I love to write, which is fortunate, since it’s what I used to do for a living, back before retirement claimed me. Nothing so grand or interesting as fiction—I was primarily a medical and health writer (at which I was pretty good), with occasional forays into other topics and copywriting (at which I was pretty mediocre).

Way back in the mists of history (circa 2010), I was searching for a way to blow off the steam of my (ahem) more serious (read: dull) work and combat the writer’s block that occasionally plagued me.

I had fallen in love with world of Harry Potter a few years earlier, from the moment I opened the first novel in the series (at the suggestion of a Very Important Scholar, and perhaps the smartest person I know, other than my father), and I discovered fanfiction while waiting for the final installments of the story to hit the shelves. Long story short, I decided to try my hand at it.

Fanfic turned out to be a terrific outlet and a great venue for my first forays into fiction writing, as it allowed me to enjoy the fun of it without doing the hard work of developing totally original plots and characters; it was the perfect busman’s holiday. However—and this is important—as a writer, I was and am firmly in the camp of those who defend, within reason (eff you, Disney), intellectual property rights.

The brilliant and flawed “Sage of Baltimore,” H. L. Menken once wrote:

“What are the hallmarks of a competent writer of fiction? The first, it seems to me, is that he should be immensely interested in human beings, and have an eye sharp enough to see into them, and a hand clever enough to draw them as they are. The second is that he should be able to set them in imaginary situations which display the contents of their psyches effectively, and so carry his reader swiftly and pleasantly from point to point of what is called a good story.”

I quite agree, and that’s what I try to do in my fiction.

I seem to be obsessed with the character of Professor Minerva McGonagall. This is probably because I have been told I am like her—but without the intelligence, courage, and power of Rowling’s character. I am not yet as advanced in years as our dear Transfiguration professor, but I am growing distressingly close, which may be why I am more interested in the actions and motivations of the adult characters in the Potterverse than those of the teenaged protagonists.

I like to stay as close as possible to canon and keep my efforts firmly within the realms of plausibility (magical plausibility, that is) and am most interested in other stories that do so as well.

Many of my stories feature the Albus Dumbledore/Minerva McGonagall pairing. I realize that Ms. Rowling has said she considers Albus Dumbledore to be gay, and I would have no quarrel with that even if I had any right to. It makes sense from the perspective of character arc, and I believe that the human experience naturally encompasses a wide variety of sexualities, gender identities and expressions; however, I have always rather pictured Dumbledore paired with Minerva McGonagall, so in my stories I often either ignore Rowling’s announcement, or I try to weave that relationship into the context of a lifetime in which sexual desires and identities are not fixed.

Alongside the astonishing quality of some of the fanfiction I’ve encountered, I am continually challenged and humbled by the talent and generosity of the people in fandom. I can only hope that my own contributions provide a bit of the entertainment and diversion I derive from reading the stories of other, more talented, storytellers.

My stories are available for use under a Creative Commons-Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike (CC-BY-NC-SA) license, subject to applicable copyright law as it applies to the intellectual property of J.K. Rowling and her assignees.

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