy; and there will be some continuity issues given that the various drafts were written over a five year period.

With respect to Harry Potter and the Last Horcrux:

I wrote a good part of three different endings to Last Horcrux and drafts for most of what lies in between. There was actually a completed draft at one time, until I foolishly placed it on a flash drive when exchanging computers and proceeded to lose the flash drive. I'm far too smart (and have screwed up far too many times) to do something like that, but there you are. I will be posting two of the three endings - one is already posted.

With respect to the fanfiction community in general, and my readership in particular:

It's been a fun ride for the most part. Thank you to everyone who has chosen to read all or part of my work. I hope that you enjoy reading this stuff as much as I've enjoyed writing it. I hope that all fanfic writers and their readers have the chance to enjoy a similar relationship. Fanficauthors.net remains the primary home for my work, and I am indebted to Tim (Jeconais) and the other writers there for providing a great place to 'live' and a supportive environment. My work will remain there for as long as Tim is willing to host it.

I find that I'm reading a lot more fanfic than used to be the case. I leave at least one review for any fic that I read from front to back. If a review shows up from this account, it's from me and not from AMP.

With respect to nasty reviews and those who spawn them:

My advice to you is stop complaining and start writing. If you're a competent writer, then perhaps you and your work product will become as Narcissus was to his pond. If you're not, then perhaps you'll develop a greater appreciation for the people who actually pursue this as a craft (albeit an unpaid one).

With respect to fanfic peeves:

I've been asked this more often than I ever thought would be the case. In no particular order:

1. Misspellings of names, placenames, spells, objects, etc. taken directly from Ms. Rowling's books. This is my absolute number-one peeve. If I see "Ginerva Weasley", I'm done. "Wizengamont"? History. "Arvada Kedarvra"? Get me a wand and I'll cast one on the perpetrator. There is absolutely no excuse for it. I do have a personal favorite, though... "Luscious" Malfoy. It's at once sleazy, terribly wrong and bleach-worthy.

2. "Spaghetti Western" fics, or for the younger crowd, "Potter Anime" fics: wherein fairly clueless OotP-Canon!Harry goes back to Privet Drive; has an epiphany that Dumbledore/the Weasleys/the Order/Voldemort/Inland Revenue have (fill in the blank, but it has to be bad); and (usually through some sort of deus-ex-machina involving a magical object and a good deal of money) returns to Hogwarts in the fall fully powered-up, fully educated in everything he needs to know, ready with a sarcastic quip at the slightest provocation, and ready to quick-draw on the bad guys. Okay, if you want a Western, read or watch a Western. If you like punk-ass anime characters, read about or watch a punk-ass anime character. Don't turn Harry into either of them, please.

3. "Instant love, just add an owl". Fics where (fill in the blank) falls in love with (fill in the blank) through a four-to-six week owl post exchange irritate the crap out of me.

4. "Instant love, just skip plot development". Okay, I have to talk a bit of smack about Ms. Rowling here. Let me preface by saying that I don't pick what to read based on shipping, never have. The fics I've read in the last couple of months have been just about evenly divided between H/Hr, H/G, and H/Other. That having been said, Ms. Rowling did a less-than-stellar job of building logical continuity toward H/G. Prior to HBP, Ginny had approximately 90 lines of dialogue in the entire series. Harry's sudden 'chest monster' was written in a very contrived way at best. The interactions between Harry and Ginny from the big kiss in HBP through the end of DH are minimalist and wooden (and the breakup scene at the end of HBP is puke-worthy, IMO). The H/G romance really wasn't central to the resolution of the plot arc, and Ginny's characterization is self-contradictory over the course of the final two books. I didn't care for its development at all, even if it was intended to be merely a minor part of the larger tale. You can imagine what I think of fanfics that have Harry and (fill in the blank) joined at the hip within 2,000 words, in soap-opera-worthy love within 5,000, and making like bunnies by the following chapter. Inexplicable love - or love/sex/canoodling that's unrelated to the plot or the thrust of the characters in question - sends me screaming for the hills unless I'm actually in the market a crack-fic.

5. Dan and Emma Granger. Sorry, but it's a peeve. I certainly don't leave a fic over it, and some of my favorite writers use it, but... erm... Dan and Emma? sigh

6. Evil!Harry. Okay, if you want an evil anti-hero, go rent a movie because anti-heros are friggin' everywhere these days. I'm not a canon Nazi, but the Harry Potter series is redemptive in nature. This isn't Watchmen, folks. Is a neutral!Harry or a "Grey"!Harry explicable? Certainly. A "Dark"!Harry? Depends on how you play his childhood, I suppose, but a Harry with fewer moral compunctions can be logically presented. Evil!Harry doesn't make any sense... unless you think Dumbledore in canon is evil, in which case there's a thin thread with which to work.

7. Evil!Dumbledore. Nope, sorry. Deeply-flawed!Dumbledore? Yep. Misguided!Dumbledore? Oh, yeah. Unsympathetically-portrayed!Dumbledore. Gotcha. He's not evil. The series doesn't work if he's evil. To make him evil, you have to make a couple of leaps that I've seen and most times rejected. (1) The Dursleys have to be serious abusers - not the Wicked-Stepmother types we see in canon, but flat-out "Evening News" abusers; and, most importantly, (2) Dumbledore has to know that and has to intend for that to happen. To each their own, but that's too much for me.

8. Evil!Ron. Don't get me wrong: I think canon!Ron is lazy, slovenly, juvenile, prejudiced, and grows very little with age. He is in a place at the end of OotP where he could have become something better. Instead, he had a backslide. After DH, I frankly couldn't stand him. He is not, however, evil. The whole 'Weasleys are manipulating Harry for the money and Dumbledore's facilitating it' meme is getting pretty tiresome. And for the record, you don't have to grind Ron and Ginny into mincemeat in order to write a H/Hr oriented fic, provided that it starts after OotP... unless you're a basher.

9. Character bashing. It's a waste of good word count. If you hate a character, find a forum and chat about it. Please don't ask me to read a fic about your hate.

10. Good!Snape. No. The whole 'love for Lily' thing bugged me before DH, and it bugs me equally in canon. 'Bravest man I've ever known', my backside. He was a spy, and very nearly a true double-agent. Calculating, yes - at an almost blood-chilling level. Brave? I disagree. Good? Hell, no. People like Snape because he looks like Alan Rickman. Problem is, he doesn't. Read the description in Ms. Rowling's book.

11. Good!Malfoy. No. Conniving little shit? Yes. Coward? Yes. In over his head? Clearly. Good? No. Redeemable? Early on, if separated from his home environment, perhaps. Later on? He wanted to 'change' because he was in a bad situation, not necessarily because his beliefs had changes or because he thought what he was doing was wrong. People like Malfoy because he looks like Tom Fenton. I suppose he looks like Tom Fenton more than Snape looks like Alan Rickman.

12. Malfoy/anyone other than a Slytherin. Under the conditions at Hogwarts, not a chance unless there was a betrothal. Malfoy/Hermione is the dumbest of the lot; see #4.

13. Harry naming a child after Snape or Dumbledore. Oh, crap - that's canon! Hmph. I still hate it, because it implies that 37-year-old Harry is as blind to the world as 18-year-old Harry. In other words, he's really nothing more than, as Harry describes himself early in the HBP film, a 'bit of a tosser'.

Cheers,

Mike FP