Thank you! Those were some of my favorite scenes to write as I structured most of my post-war arc for Draco around his mental health. (Quick disclaimer that I am in no way a medical professional). I do write/edit for a living in a health/sciences space so a lot of my writing training comes from that angle as opposed to fiction/creative. So I think I was just already trained to approach that topic and those scenes with a sensitive eye. And then I suppose a lot of what Browning says is a bit of wish fulfillment or really an amalgam of the kind of advice I received all through life from different adult figures.

Hi and no apologies, this is quite the surreal experience for me! I was a Dramione reader for a longgggg time. It was my favorite pairing to read and so whenever I had ideas for writing creatively, they were at the forefront of my mind. Eventually I wrote it down and shared but that part took.. a much longer time lol

aww thank YOU for reading, seriously. Draco is my favorite to write, especially his inner monologue.

Thank you so much! A bit of both, honestly. I love a good character analysis, so when I look at how I want to write a certain character the number one question I have to ask myself is: what's motivating them to do anything? I re-read the books once a year and they hit different as an adult. It's so painfully easy to see how jealous Draco was of Harry and coupling that with his obsession for his family's pride, it's easy to see how he was such a little shit in canon. HBP added that extra layer for me of how this is a child who actually loves his family and will do anything for them to survive. If anyone has read or seen Cursed Child, that development of Draco into an adult who loves his family fiercely and would do anything to protect them felt natural to me (even if I have 1 million other issues with that show...). But I loved writing Draco as someone who had everything, had it taken away (due to his own mistakes and the adults around them) and exploring how he'd rebuild. He'd still be a snarky asshole though.

Hi! That was a fun bit of world building for me, glad you enjoyed the little glimpses of them! I loved writing the elves as these little formal butlers/cook as opposed to speaking in that sort of broken English we see in canon. I also thought it would nice for elves to have a bit of development outside of "the help" and I hadn't read a story with this kind of arc before. Communication sciences and disorders is a fascinating field to me, and I thought here was an opportunity to expand on the magical world a bit. How would they communicate with someone with hearing loss? A lot of side plots in RN came out of me just wondering how to build out some of the logical questions I had when reading the series I am going to expand on Crick and Waton's background in a one-shot, eventually.

wooooo I brought someone into the ship!! YASSS. Welcome to Dramione, there are so many wonderful writers and authors in this space. And oof, yeah I imagine lots of people are like "wtf? 300k words? WHY?" The "why" is that this story (and I apologize to anyone who has heard this from me before) lived in my head for a decade. An actual decade. So that's a lot of time to think through every little thing. I finally caved last year and started writing it all down, without a clue for how long it would end up, I just knew where I wanted draco/hermione to start, where they ended up, and everything in between was going to be the most self-indulgent, wish ful-fillment moments I could dream up. So the plan was always: OMG JUST WRITE THIS STUPID THING DOWN SO YOU HAVE SPACE IN YOUR BRAIN AGAIN. And that's how one gets to 300K words.

Hi there! Thanks for reading those fun little stories, I really enjoyed writing them. I do love them both but I probably prefer Draco because I love to swear and I write him very sweary so his dialogue and inner monologues come more naturally to me. And absolutely, I like switching between their POVs because it lets me exercise different modes of thinking and tap into different sides of myself to try and relate to the character I'm writing.

ahh thank you thank you! Oh boy this music question.I am a very music driven person in like, life, so RN does have a playlist and I do need to listen to something when I read or write. A bit of a weirder ritual is my plotting runs. I go for long runs outside with a specific playlist and just think through the story in my head. That's helped me more than anything. There's an abandoned parking lot near where I live that should have a co-author credit on RN.

I feel like they are british? I honestly don't know the difference, but i love to bake and am an avid consumer of Great British Bake Off, so I would probs say british, but I am a filthy yank so I've probably got it wrong. They are very buttery and crumbly? I cut mine into wedges.

Ooh it's so different. Fiction lets me just go full stream of consciousness if I want, play around with fun dialogue, perform full on character analysis of some of my favorite fictional creations and breathe new life into them and it's so much fun. I can get more imaginative with my words or POVs, more lyrical. It's pure stress relief because how I write for work is much more methodical, I've got to stay in active voice, I've got to write evidence-based, hard facts and keep it very concise and tight. I don't find it too hard to switch, because I view them as such different sides of my brain and one I've boxed in my mind as "work" and the other as "fun."

I've read lots of Dramione and I love seeing the different people paired with Ron and it's awesome (Pansy and Luna are probs my fave for him when reading). I had him with Padma from the beginning I think, because she's a pretty blank slate, honestly. I did think it'd be sort of funny for them to bond over how shitty a time he showed her at the Yule Ball, and I also loved that detail from canon that she's in a different house from her own identical twin. That was very telling to me about her personality and I envisioned her as very intelligent but definitely not as tightly-wound as Hermione and a calmer presence for Ron.

Yes, absolutely, this story was always at it's core an exploration of how these two specific people found their way through trauma, both separate and together. It's the biggest criticism I receive (to be clear, it's totally valid, my story is not for everyone!) that nothing really happens and it's just about their healing and their relationship. I've written them a bit older (they're about 27 at the start of this story) and so a lot of those moments where one of them could have flared up and left the relationship for a bit would have felt immature, to me. They are full grown adults who survived truly awful things and I think that matures a person quite a bit!

Hi, thanks for asking me questions! This is a lovely one! He has lots of little victories throughout the story but there are two moments that stand out to me. His biggest turning point in his healing I would say is in chapter 18 when he accepts the new mantra of "I am okay with this." And his most important healing moment to me was the letter he wrote Lucius in chapter 49. It took him so many years to get to that point where he felt like he could "talk" to his father honestly and let go of a lot of that anger and resentment.

Yes I've dragged someone else aboard!! I think nowadays I lean toward honest redemption arcs and depictions of healthy relationships if I want a longer fic. So in that vein I'm recommending one of my favorite authors mightbewriting. Her "Wait and Hope" series is spectacular and I would rec it to all readers, especially if you are new to dramione. Niffizzle is another author I adore ("Somewhere Down the Line" is fantastic). If you're looking for some really lush prose, read anything and everything by PacificRimbaud. Her writing is GORGEOUS and she converted me to ParkWeasel ("The Secretary" is a must read. It's very explicit, so if that's not your thing, just a heads up and she has a dramione in that universe "One and Done"). Scullymurphy is another top notch writer and her pride and prejudice inspired "Universal Truths" I highly rec along with her memory loss one "Fragments and Fissures.

Part 2: tropes and other ships. I love me a co-worker setup. Forced proximity through work? Perfect. I do enjoy some soul-bond tropes because I find it interesting to see how authors write the free-will aspect. Memory loss is excellent too! Other ships I enjoy include the aforementioned ParkWeasel (Percy x Pansy), Ron x Pansy, Harry x Ginny, NottPott, Draco/Neville... you can convince me of just about any ship honestly as long as the story is good. It's why I rec PacificRimbaud a lot because she is so good at making rare pairs work!

As I responded to Jass, she'll do anything for Draco. However, the way I've written her here, I think the man her son has become is a bit of a surprise to her. She's been away from england for months at a time and hasn't seen the way her son's life has been affected, nor the ways in which he's had to cope (both the good and the bad). I head-canon the Malfoys as very repressed, emotionally, so I kept Draco's reactions with his mother very stiff and formal. I don't think their family is the type to show vulnerability between parent and child. And I think Narcissa sees the way Draco has incorporated Hermione and his new friends into his life and she was afraid of what that would mean for her place as his mother (though she'd never admit the fear). So her pride got in the way of supporting her son at his Muggle wedding. She was protecting herself, not realizing she'd really hurt her son, and could rationalize to herself that "oh it was just a silly muggle thing anyway, the magical ceremony is the REAL one and Im supporting that."

Non-con is a hard pass for me to write or read (I made an exception for The Auction because I had read and enjoyed the other works in the series and trusted the author). I don't think I'd ever write a Voldemort Wins AU because I am such a fucking hufflepuff and I need me an HEA. I do love to write darker themes, but more in the vein of how Draco is at the beginning of RN versus dark themes of violence.

I love how people responded to the OCs because that's quite a challenge as a writer to insert new faces into an established, beloved universe and have it be believable. But I approached writing Sasha as I approached writing Theo or Padma (a lot of those minor HP characters can be considered OCs, in my opinion because we know so little about them in canon). Sasha was particularly fun because whenever I read the books I'm always questioning just how the separation between magic and muggle worlds actually works, like logistically. How don't more people know about the magical world? How far does the secret need to go? I started exploring all these little inconsistenices (like... Vernon Dursley knows about magic before Harry is dropped there. Why is he allowed to know? Where does the line stop for blended families?) and before i knew it I'd spiraled into this lovely little relationship of Theo and Sasha that had this massive complication and put forth my own solution because it bothered me so much in canon.

I'll start with Hermione! So speaking of blank slate characters, the Grangers are the blankest of slates. We know they are dentists and take Hermione skiing that one time in OoTP and then she obliviates them and sends them off to Australia. And i know that the books are from Harry's POV, but I always found the lack of information on Hermione's parents very weird for someone who is supposed to be one of Harry's bffs. I always imagined her poor parents just so so overwhelmed by all this magic nonsense. Like this poor couple has to reckon with the fact that their only child is a witch, will be sent away to some school that they can't visit (or if they can, it's not clear), and her best friend is this savior and there's a group of people that would like to murder him and everyone around him. Cool. I'd be so so wary of magic if I were them, especially after the obliviation, so I always felt Hermione would have to do some trust building with them post-war. And also I think Hermione would carry that sense of "where do I belong?" with her parents hesitant to get excited about magical stuff and neither of close friends dealing with muggle parents.

And now the Malfoys. They are so freaking dramatic and I love writing their messy, messy dynamics. Lucius to me is the messiest, I mean he really gambled and lost in this world and so to me it's easy to see how Draco would go from idolizing his father to resenting him and wanting to pull away from that image. Narcissa fascinates me. Her motivations in canon are a bit obfuscated, but her driving force seems to be that she loves her son. I think my favorite Narcissa moment from canon is that subtle wrist grab she does to Lucius in the beginning of Deathly Hallows when Voldemort demands Lucius's wand. To me that showed her determination to just keep her head down and survive with her family intact, no matter what. Post war and without Lucius around... I think her love for her son and her family could override the worldview that shaped her... but it certainly will not be instantaneous. She wants the best for Draco and she's been raised with the belief that the best would be a witch of pure blood.

What a great question. It wasn't explored in canon at all really and so here was another area that always had me scratching my head when reading. How is it different in the magical world? It seems the blood purity focus is their particular world's foundation for a hierarchy of prejudice, but as the magical world expands out of Sacred 28, surely some muggle societal problems would have an impact too? And so part of the reason I wrote them as black women was to diversify the world itself, but to also highlight how truly sheltered Theo and Draco sound when they have questions about it. It also shows that magic doesn't solve everything, as depressing as that is. The magical world is no more accepting a place, something Sasha is quick to be frustrated by when talking with Hermione about the nonsense that is blood purity. Discrimination and prejudice are often at the core of the ruling classes (purebloods in this context) and so making the magical world clash a bit with our world in that very real sense was important to me. Does that answer your question?

ahh my fix-it scene for Ginny. Justice for that girl's trauma. And you're so right, the reason a lot of those characters seem more okay than Draco is because of the tight-knit support of family and friends. But I really wanted Ginny to get her moment of healing here and to show Draco that he really isn't alone. He has more in common with his own generation than he thinks, especially with Ginny. It was something she needed to say out loud and it was definitely something he needed to hear.

Hermione is someone who needed to learn she can be vulnerable too. A lot of her canon depiction saw her putting Harry's needs first and I think she's the type of person who puts immense pressure on herself to be perfect all the time. I loved writing her little bit of vulnerability when she lets Astoria take over running her fund and then later in the story when she unravels and explains to Draco how she thinks she's failed with her house-elf legislation. And her growth with how she relates to her parents: her conversation with them at their Christmas party in chapter 41 where she finally asserts herself and demands they not only accept Draco but accept her abilities, as they are such a natural part of her.

Draco's apology in chapter 8 is probably the one I enjoyed most because it kickstarted the whole story for me. I really loved writing it because it led me down the (very long) path of building him up to that moment, having Hermione react in a way that made sense, and then opened the door for much more to develop between them.

I would say honestly, probably not, from a scene or dialogue perspective. I'm probably much too close to RN, as opposed to other things I've written, so any major changes from what I threw out onto the internet would feel like a betrayal of the story I wanted to tell (lol i sound so dramatic, but this story is sort of my baby and also my soul?) I will say as I read through it the editor inside me is like "arghhhh you can tighten up this sentence and omg there's a typo"). I do have a few tense/grammar issues I'll fix eventually.