Current Status 8/18/11: Methyl has chapter 6 back from the beta for the first round of fixing. She's been writing (and doing more) science instead of writing (and editing) story. :p

General Story Information

The story, A Pale Shade of Night (and it's sequel Illusions of Choice), is the only fanfiction I am currently working on. The first installment of the series, A Pale Shade of Night, is complete. When all is said and done there should be three installments of this AU story -- and yes, it is quite AU in some ways, but hopefully fairly reasonable and well grounded in canon.

If you notice stylistic changes and (hopefully) general improvement during the story, that's because I started writing it in 2003 (my first notes are dated June 2003 x_x). Yes, I am slow. I write faster now when I have free time, but that is a highly-variable commodity. In general I took the end of OOTP as my starting point time-wise in the HP universe, and I stole some useful bits from HBP, but do not expect my story to follow HBP or the seventh book. The story is peppered with original characters out of necessity and because it is fun to develop new people, places, and things within the basic framework of JKR's world.

I welcome all constructive criticism as I am using this story as a way to practice my fiction writing skills (duh). I really hope you enjoy the story that a little corner of my mind has spewed forth.

A Little Bit About Me:

I'm (still) a graduate student. I hail from the wonderful wet and green Oregon, though do not currently reside there. I have an ever-growing jungle of plants, and I can be identified by green sun hat I wear to protect myself from the evil burning eye in the sky. On dark, cold nights this is swapped for one of several colorful woolly hats.

I will gleefully admit to you my unhealthy fascination with dark and evil wizards (fae and demons are fun too!). If you decide to visit my livejournal (click the "homepage" link above) be forewarned that Voldemort tends to make his presence known fairly often. He lives in a little corner of my head. Arcana lives in another. They don’t get along very well. Technical garble also tends to pop up on the blog -- ye have been warned.

Inspiration for Story and Miscellaneous Thoughts (read at your own risk)

The fae are a staple of British folklore. You can't read it or hear it sung without running into the sidhe. So upon reading Harry Potter, Methyl wondered where they were. Of course you could say, "Ah, but there are house-elves, brownies, banshee, and all sorts of faeriefolk in the books," and yes, this is true. But we don't see the likes of the Seelie and Unseelie Courts, the kind of fae that would scoff at most modern-day witches and wizards (or at least what we see of them) and might enjoy hunting them down for sport. To that you could say, "Well, they just don't exist in JKR's world," and you would likely be correct.

Methyl thought about this and grumbled a bunch, then crawled out from underneath her mossy rock and proclaimed, "Ah ha! This is what fanfiction is for," and promptly jumped into the world of the AU story.

If approached as a history of magic or world mythology problem, we could think, "Perhaps there is a good reason we don't see the fae in canon," and then ask, "Why don't we see them?" The answer could be that they were banished way back when, and that Harry Potter (not known for his stellar record) wasn't paying attention in History of Magic class when Binns droned on about this subject, or perhaps this is a seventh year topic.

Unfortunately, if the fae were banished it'd be rather hard to write a HP story with fae since they were . . . well banished out of the picture. But magic being what is it, loopholes are possible, and perhaps that let one fae sneak through (we'll ignore some of the technical details about fae that I had to develop at this point as they're sorta story spoilers). And thus, given leave to exist, Arcana poofed into existence.

Well, she actually poofed into existence after a discussion about how liquid-liquid extraction was really a black art, in conjunction with finding a great urn at a bookstore on which was written "Ashes of Troublesome Students." From this the idea of a "jar of souls" was born, and from that came the idea for a soul hunter.

"Ah ha!" Methyl thought. Now this is the sort of person that Voldemort would be very interested in contacting (and forcing into servitude). We know he's ginzu-ed his soul to itty-bitty bits, or at least we did after HBP, to prevent himself from properly dying, but what if the Horcurxes were only the beginning? Not properly dying doesn't get you very far if you're stuck as a disembodied spirit with no one to get you a new body (and we know that Voldemort really doesn't like to rely on others for anything, much less such delicate and personal tasks).

So with that I had a reason that a fae could be running around and a reason why one could be interacting with our favorite Dark Lord. After further pondering, but not much, Methyl plopped down in front of the computer and thought, "Ooooh fun! Now how do I write fiction?" She started typing soon after and is still going to this day (and is rather pleased she no longer has to fight to keep the prose from sounding like a technical report).