Perspective

My Harry Potter fanfic has been, well, a long, strange trip. As I wrote in a previous entry, I began to write it several months after the publication of JK Rowling’s 5th book, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. I don’t remember when I decided that I wanted to write all the way to the end the life of Harry Potter (the parts that would be significant to anyone other than Harry and his (future) family, at least), but I came to the conclusion that I wouldn’t write a 6th year story and then a 7th year story. Instead, as I had seen others do, I thought I would write one longer story that would cover the time from the end of the 5th book until after the relevant parts of Harry’s (alternate universe) life had been recounted, including a more satisfying leap into the future for a where are they now sort of look. At that time I didn’t know that JKR’s last chapter, about Harry 15 or 20 years later, would be so unsatisfying to me. It was really the only thing (other than Sirius’s death in the Order of the Phoenix) that I didn’t like about the seven novels.

I had what I considered to be a pretty good idea for where the saga should go. I still think it’s a pretty good idea, though I guess I ought to clarify that I don’t mean to say that I think it’s what JK Rowling should have done with her last two books. I just mean that I thought (and think) it was a good what if sort of scenario. I began to write, and some days I was just burning up the page – filling it up would really be a better term for what I was doing, though I don’t mean that in the cynical sense that I think that sentence sort of carries. I wrote quite a lot at times, but I also went days, and sometimes weeks without writing anything in that story. The reason for this is twofold: part of it was that I kept going back to the beginning and rewriting huge portions of things I’d written earlier. I was too much of a perfectionist for the first draft stage, but I guess that’s sort of the way I work. The second thing that kept me from working on it was that I had what I thought were a couple of pretty good ideas for my own original novels.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: If I had ideas for stuff I could actually publish (in theory, anyway), instead of something written while playing in someone else’s sandbox that could never be published, why would I mess around with the unpublishable one unless my goal was only to do this for fun? If I wanted to be a writer, wouldn’t I want to focus my energies on that part of writing?

I suppose the answer is yes. Yes, that’s the way I should have thought. Yes, that’s what I ought to be doing now. But here’s the thing: I’ve given up on a lot of things in my life. I finished high school (through very little effort on my part, I assure you), I finished my Eagle Scout (through a whole lot of blood, sweat, and tears on my mom’s part), and I finished my mission (though I didn’t really feel like that was a noteworthy sacrifice; I was just doing what I needed to do). In a few weeks I’m going to graduate from college (FINALLY!!!) but there are too many things that I gave up on and I hate that about myself. So once I was pretty far into the story (and I was pretty sure I knew how it was going to end), I felt like I needed to see it through to that end, or at least to whatever end I found. And I still feel that way… most days.

Despite my frequent bouts of feverishly-paced writing, I was not that close to being finished two summers later when the Half-Blood Prince (book 6) came out in July 0f 2005. I told myself in March that I only had four months to finish it. I told myself in April that I only had three months to finish it. I told myself in May that I only had two months to finish it. In June I told myself that a month wasn’t nearly enough time to finish it, and I basically gave up. In mid-July I read the 6th book, loved it, and then realized that I was really still in the same position I had been before the book was published. I was still telling a story in an alternate universe, so it didn’t really matter if my fanfic was not Half-Blood Prince compliant. I could do whatever I wanted. What I wanted (though in restrospect I have to question how badly I could have wanted it) was to finish the story I had begun.

Unfortunately, I made much slower progress over the next two years (meaning: during the time until the 7th book came out) and by the time I heard the official release date for the Deathly Hallows (book 7), I had all but given up again on my fanfic. I had also mostly stopped reading fanfics, having immersed myself in a different genre of reading for a while. There was one story that I was still following as the chapters were posted with relative infrequency. (I should note here, for those unfamiliar, that fanfics are rarely posted online as complete stories. Typically they get posted in chapter increments, ranging from about 2,000 words for short chapters to 25,000 word monster chaps for the especially verbose.) That particular fanfic, which is entitled Harry Potter and the Years of Rebellion, is in its 2nd or 3rd draft, as it seems its author, who goes by the nom de plume Full Pensieve, currently stands at 489,298 words and the story appears to be only a little over half done.

Over those two years some problems with fanfiction.net began to surface, the result being that a lot of ffn users were looking for other forums for their work. One such site, created by a couple of these authors, goes under the moniker fanficauthors.net and has stories written by several of my favorites from the ffn site. It also has some real stinkers. I’ve read a good chunk of what the site has to offer and only a small portion (perhaps as much as a quarter) is really any good. As with the old Gryffindor Tower, the site is administered by a small group of the site’s authors and they have complete control over who gets to read there and who gets to write there. They’ll let pretty much anyone read, as far as I know. But they’re pretty snobby about who they let write (or, rather, post) there. I applied for membership as an author and submitted everything I had written up to that point (a little over 225,000 words). I’m not sure who volunteered to read it, but the reply they gave me was that it wasn’t really anything new. They said they had seen enough stories like it already, or something along those lines. Of course, I am ridiculously biased, but I attempted to defend myself by saying that only two or three of the authors on their site had written anything that was as good (or better) and that they were missing out by not including me. My guess is that the people who were in charge were not among those that I named as being any good, so that probably didn’t help my case. I guess I could have used a review of Dale Carnegie’s most famous book. Whatever. I was irritated, but not deterred.

At this point it’s probably important to admit that I’m mostly finishing the book because it’s fun for me, though I’ll still claim that I feel I need to finish it for my own good as well. I really think that I may not be able to get on to my real writing until I finish this “exercise” in writing so that I can move on without regrets.

The seven Harry Potter novels that JK Rowling wrote are of the following lengths and word counts:

1. HP & the Sorcerer’s Stone: 309 pages, 76,944 words, 249 words per page
2. HP & the Chamber of Secrets: 352 pages, 85,141 words, 242 words per page
3. HP & the Prisoner of Azkaban: 435 pages, 107,253 words, 247 words per page
4. HP & the Goblet of Fire: 734 pages, 190,637 words, 260 words per page
5. HP & the Order of the Phoenix: 870 pages, 257,045 words, 295 words per page
6. HP & the Half-Blood Prince: 652 pages, 168,923 words, 259 words per page
7. HP & the Deathly Hallows: 784 pages, 198,227 words, 253 words per page

So that means that she wrote 1,084,170 words on 4136 pages, an average of about 262 words per page. My own story currently weighs in at about 245,000 words, but I would say, based on the outline of future story I have planned, that it’s about half finished. It might be closer to 60% complete, but I’m only speculating at this point. At JKRs pace of 262 words per page on average, my story ought to take up nearly 1,000 pages, but since it’s in Word in a space-saving format (in case I ever finish it and want to print out a hard copy), it’s only about 550 pages so far.

Should I post it here, one chapter at a time? I don’t know. Obviously it’s only for my own entertainment (and the possibility of entertaining a few people I know, I guess). I’m not going to post it at a fanfiction site. The one I wanted to use rejected me. Maybe it sucks. Nah. Can’t be that. I have an uncle who wants to read it. A cousin (his daughter) also might be interested. One of my wife’s friends heard about it and said she wanted to read it. That’s about it…

~ by jabeandkristin on 6 May 2008.