In which I refuse to sail any ship, but show that years of long-distance swimming were not wasted

Right, it's time to come clean. After putting a toe into the dark and murky waters or HP fic, then having what was going to be a one-time paddle, I have stripped down to my scanties and thrown myself into the Channel Crossing Swim, and there's no turning back, even if I run out of goose fat and the shark cage comes apart in the waves.

Because, and I freely admit this worries me far more than it could possibly worry any of you, while reading Deathly Hallows, an entire other book unfolded in my brain.

In my defence, I picked up a terrible case of influenza while I was in New Zealand, and instead of queueing merrily with kids holding broomsticks I was reduced to sending out the lad and cuddling the book under the covers for a few hours when it came back before I could work up the energy to start reading.

So on my first read-through, I actually hallucinated a few sections. There was a whole Diana-death bit after the Ministry section, and then a Draco heroics moment while everyone was trapped in Malfoy Manor (embarrassingly, while I realised that the latter was an hallucination, I chatted merrily to several people about the former, all of whom looked at me blankly. I ended up justifying it through subtext after a re-read, which was not too much of a stretch.)

I am not a regular hallucinator, but this was not a regular dose of influenza. Rather, it was the sort of thing at which Mr Bingley would have ridden for the undertaker and settled down for a good wait till Georgiana was a bit older. (An aside: New Zealand is otherwise miraculous.)

And as I read the epilogue, I realised that in addition to hallucinating JKR's text, I had been mentally constructing one of my own.

And when I was mostly better, not only had that text not gone away, but I had written it into the world outside my head.

All of which is still less embarrassing than the time I hallucinated Teletubbies while being fed morphine through a drip after one of my more spectacular bike crashes. If only there were cleaning products available for the brain.

Part Two follows on directly from Part One. It will doubtless take me forever to finish this. The rules in my own head are that everything is canon until the last page of OotP, and after that we're somewhere quite different. Except that the previous six books still need to make sense in terms of the plotting.

So, there are still Horcruxes, there are still Hallows. And, because it seemed respectful, the same people will die. Just not always in the same ways.


GB's Story Part One



( Read more... )

Part three

In which I refuse to sail any ship, but show that years of long-distance swimming were not wasted

Right, it's time to come clean. After putting a toe into the dark and murky waters or HP fic, then having what was going to be a one-time paddle, I have stripped down to my scanties and thrown myself into the Channel Crossing Swim, and there's no turning back, even if I run out of goose fat and the shark cage comes apart in the waves.

Because, and I freely admit this worries me far more than it could possibly worry any of you, while reading Deathly Hallows, an entire other book unfolded in my brain.

In my defence, I picked up a terrible case of influenza while I was in New Zealand, and instead of queueing merrily with kids holding broomsticks I was reduced to sending out the lad and cuddling the book under the covers for a few hours when it came back before I could work up the energy to start reading.

So on my first read-through, I actually hallucinated a few sections. There was a whole Diana-death bit after the Ministry section, and then a Draco heroics moment while everyone was trapped in Malfoy Manor (embarrassingly, while I realised that the latter was an hallucination, I chatted merrily to several people about the former, all of whom looked at me blankly. I ended up justifying it through subtext after a re-read, which was not too much of a stretch.)

I am not a regular hallucinator, but this was not a regular dose of influenza. Rather, it was the sort of thing at which Mr Bingley would have ridden for the undertaker and settled down for a good wait till Georgiana was a bit older. (An aside: New Zealand is otherwise miraculous.)

And as I read the epilogue, I realised that in addition to hallucinating JKR's text, I had been mentally constructing one of my own.

And when I was mostly better, not only had that text not gone away, but I had written it into the world outside my head.

All of which is still less embarrassing than the time I hallucinated Teletubbies while being fed morphine through a drip after one of my more spectacular bike crashes. If only there were cleaning products available for the brain.

Part Two follows on directly from Part One. It will doubtless take me forever to finish this. The rules in my own head are that everything is canon until the last page of OotP, and after that we're somewhere quite different. Except that the previous six books still need to make sense in terms of the plotting.

So, there are still Horcruxes, there are still Hallows. And, because it seemed respectful, the same people will die. Just not always in the same ways.


GB's Story Part One

( GB's Story, Part Two )

Part three