Due to a few requests I've had lately, I've decided to try and offer my services as a beta reader. It's on a trial basis for now, but if I manage to do a passing job and there's interest, I might stick with it. We'll see.

Hello! Hyaroo here, but you may call me "Roo," if you so wish. (No relation to any other users here named Roo.)

What to say about me? Well, I'm a writer and artist; nowadays I'm mostly doing original work, but occasionally I get the urge to do a bit of fanfiction as well. My updates are... sporadic, to say the least, but patience is a virtue, right?

For all you romance fans out there: I don't really write romance stories. I might, on occasion, write a story that contains some romance (usually canon couplings, but I'm not opposed to writing either het, slash or femmeslash), but I never write stories where the romance is the main point. I'm much more interested in a good adventure story, a comedy, a mystery, a character study or an exploration of non-romantic relationship. My main concern is characterization; I'm always striving to keep as true to the characters as they are in canon as I possibly can -- or if I change them at all, at least find logical reasons for why they turned out differently.

I love to read fanfics as well as writing them, but I'm very picky... a lot of people would even say overly nitpicky. (Which is why I generally don't review stories unless I'm specifically asked to and the author understands that I'm not going to be nice about it.)

Nothing earns my ire faster than character-bashing and/or author-bashing; I find it juvenile, mean and annoying. You don't have to like all the characters or all aspects of canon, but if you can't find it in your heart to be fair to them, then, well, then I definitely won't read your story.

On Weasley Girl:

Currently my main work here is the ongoing Weasley Girl trilogy, a Harry Potter AU in which Ron Weasley was born a girl.

The entire idea came to me after I'd read a lot of "Harry Potter was born a girl" AU fics. Basically, I realized that I hadn't seen any stories where some character other than Harry was born the opposite sex, while Harry himself remained a boy. So I decided to try writing one and see what might happen.

The obvious choice for the gender-flip was either Ron or Hermione. I decided almost at once that a female Ron would be more interesting than a male Hermione, at least partly because it would visibly change the Weasley family dynamic. After all, we barely see Hermione's family, but the Weasleys are there throughout. Plus, turning Hermione male would just give the story even more of a "boy's club" vibe and rob the story of its only consistently major female character (seriously, check the books; Hermione's the only girl to play a major role in all seven of them).

Currently we're on the second story of the trilogy. I'm not going to do seven stories because frankly that would be too big an undertaking; far too many fanfic authors who start out with interesting HP AUs begin with ambitions of writing alternate takes on all seven books, but most of them lose steam before they get anywhere close to seven books. So I'm aiming for a much-more-manageable trilogy instead... though there will be some additional side-stories, mostly one-shots.

The stories are, in chronological order:

- The Leapling (Short story prequel, takes place in 1980)
- Weasley Girl (First novel, takes place in in 1991)
- Weasley Girl: Secrets of the past (Second novel, takes place in 1992)
- Moaning Myrtle's Party (Short story interquel, takes place in 1993)
- Weasley Girl: War of the Prophecy (Third novel, upcoming)

If you have ever felt really tired of profiles on this site that tell you to copy and paste stuff into your profile... feel free to NOT copy and paste this into your profile.