Title: Hogwarts' Dawn
Author: Jeconais
Rating: Mature
Genre: Action/Adventure, Comedy, Drama, Fluff (According to Jeconais)
DLP Category: N/A
Pairing: None so far
Chapters: 11
Words: 140,663
Published: April 29, 2010
Published: June 29, 2013
Status: WIP
Summary: "There were many ways that Harry could choose to deal with being forcibly entered into the Tri-Wizard Tournament. As everyone knows, the best way to deal with a problem, is to hire expert help. And who better than Fred and George to show Harry the best way to survive?

Escorts, Veela, Bodyguards, Bounties, Alcohol, Mata Hari's, National Championships - it's a wonder if Harry will have any time for the actual tournament."
Link: http://jeconais.fanficauthors.net/Hogwarts_Dawn/index/

I'm admittedly a huge Jeconais fanboy so I was naturally excited to see him start a new novel length project. The first chapter was pretty entertaining, but it's not really 'typical' Jeconais. I don't really know how else to describe it, it just has a different feel compared to his seminal works. Definitely worth a read though.

4/5


Checked by Minion, July 26, 2013

 

Iunno, maybe a fucking expert, rather than two school children.

inb4Beargrylls.

EDIT: Before the bandwagon starts, I've read Jeconais a few times and while it isn't to everyone's taste I enjoyed some of it. I'll be reading this soon, the summary is just retarded.

 

Ya, Heads up, Jeconais isn't exactly well liked by many of the members here.

 

Got about 20 lines in at which point the twins offer to sort Harry's life out for 10 thousand galleons. Misuse of money in fics has started to really annoy me recently. A wand is 7 galleons (I think) and Ron couldn't afford to buy a new one... and the twins want 10k.

I'll try and read a bit further later. Maybe.

 

What is up with his attitude?

And lol:

 

First: Login required. Fucking annoying. But since I have Mobipocket...

It's a crackfic. Should be described as such. Keeping that in mind, it's mildly humorous. I grinned a couple of times, but that's about it. Probably would have been better to write another 7000 words and made it a one-shot. Not really worth following.

 

I'd give it a 3/5 because I like most of Jeconais's fics and this one isn't that bad, mildly entertaining.

 

I generally like Jeconais's stuff, though some of it can only be read in the right mood. It's a decent fic, and I chuckled plenty, but never really broke out laughing.

3/5

 

​

Read it, chucked a few times but cringed at others. What Heather said: should have been condensed to 20k and been called a day. Anything longer and it starts to take itself way too seriously for where it's headed.

3/5

 

Fucking login required. That just seems wrong.

 

What he sad. Except I chuckled, without chucking.

I haven't read Jeconais in a while, but this seems exactly like typical Jeconais to me: decent humour, some good new ideas (or at least I think so), a lot of clichés, cringe worthy lines, no credible conflict in sight, complete inability to inspire suspension of disbelief.

The premise looks rather promising: GoF AU always ensures minimal plot and conflict because of the tasks, and the fact that he's going for a Tony Stark kind of Harry without a fixed ship means we'll avoid barf-worthy fluff.

What will probably happen is that Harry is going to get SUPER pretty fast thanks to the Weasly twins and time dilation, how much he used to suck will be emphasized even more. He'll have a super network of friends and employees, annoy the teachers, and breeze through the tasks. That part will get dragged on for far too long, and be mildly enjoyable.

Then Jeco will realise he needs to take care of the plot, Harry will kill the bad guys in a jiffy, and be back for supper with some cheesy and flirtatious line.

If I'm wrong this could be pretty good. 3/5

 

He very explicitly stated this is not DLP material and this should not have been submitted here.

http://jeconais.fanficauthors.net/news/265/

 

He said he wasn't using a beta anymore, so? That doesn't change the fact that he's still one of the more widely respected authors in the HP fanfiction world and, as such, deserves a shot at a place in the library.

I'll retract the above statement if you can find the exact place in that post that Jeconais says, "Please do not submit this work for the people over at DLP to have a look at."

 

What changed?

 

Some of Jeconais's work is quite good. So far, this isn't one of them.

If you take it as a crack!fic (which I'm assuming it's supposed to be), then it's okay. There were two or three moments that were slightly amusing. But overall it wasn't great. I started skipping my two-thirds of the way through the chapter. But as I'm not a fan of crack!fics (everything is already over the top in this), this won't be something I'll enjoy.

2.5-3/5. 3 at best.

Once again, the OP posted this story prematurely. Should have waited until at least three chapters were posted.

 

QFT, especially given Jeconais's spotty record of late for posting stories that he and his betas claim are complete. (Perfect Slytherins, ostensibly finished and merely awaiting posting, is a case in point).

I'm less interested in stories of his like this one than in his older work, where he had professional fiction writing as a goal. Even without his A/N comments, it's abundantly clear that Jeconais doesn't have the hunger he once did for writing fiction. He's not pushing himself, forcing himself to hone his craft. He's not taking chances and he's no longer wringing quality from his muse. He seems resigned to the belief that stories like Hope, his signature novel, are his writing past, not his future. It's self-fulfilling.

Claims that he's now writing "for the love" or some such are fine, I guess, but it's going to lead to work that he and his readers know aren't his 'A' game. This can't help but be a disappointment and I believe it's debatable how long he'll continue to write in such an environment.

 

He mentioned in his AN he got knocked back to many times by publishers so now his not going to worry about it anymore. Must be going through a rough time.

And he said he lost his beta, which is weird cause he always posted with 3 betas. The other 2 must have been him being nice and just putting them in for recognition haha.


As for for the post above and his A game, I enjoyed Perfect Slytherins the most, best Addams family cross there is. Hope just aint my style.

 

It's not to a lot of people's styles, but it's the most polished of his fanfiction novels. Though a more interesting concept, Perfect Slytherins is inferior because it's incomplete and likely to stay that way (no updates for a year, despite he and his betas saying the story's essentially finished).

Regarding professional fiction sales, I'm not surprised by his rejections. Spend any amount of time trying to sell original fiction, whether short or novel-length, and you'll get well acquainted with the rejection letter. Professional fiction writing is an incredibly competitive, frustrating game to get into, as I've found with my own pedestrian efforts.

If you wish to publish novels, you have two options open to you: You can labor in relative obscurity writing for a small publisher (like jbern with his two novels) or you can try to land a contract with one of the few big publishing houses. I know writers in both camps; all in the former dream of making it into the latter.

Complicating things is that the large publishers don't take unrepresented novels anymore (death of the "slush pile"), so you will need a good literary agent to even break in. Competition for literary agents is itself fierce, since there's no shortage of talent out there. To have much hope of landing one, you need to have penned a killer novel draft and, ideally, have bona fides of some type (a MFA degree, participation in a highly regarded workshop/boot camp like Clarion, a stack of professional short fiction sales, membership in organizations like SFWA). This means a lengthy period of "dues paying" as one polishes his craft. As a point of reference, I've been working at it for a couple of years now and have all of one professional sale (5c+/word) and five "semi-pro" sales (<5c/word), none SFWA-qualifying. I'm a better writer now than when I was writing fanfiction exclusively, but I have a long way to go to compete favorably in the pro markets.

 

Short fiction sales are all well and good for people living in the states. I'm nearly sure that Ireland doesn't have a single magazine that buys short fiction.

 

I doubt that, but even if true, dozens of online short fiction markets do payment electronically; Paypal seems to be the standard.

For instance, an easy place to get published is this monthly writing contest: $50 prize (semi-pro, ~2c/word) for a short story between 2k and 5k words; typically only a few entrants participate per month (it's not well publicized) and the editor occasionally purchases stories that don't win. This month's prompt is, "Write a short mystery story in a classic noir style." Deadline is May 21. (With all the Dresden aficionados on this site, I'd think someone might be up for it).

I could start a thread listing such sites if people were interested. There's certainly no shortage of writers on DLP who are better at the writing thing than I, some of whom may not mind earning some beer money while they're at it.

[And my apologies for the thread hijack.]