So, I hinted earlier that there would be a new writing project from me soon, a fanficcy project that wasn¨t tied to the Witching World. And I have started launching it now… it’s called Seven Favours for Harry Potter, and is all about what happens when you have Lady Vidia enter the world of Harry Potter.
It started out mainly as a project I did because I was trying to get rid of my writer’s block. I remembered my fave author, the late, great Sir Terry Pratchett, and how he had written 400 words every single day, no matter what. It sounded like an achievable goal, but I amended it to “at least 200 words, but preferably 400+ words,” to keep it flexible.
And to get me started on it, I decided to try a silly little idea: Have Lady Vidia show up in the Harry Potter world. Say, she meets Hagrid at Godric’s Hollow as he takes Baby Harry out of the ruins, and she notice that “the child is marked for death.” Cue her making a deal with Hagrid that she’ll do seven favours for Harry over the years; seven times she’ll save his life or get him out of a serious scrape. Then the rest of the fic would breeze through Harry’s Hogwarts years as Lady Vidia stepped in every so often, working her magic to help Harry and in the process screwing up the canon story and sending everything spinning out of control. By the time of the seventh favour, there would be nothing left of the canon story; with both Harry and most of the supporting cast changed beyond recognition. It’d be a fun little comedy-horror fanfic with increasingly erotic overtones; not too big a story… a 10 00 – 15 000 word long novelette, maybe…
Two months later, the story was ten chapters and 61 000 words, and I’d only just finished Harry’s first year at Hogwarts. What can I say? I got inspired, and then I got carried away.
Since those ten years did complete a story arc, though. I decided to share it with the people at my Patreon… and then, I decided that I might as well post it to AO3 as well… just chapter by chapter, I launched three chapters in three days, to give people a proper chunk of the story to read… and starting with chapter four, decided to post one chapter a week. And then I thought, why not have it on my own site as well?
Let’s face it: JKR is a bigot and a transphobe. I’ve written before about how I used Holly Potter and LGBTQ-centric fanfic to cope with my conflicting emotions about the wizarding world… It’s such a great springboard for stories and fantastic ideas; too bad the creator is such a bigot.I used Holly Potter to explore a different take on the world, with a lot more queer stuff. So Seven Favours could be something similar; just that here we started out in a world that looked like the canon HP books at first glance, but soon proved not to be at all… and which would get less and less like the canon books as the story went on.
It was worth a try.
And so, I present to you, the first few chapters of Seven Favours for Harry Potter, a story that JKR would no doubt call a disgusting mockery of her story… but one that tries to treat her characters (but not her ideas) with some amount of diginty even as I take them far away from what she wanted.
You can follow it here on the site, or on AO3. On AO3 you can even leave kudos and comments, but only if you want to. ^_^