This thread is turning out to be as frustrating as the 'Abandoned Stories...' thread.

 

Giving it a go now. There are a surprising amount of factors you have to accommodate for.

Skills, knowledge, wand, innate abilities, talents and items all have to be included.

Still doesn't look too difficult, though I think I'm going to have to use the FATE system again. I'm getting tired of using that.

 

Saw Gone Girl and was inspired to write a psychopath Nick story.

Basic plot is that when Nick gets home on the morning of his anniversary and finds the smashed, upturned table in the living room he doesn't report it to the police. He just tidies up and searches the house for the anniversary clues that he knows that Amy normally leaves for him. This leads to him finding all the hidden shit in the woodshed, which he brings back to the house and uses.

The first couple of chapters would be in Nick's view with him hiding Amy's disappearance and then a flashback chapter from Amy with her reaction to no news coverage of her being missing.

Amy would then report it herself and the rest of the story would be about two psychos playing a sort of cat and mouse game. Nick's characterisation would obviously be ooc so that he can play the distraught husband too ashamed to tell anyone his wife ran away, hoping she'd come back and Amy would be constantly dropping hints to the police -like the half burned diary - and the subsequent media scrutiny on Nick.

I imagine this would be at least novel length and I've kinda started writing the first chapter however just reading the basic plot I just wrote for this post it sounds like a deep, psychological, complicated plot with lots of different twists and turns.

 

Edit: I'm an idiot. Nevermind.

 

Have you read the book yet? If not, do so. It's going to help you out a lot. The film did a poor job of Nick's characterization, but to be fair, the book's pretty much divided into his and hers POV chapters, and the film can't exactly properly convey every single thought of his without resorting to heavy self-narration and monologues, which would prolong its length beyond that of a single film.

 

I wrote two fics last year and I posted a short chapter of one (Superman/GoT). The other that I started is HP/DF crossover.

Someone manages to capture Mab few days before Halloween with an intend to kill her and steal her Mantle. Whoever it was, they can even remain hidden from the Mothers and it's up to Dresden and his skill as a detective to find the Winter Queen before it's too late. But with an enemy of this caliber, he will need a help. Enter Harry Potter, the Master of Death and the guy you call when you need to kill an immortal on any other day of the year than Halloween.

 

The blue balls, they're real. So many concepts from some of my favourite writers, and if we're lucky we might see 1/10th of them.

On topic: I attempted to write a Bond-like Slytherin!Harry, suave and smooth with his friends, ruthlessly violent with his enemies. It's been sitting on a hard drive for years, being added to, edited and re-worked, but I've never been happy enough with it to see the light of day.

 

Harry Potter and the Vaults of Valbone - I think there's something like 10 chapters of this sitting around somewhere.

The Luminaries - A complete BtDL/CS/Sequel re-write. Currently standing at around 35k words?

 

The Prisoner's Cipher - I have two versions of this story's last chapter written. One has a very detailed outline, and the other completely written but unedited and written spontaneously. I've always had this story planned out with two possible endings, figuring the right one would naturally emerge as I wrote it... but not yet. Very frustrating.

I also have the strangest one-shot I wrote on a plane about Harry having an intensely metaphysical and scrutinizing conversation of a sorts with a unicorn.... iono.

 

In a way I think that might actually be a good thing. From what I've seen of the Wba, typically the less popular threads/fics receive less attention and thus less critiquing while the more popular fics receive more responses but less specific or useful advice. It seems like a good idea - or at least a worthy experiment - to include plot and character related questions and such beyond just the story itself, a function which it seems IRC has been performing for other DLP authors as mentioned above.

Maybe post both in the Wba and see which works better?

 

Well, I posted all my story snippets of things I started but didn't decide to finish, like the Grindelwald as sinister mentor with his own agenda, crossover with fourteen different other things, and the sociopathic prankster story. I've got my own Harry Potter... in SPACE story but I hope to write that someday more than the outline I've got.

 

The Weasley Way- Basically, a time travel story starring Ron & Ginny. A plague (caused by Voldemort posthumously - essentially, he was planning it before his death, a few Death Eaters that manage to to escape arrest after the Battle of Hogwarts carry on his work and unleash it about 6-7 years post-Voldemort) has wiped out most of the Muggle world, and war has broken out again in the Wizarding world. Hermione is assassinated, Harry killed in an ambush.

While desperately researching a cure for the Plague, Hermione had stumbled across a potion said to grant a "boon" to the drinker if they are judged worthy; at the time it was thought this "boon" could potentially reveal a cure to the Plague- although the potion takes so long to brew and has such negative consequences for the drinker that it was considered a final resort. When the potion is finally finished, only Ron & Ginny are left of their close family and friends; the Muggle World is all but gone, the Wizarding World not much better off. They both drink it, hoping at least one of them will be considered "worthy", and somehow they will be able to improve things.

Their "boon", predictably, results in time travel. The negative consequences they face isn't explicitly stated for the reader, however. The bulk of the plot involves their quest to not only destroy Voldemort and his horcruxes yet again (as well as determine the implications of the prophecy, if it still applies, and the potential that this time, Harry won't be able to survive the removal of the horcrux in him), but also systematically destroy the data and research Voldemort had started on the "Muggle Plague" before his first rise to power.

I've mostly just written the pre-time travel bits; my main motivation was trying to find a situation where time travel would legitimately be the only solution, as well as a method for time travel with which it would be reasonable that no one could replicate. Additionally, I thought the Ron/Ginny sibling dynamic would be interesting to write in this context.

Some of the reasons it'll never get posted? No one wants to read a story that doesn't focus on Harry Potter, and time travel stories are incredibly over-done as it is. Still fun to write, however.

 

I disagree.

I for one enjoy such stories.

 

They have to be sublime for me to even consider reading them. That being said, there have been a few. I've read 3 focusing on Moody, one on McG, two on AD. If it's just a random story from the POV of Hermione, then it's probably a no-go.

Anyways, I think I'm really close to the point of wanting to post my Harry Fleur story. I've finished 5 chapters (well, the writing part at least). I just want to redo a scene where Dumbledore is explaining the rules - somehow I got it into my mind that it's explained 3 times in GoF - once at the beginning of the year, once when the other schools arrive, and once when the names are called out. Obviously, this isn't the case so something has to move. Also, on top of that, is editing, which is my least favorite thing ever. I just don't have the attention span to sit down and concentrate on editing 20k words, or even 5k words, in one sitting.

 

Fair enough. I'd say in general though, a lot more will be forgiven of a story that stars Harry Potter than one that stars anyone else, especially comparatively "controversial" characters like Ron and Ginny. Personally, I'm not talented enough that anything I write will be over that threshold.

 

Is there any particular reason why the story absolutely has to exclude Harry from the time-travel? If not, the Harry-Ginny-Ron trio works just as well (similar to Backwards with a Purpose), and the sibling relationship can still be explored while keeping the interest of those who aren't fans of either character.

If you want limited knowledge time-travelers, the Ginny-Bill duo works just as fine, and as far as I know, there aren't any rabid Bill haters, so the story could draw more interest while still exploring the sibling dynamics. Or maybe a Ginny-Fleur or Ginny-Cho duo, if you want to draw upon the bitchiness of women. That could be fun.

 

I wrote a follow-up chapter to this little one-shot from a few years ago:

Tragedy, Mine Alone

This was a Terrorist!Harry fighting an ultimately powerful Voldemort, who required a pledge of magic from every witch and wizard in the United Kingdom. He had conquered Britain, wholly, and was building a sky city over London.

Sometimes inspiration strikes and won't go away. The chapter, still rather rough, was from Draco's perspective, as Deputy Head of the MLE and Senior Auror on the Phoenix Taskforce. He was counting the cost of Harry's attack on the God-Lord Voldemort and worrying what Harry/Voldemort were going to do next.

 

I disagree with this as well. That the vast majority of fics star Harry Potter is a reason to post stories that do not focus on him, not a reason not to.

 

I wrote around a 5k piece on a Harry Potter/ Ghost in the Shell Stand Alone Complex last year, around October then lost momentum.

"A Wizard's Shell" (i know, sounds cheesy. heh)

Here's the summary:

Section 9 has been called to investigate a series of murders consisting of the political elite. No clues had been found, until the last victim whose memory has been recovered enough to show an image of a man wielding a strange weapon...

Here Section 9 encounters a strange series of murders, with the victims unmarked and undamaged, while those with technological implants have suffered more gruesome mutilations. Section 9 chief Aramaki realizes the magic used from the latest victim, and called upon old contacts to give him an asset to solve the crimes.

Here Auror Potter comes, he was critically injured in a previous assignment, and with the damaging curse eating at his body (similar to Dumbledore's). His body was frozen and preserved, then acquired by the British government and using the latest technology at the time, started the conversion to a cybernetic body.

80 years later his body was acquired by Japan, and further modified and repaired and then activated. Here while being worked on, Section 9 has been able to see his memories and dreams, trying to find clues to their recent case.

Upon being awakened, he's understandably pissed and unable to perform magic. He will try to cope with technology and mostly rely on his new found abilities to find his way around this new world. He's also a bit insane, from the effects of the constant dreaming he was placed in to for decades, and sometimes cannot tell the real world from his dreams.

With his cybernetic enhanced brain and body, he's having problems and constantly sees illusions that creates tons of trouble from his section 9 minders, to the point that they're wondering just putting the guy back to the storage.