Thanks, I'm glad you enjoy them! They're one of the few things I think about chronologically in my writing. I don't write them chronologically, or even "plan" them exactly that way, but it's the string that ties them together in ways that's less true for my other stuff. I tend to start with just a blank page with
"1
2
3
4
5
6
7"
and then I go through that list of years and start taking notes of things that have to happen, things that would change because of the "AU" twist of that piece, etc. And as I put notes in, if I get excited, I let myself get excited and start writing in things closer to prose, amid the notes, until I run out of steam on that bit. But normally that sends me to another section ("oh, if he befriends Millicent Bulstrode here, then she should be involved here and here, let's put the note in...") -- and if it doesn't, then I just go to the top, start reading & thinking 1-7 again, and adding new planning notes or pausing to turn notes into prose. And at the end of it all, that 1-7 outline becomes the story.
In my latest piece, with Dudley as a wizard, I think I even left the numbers in at the end.

I think it took me a long time to let myself write in my unique voice. I started writing novels when I was about ten (I still have copies of those early drafts, and yes, they are adorable), mostly doing constant full rewrites of what became my first trilogy until I was twenty or so. And going through those works, I can see elements and phrases that grew into the "style" I'm more known for now.

Finding fanfic in my twenties, which let me really explore and write the interstitial stuff and style that jams with me, was great, and then I also let up the reins a bit with my second trilogy, Jack's books, which made them really sing a bit more. I added interstitial chapters between my more standard prose chapters, which tackled feelings, backstory, poetry, and let me and the reader pause and absorb. It's a very "me" style, and so it turned out to be a very "me" trilogy.

The obituary chapters are definitely one of the big ones I was thinking about! Those books would not be themselves without that.

It was a conscious choice by the time I was really constructing the book. With Beanstalk, I spent the first few notes making notes and writing little half scenes and thinking aloud in a blank Word doc. When I had enough of the world, story, and characters (Laney used to be two people!), I started bringing "scenes" into what would be the full draft document, but also realized some of my "thinking aloud" I really liked as well. Those got polished into writing, and put in as the interstitial chapters.

With doing that "style" in original fic, you just have to make sure it either is a) establishing canon itself (ex. in the "This is a Hero Story" bit that starts Beanstalk -- it's stating things and giving you ground and context to stand on, not relying on you knowing things), or it's specifically referencing stuff I already wrote and told you in the prose. You just have to write the original fic and the "fanfic" of it and make sure you do it in a sensible, impactful order. It's fun!

Well I have a big giant unfair advantage there which is-- everyone knows Harry Potter (or rather enough people know Harry Potter well enough). Doing it with pretty much any other canon, it doesn't work as well. With HP, I can touch on details, or striking images or colors or concepts ("they buried Dobby by the sea, the wind bitter, their hands cold") and I will get from most readers not just the context and summarizing I need, but also throw them into the feelings and emotional context of that scene. It really does feel like cheating (and I absolutely lean into it and take advantage, because it gives me such a rich powerful playground to build in).

Hi! I'm glad you liked Stay? !! I love Stay? !! I'm working on a new game right now and it's ten times the coding complexity of Stay? and I have to write ten times as much dialogue and yet it's going to be about half as long to play I think and I'm deeply deeply amused with myself. (Psst, the rest of y'all, Stay? (an interactive fiction story I wrote! You'll like it!!) and also my sortinghatchats quiz are both up here: https://ejadelomax.itch.io/)


I'm in a really lucky spot where I have a day job I like. It pays my bills, it's in a part of the biomed industry that's actually, like, improving people's lives, it's challenging and fun and I'm good at it. Writing feeds my soul. It delights me. I'm going to keep doing it forever, but making money off of it (enough money to actually do anything useful for me) is a pie in the sky thing. I'd rather more people could read my works and meet Jack and Laney and Grey and Rupert; or play my game and meet Jo and Esteban and Suzette and Gemma and folks; so I make it free.

I did start up a patreon awhile back, and that was mostly to enable me to Make More Stuff. I would feel bad spending too much dayjob money on fun things like cool new covers for Beanstalk (I've really got to set up those prints, the covers are so cool!), or paying actors/directors/cowriters for the scifi podcast I produced (Second Star to the Left, y'all, go check it outtttt https://second-star-to-the-left.castos.com/). And so now I get to pour resources into getting to make more art (and with people! who I can pay!) without feeling like I'm being irresponsible. And that's great!

Oh also favorite fic: to be honest, probably "a life of smoke and silvered glass," an AU where Severus Snape is 3 degrees less of a dick and we see what that does to the narrative (answer: sort of nothing and sort of everything).

Sortinghatchats was a passion project between myself and one of my best buddies, K, from college. There's actually a whole tumblr, if you didn't know, where we sort things and write up explanations and such (and a very active brilliant tumblr community (they also have a discord) that does further analysis and sorting in that same theme). And we also have a podcast https://sortinghatchats.castos.com/ (also on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Audible, all that jazz...) where we sort a canon in the lens and talk about our analysis.

We basically started the system because we kept saying things, like good 90s kids we are, like "mmm that character is so Hufflepuff" and then we wanted to understand what the other person exactly meant by that. It's really just the two of us desperately loving to define our terms. We probably discussed and defined for over 100 hours before we actually wrote anything down, and then we started with just big long descriptions of each primary and secondary house, and the general system, and then doing sortings as examples. And that's all we had for years, until I stumbled upon "ink" which is what the SHC quiz and Stay? are both written in; and it let me have enough flexibility to really write a quiz that felt more like a conversation. Because straightforward point-based quiz doesn't work for this system -- you've got to be able to argue with it a little and do some self analysis.

We didn't employ any specific psych techniques, other than ideas like "ideal types" as part of our conceptualizing. K has a sociology background, so that definitely colors things. But with psych, you'd want to do, like, research, to make things viable and arguable, which obviously we didn't do. So it's just as scientific (not very) as Meyers-Briggs or Enneagram, and slightly less than Big 5, which we think is funny.

The podcast is on hiatus right now, for Personal Reasons, but we're planning to get back into it when Personal Reasons are in a stabler spot. It's a nice way to carve out explicit time to chat with each other monthly. They're good Personal Reasons! All going in good directions, there's just Stuff we have to Do before podcasting makes sense for us again.

So much of the SHC system is build around the ideas of models, adopted systems, chosen systems, purposeful tools, etc, as things that layer on top of "you" -- so at the end of the day the reader has to decide who and what they are. We just help give words to do so! And paths to help tackle the words and how they differ. It's fun!

In terms of my AUs, the original "seed" tends to be a request. The first one I did was "the family Evans," the Petunia-less-terrible AU, because an internet friend had asked for a piece on Petunia and I ... do not like Petunia. So I wrote a Petunia I could like! And that was fun enough that when I got some tumblr asks for other AUs, I tackled them, too. I think all my fic have come from asks now, but that's also because I get enough asks that... most AU possibilities have been in there sometime. So when I write something, I'll just search through the asks until I find someone I can answer with whatever I've written XD. So it's sort of me and also sort of the crowd shouting suggestions?

For the details inside of the AU, however, that's generally just me. I don't really take suggestion for the little details -- that Chosen One Neville ends up with a Golden Trio of him, Lavender, and Parvati; or that if Dudley's a wizard then he ends up in Ravenclaw. I figure out what makes sense, but often more importantly: what works best for the story I want to tell. For Dudley, for instance, I could easily have told a story where he's a Gryffindor, that fits him fine. BUT I didn't want him intruding on Harry's space and Harry's story. I didn't want the story to be able Harry having his bully constantly with him, or that Harry needed to be involved at all in Dudley's slow redemption. Same with Hufflepuff -- that was my "gut" feel for where Dudley should go, but the story I wanted to tell sang better with him in Ravenclaw. I didn't want him to be put in the "nice" House and then get "nicer" -- it was too simple and clean. I'd rather talk about types of intelligence, about curiosity, about potential. (And Slytherin was never an option, for reasons).

I have some friends who weigh in on stuff (my spouse, for one). One of my friends, M, is mostly responsible for anything involving Anthony Goldstein's family (she's dubbed them to Cohen-Goldsteins) and stuff around their extended family, especially their Judaism, is whatever she hands me. So there's some stuff like that.

But I love keeping the headcanons "consistent" through the AU series at the very least. Ex. the terrible rug Sirius buys Lily and James when they get married. Callbacks are great. Especially sad ones.

Especially for "he will have power the dark lord knows not" (where Harry's a squib) I wanted to key heroic canon moments to be as identical as possible. In all my fics, but especially that one, the fic is an answer to the question "what does it change, if Harry is a squib?" And I wanted very very much for Harry to be able to do everything wizard!Harry could do, to do things differently maybe, to need community or accommodation maybe, but to exist in the same spaces and tell the same story about heroism, sacrifice, friendship, tolerance, magic, and joy.

So far every time I've said "oh I won't write that" (my Snape AU, my Dudley-yer-a-wizard AU, Petunia, my Pansy Parkinson focus...) I did and then it was one of my favorite things. So I'm hesitant to say never. I think what it is -- is that whenever there's a story or character that doesn't work for me, to write it, I have to find a way to convince myself. And in finding a way to convince myself, I build something that's persuasive and interesting outside myself as well. Half the time the fics I'm passionate about do the least well -- because there's no "convincing" myself and so I don't end up "convincing" others as well.

Long story short, if I do any more HP AUs, Chosen One Draco isn't off the table, oh three dozen people who have put that request in my ask box.

But I am a little concerned that the people who are asking for that one (because they like Draco? Probably?) may not be the ones who end up actually liking the story.

There are some that definitely argue all my prose is purple, and that's reasonable.

For those pieces, it depended on the character. I would always start out with a list of everything we knew about them in canon -- but of course for characters like Susan Bones or even Andromeda Black Tonks or Luna Lovegood that's... not very much. (For Ginny, for example, there's a lot more). Then I would look for themes, for gaps, for motivation, and for ways to specifically tie their Houses into it. For that series, unite within her walls, I wanted particularly to focus on two women from each House and explore their experiences, life, healing, and worth in that lens. It's an "aftermath" set of pieces in a lot of ways, which is something I like to write. (Arguably my whole Beanstalk trilogy is also an aftermath story).

For those pieces in particular, I only wrote down the moments I wanted. There's big narrative gaps. There's not a real sense of plot in any way. But I tried to track them emotion by emotion, and get them to a place of peace by the end.

Hi taeli! My original work is all on https://ejadelomax.com/, and my games/quizzes are here https://ejadelomax.itch.io/. I've got a queer scifi podcast, Second Star to the Left, here http://second-star-to-the-left.castos.com/ and a narrative/literary analysis through the lens of Sortinghatchats podcasts here: https://sortinghatchats.castos.com/

For my fanfic, it's all up on archiveofourown under dirgewithoutmusic. My boy with a scar series is all my HP AUs, and probably what I'm most known for (esp. in this crowd). https://archiveofourown.org/series/285498 But I've also got a series of stuff for Susan Pevensie, starting with this piece, which was the first "fic" I ever wrote: https://ink-splotch.tumblr.com/post/69470941562/there-comes-a-point-where-susan-who-was-the And I've got some Tamora PIerce stuff, some MCU stuff... and a bunch of other HP stuff outside the AU series, too.

I'm also ink-splotch on tumblr, and ejadelomax on twitter, though I mostly just post pictures of cats and baked goods there.

I read a lot of wikis! But I haven't reread the books in years. I'm also pretty light and breezy in terms of canon. Sometimes I just leave stuff out, on purpose or not, or drag in movie canon instead because I want to, etc.

Short answer: I'm a Hufflepuff. I just keep chipping away until I get there.

Alternate short answer: I'm a Slytherin. People saying nice things about my work is a really persuasive way to get me to keep creating work!

Longer answer: I've been creating things for long enough now, that I can be in the that doldrum middle of the project where it's easy to feel like it will Never Be Done and Never Be Good and ughhhhh what if you just went and read a Good Book instead of writing a Bad One and etc etc... but I've been there often enough that I know if you just keep working, and looking just one step ahead, at something you can write or can fix, then eventually you'll look up and have something beautiful. And I like beautiful things.

I try to open up something I'm working on every single day. I don't necessarily write anything or edit anything (or that's what I tell myself, to get myself to open something up -- all you have to do is look! Read a couple lines!), but I open it up. Then I tend to get caught up, make a little tweak, add a sentence-- sometimes write a LOT. But I try to, even on the days where really all I do is glance at it and close the document, I try to make myself feel good and proud and accomplished. I ask myself to do something super manageable and try to truly only ask that much of myself, and celebrate any little tidbit more that happens. The only mandate is to give myself the opportunity to write -- and then I surprise myself with how often I meet that opportunity head on.

I have a backlog of ideas that will last me yeeeears. I know what my next four games are gonna be, and what my next three books are gonna be. I have a queue of two more tentative HP AUs, and then three thank-you fanfics I need to write to these cool awesome folks who are making a fan audiobook of my novel Beanstalk, and then I have uhh lemme check ... 4471 unanswered asks in my tumblr inbox, which are probably about a third prompts. And then I've got two or three projects in other mediums I'd like to do (another podcast, a mixed-media-storytelling blog thing...). What I need is more time and bandwidth!

For making time every day... generally I just flip open my laptop once I'm in bed and go through whatever I'm working on at that moment, while my wife gets ready for bed. It's not a LOT of time to write -- but that's not what I'm asking of myself! On Awesome Writing Days I might write for hours in the afternoon or when I get home from work -- but on your average day, writing a sentence before I go to sleep is Amazing and I try to treat it like that. In the long term, it makes something exist!

Right here! https://ejadelomax.com/leaguesandlegends/beanstalk/ it's free to download as an ebook, as are its sequels!

I do! I use it whenever I'm talking about characters or people with friends who are familiar with it-- so, especially K. But I love classification, I love comparisons and contradictions, and sorting people in order to hold them up against each other and think about how they're built and how they can change, grow, intersect, affect, accomplish, and clash. Here's a piece I wrote about using SHC to look at conflict in narrative -- it's part of series. https://sortinghatchats.tumblr.com/post/646684812805013504/character-primaries-the-why-sources-of

Aw thank you! I remember first getting into fanfic and being flummoxed at the first person who told me I made them cry! I turned to K (we were roomies at the time) and expressed my confusion and they laaaaughed and laughed. I thought I wrote happy stories! And they just kept laughing.

For a lot of them, canon gave me some direction, and my job was to figure out the "why" and the feelings (for folks like Hannah or Luna). For some, it was a blank canvas (Cho, I think, Pansy, and Andromeda), and those I tried instead to think of a place that they could go that would feel like progress, maturity, or healing. So much of that story and those stories is about coming out of trauma into a "healing" world and seeing how to find yourself again in that space.

The gaps were things like WHY would Hannah want to own a pub, and why and how would she fall for Neville; or how does Andromeda feel in the aftermath of losing her husband, her daughter, and her son in law -- as well as raising her grandchild? How does she feel about her childhood, about being a Slytherin in this story, about the fact that her sister was murdered by her friend, after her sister murdered Andromeda's own daughter? How does Luna feel about her father having betrayed her friends? Is Luna's "weirdness" something she is aware of, and how does she feel about it, and what parts are purposeful or embraced or avoided by her?

Oh a big thing in boy with a scar specifically, is I wanted to cost of victory to remain the same. I don't do this in all my whatifs for other fandoms -- but for HP so much is about sacrifice and cost, and so I wanted it to remain the same narratively. I didn't want to say "oh, well, if Hermione was the Chosen One, then it would have been easier..." -- because one of the points of the story, for me, is that fighting evil is costly. It's hard and you lose things. So I try to keep the deaths consistent -- not literally identical but emotionally. So we always lose a student, generally one who has been kind to the Chosen One, who the Chosen One felt complicatedly about, in book four. We always lose a father or older brother figure in book five. We always lose a mentor and guiding light (who we also sometimes feel complicatedly about) in book six. And in book seven... you lose an innocent, you create an orphan, you lose a light in the darkness, among other things. I try to keep the emotional impact to the same degree and also the same timbre, so to speak. It's, uh, fun.

The last line of "the last son" is one of my favorites!

I love my Andromeda Tonks -- I like to think that one's what happened, after. If the Snape of the books had been the Severus of my fanfic, he would have been hands down and absolutely my favorite character, rather than by far my least. I would have loved if Harry was a squib, I think the story plot works just as well -- and I like the heart better.

I dunno there's like a place for "fun to explore in fanfic!" (ex. I love my seven little Weasley orphans from Ron-as-Chosen-One fic) and then just straight up edits: ex. don't have Griphook betray the good guys for "profit"? Don't do whatever the heck you're doing with house elves, JoAnn. Don't have werewolves be both AIDS-coded/gay-coded & specifically prey on/"convert" teen boys? Don't be transphobic? Etc Etc

I wish he could have though!

Yes, it doesn't break the narrative or the plot! It fixes nothing! But it makes things matter differently and that's what I want. I want him to be a tragedy, not an antivillain. I want him to have changed, and to still (BECAUSE of those changes! For the better!) to die alone, unloved and uncomprehended by anyone still living, and to go down with no regrets. It changes nothing and it changes everything and I want it to have been canon. I'd have cared.

But tbh JKR and I have some different ideas about heroism and redemption and that's okay. I like mine better but, then, they're mine.

I think there's detail with spaces in between to let people fill the whole world to their liking. I think it draws from a lot of preexisting tropes and structures that let it resonate -- magical schools in general, chosen one narrative, death-and-resurrection-of-hero, found family. I also think it happened at the right time and in the right place, and part of its compelling nature is the reaction and the things that got built around it. I think the best thing about HP is the fandom and I think in many ways the fandom built itself.

Oh I think canon Snape is actually a Gryffindor Primary! That's how JKR seems to model "good" people, pretty much. He's a Gryffindor/Ravenclaw or something like that.

My version is closer to being a Slytherin Primary, though I also think it's fun to read him as a burned Gryffindor Primary who unburns under Lily's influence/inspiration.