Oh thank you so much. The reason I came up with the runes was because I wanted to try to write a natural but reluctant progression for Draco and Hermione in the flashbacks and they were both so resistant that I felt like I needed to do something fairly profound to affect the way that they saw eachother. The idea of runes just seemed like the natural way of invoking HP worldbuilding in a way that wasn't common that gave Draco an injury that let Hermione get around his defenses and put emotionally isolated Draco in a situation of having someone caring for him for the first time since he'd lost his mother. I find scarification and those types of rituals kind of horrifying, and so the runes were like a iteration of that on steroids because of the magical aspect and the fact that they not only needed to heal but that they were actually impacting who Draco was.

I didn't actually know Avendell until after she posted the Manacled art, so those illustrations are entirely her on interpretation of the descriptions in the fic, but she made them look almost exactly the way they did in my head, which is pretty mindblowing and I legitimately nearly had a meltdown in a public park because that's where I was when she posted them on tumblr.

Ah. Poor Harry. I tried to show some of his character background and reasoning, but alas the limitations of limited POV, people hated him so much. So... what really informed the way I wrote Harry was that in Deathly Hallows by mid-book he is having a pretty difficult time keeping Voldemort out of his head. During Hermione's torture during Malfoy Manor, he can't keep his mind from slipping away into Voldemort's consciousness and that was a DESPERATE situation. And it wasn't until he had his grief-love moment over Dobby that he was finally able block his connection to Voldemort. Dumbledore described the horcrux to Snape as getting stronger. And Manacled is set years later than Deathly Hallows, even the flashbacks are years down the road from where Harry would have been in Deathly Hallows.

So the way I thought about Harry is that he had a very incomplete understanding of the war and what won the war because Dumbledore didn't tell him so many things, and so over the course of the war, he has this increasingly invasive connection to Voldemort developing and the ONLY way he found to keep Voldemort out was when he was leaning really heavily into his love for people and his desire to protect them, and when he wasn't doing that's when Voldemort's influence took over more of his mind. So that's why when he and Hermione fight he talks about how on the battlefield, he's only thinking about the people that he loves, and when Ginny's pregnant he really deteriorates and talks about how when he was with her, it was better, but now that he can't see her anymore he's declining more and more.

So originally I was just posting my updates on tumblr and in some of the fb groups. With Avendell, that was completely just she read the fic, decided to illustrate it, and posted the art on tumblr and I didn't know her until the art dropped and I wrote her a letter having a total meltdown. Since then we've become friends and I did a collab with her a couple times, once it was because she had a piece she wasn't sure about posting and I told her I'd write a fic for it if she posted it, so then she told me all her headcanons for the art and I tried to integrate them into a scene for her. With Elithien, she was an artist that I had been following for years because I loved her reylo art, and so when she did a dramione piece I had an idea and I wrote it and posted it in a reblog of her art, and she loved it and messaged me, and was telling me about her ideas for her next piece and the headcanons and details that she wanted, and then when she posted that piece, I wrote a story that integrated all the details that she'd shared, and then we started actively collabing after that. I only joined platforms like instagram to comment on dramione art, and then my account ended up growing so now I mostly use it to promote dramione artists. And then a couple people sent me their tiktoks talking about manacled, so I set up an account to like their videos and say thank you. But I'm pretty lost with using most of it as a writer, and just kind of throw things out there and see if the technique works.

Mostly there weren't many scenes cut, some did get so heavily revised they were barely recognizable, or gutted or trimmed, but for the most part, most scenes stayed in. The main thing was that my beta Jame would tell me that I had scenes that were too long and were messing with the pacing at different points in the story. So, I had a really long scene where I described exactly how to build a bomb and she made me cut two pages of it. I'm an avid worldbuilder, and it hurt. Or another example that wasn't really scenes but the contents and progression of scenes, Hermione's reconciliation with Draco was written slower and a lot more back and forth/internally conflicted as she tried to process everything. But the way I wrote it was too in her head, and after all the climactic action of the final battle I had make things progress at a quicker rate after the flashbacks. Which, storycraft-wise was a necessary choice, but on the psychological, healing process "there was a lot that needed to be reconciled" side of things there's a part of me that wishes I could have gotten into it more. It's a duality that is hard to balance in a story like Manacled, and I don't think I hit the exact balance between the two that I wanted, but I don't know that I could have written it any better at the time. Now, looking back on Manacled, there's a number scenes I cut or revise. I'd probably try to revise it down by about 70k words if I was going to revise it. But I don't plan to actually do so anytime.

One of the things about Draco and Hermione's relationship in Manacled was that it couldn't be about the sex. No one goes through that degree of trauma and suffering for each other because the sex was just so incredible. So it was one of those relationships that felt like it really needed an emotional progression that cut to the core of them, because things that happen easily and come easy aren't always valued. So the fact that they had a "good" relationship during the war was something they had to really fight for, and never came easily. And to me it felt like sex was a necessary part of that messiness, that it couldn't be the dream version of simultaneous orgasms but that it was another thing that they had to build with together and it wasn't going to happen perfectly the first time.

Hmmm. That's hard. I loved writing Draco because he got to be such a enigma for so long, with all these little details and tells that took ages to come together, and then he's SO dramatic. Like that boy is always trying to go die, and and he gives the angriest monologues. He's so extra. He has so much super-villain flare. But I also loved Hermione because she's so complicated that she's constantly underestimated because everyone always only sees her in parts. But then I also adored Aurore, creating a little mini-dramione was so much fun. Having her bludgeoning James over a book was an utter delight.

I mean, mostly I just tried to think of things that sounded awful or really medically complicated to deal with. My history textbooks as a child were actually really gory and gave much too much detail about the ways that people used to be tortured, and so mostly I tried to think of spells that evoked the sense of horror I experienced as a child trying to do my homework.

Oh thank you so much. I'm very tied to canon, I have a hard time when I don't have a firm point of canon divergence, so I hadn't written Snape until I was writing Manacled, and then I just kept adding him in more and more because I loved him. There was something so fun about writing someone who's intentionally unpleasant and only likes people very reluctantly, and is completely inept in interpersonal relationships. Draco, I always feel like I need to make him grow up and reform and get redeemed, whereas Snape is set in his ways as an almost completely awful person and isn't going to change his personality for anyone. So writing Do Not Go Gentle was quite a challenge because I didn't want to write a predatory story, and I didn't want him to be emotionally abusive but I also didn't want him to be out of character. So I spent a lot of time going around in circles with exactly what the proper balance was. I noticed when refreshing my memory of the books that he's only really silky and smooth tongued when he's lying, when he's talking to Bellatrix or Voldemort, he's very clever, but the instant he's actually having a real conversation he's like a feral cat, he's so awkward and when he's upset or feels cornered his back goes up and he's spitting and lashing out in all directions. And honestly, thinking of him as this very crabby cat that only liked one person, really helped me write him in a way that felt true to character, that he wasn't ever going to nice but there could be this one person that he was partial to and tried to make an effort for, even though his instincts never went away.

So, funny story The Library of Alexandria was actually a Lucius/Hermione story when I first started thinking about it. But then I was just starting to write Manacled and Draco in that was so dark, I really wanted to write a sweet Draco who was the complete opposite of Manacled Draco. The idea actually came from the Monster's Book of Monsters, basically asking the question why on earth a book would be like that. And then thinking maybe magical lore had a magnetic effect on the magic it covered and so the books absorbed those traits and manifested them. And then Alexandria being a library that wasn't actually lost but actually was a wizarding library that kept all those dangerous magical books just seemed like a delightful place that Hermione was undoubtedly just keep trying to worm her way into. And the Malfoys having books there that needed to be maintained and somehow them getting trapped having having to have sex to escape for some reason was my initial premise, but then the plot grew, as it tends to when I get an idea.

Mmm. I don't know. I feel like I'm generally more overrated than underrated. I'm very partial to my tomione fic, but it also pretty understandably doesn't get that much attention since it's a non-magical mafia AU for a pairing that I'm really not known for.

That's the way that it occurred to me, to be honest. But, additionally, my first story also involved memory loss. In that story, near the very beginning Hermione get obliviated and loses her memories of a day, and then there's seven chapters of her trying to figure out what's going on, where the reader knows exactly what she's missing and she doesn't, and people were so pissed off at her for not figuring out this thing that she had no information to be able to divine on her own without her memories. And so, I felt like Manacled had to be told starting in the middle because if readers knew more than Hermione did, they'd get angry at her for not figuring things out faster, and so I really felt like readers had to only be allowed to know as much as Hermione knew. Also, I felt like reading the story as a war/espionage story and then having the twist in the middle of the Order losing, everyone dying, Hermione becoming a surrogate, Draco having to rape her and act like he doesn't know or care about her, would be too much for people, they needed to know right from the start the worst things that were going to happen in the story, rather than when they were halfway in. However, I did write Manacled intentionally so that it could be read in both chronological or published order. Which is why there's a fair bit of repetition in the beginning flashbacks, the story really does start over a bit there because I wrote both sections as if they were the beginning of the story.

It was honestly just the way it came to me. I wish I had a more complex worldbuilding explanation, but that bit was very much just the way it seemed to me like it would be. That she'd bury him in layers, and sort of fade away herself in the process of all these parts of herself that she was losing in order to protect him.

I knew plotting it that it wasn't going to be a story where Draco got redeemed to anyone but Hermione. I always planned that they were going to run away and live in peace and in hiding once they escaped, and that they would have no expectations that the wizarding world would never understand why they did what they did. So, I always planned that Hermione was never going to get credit for what she'd done. But it was a couple months into writing it that I had the idea of the ending of the story being a picture of Hermione with a description that just erased everything about her, and ended with the words "and did not fight" because Manacled wasn't supposed to be a feel good story where every gets the acknowledgement they deserve and their trauma goes away in a puff of smoke. Draco and Hermione got the happy ending that they wanted, but I wanted to pull back to the larger point of the story and make everyone angry again. I wanted to emphasize unjust history and war is and how much of it we don't know and may never know. Because hermione's story is vivid in Manacled, and so the fact that she could be erased so easily was intended to make people wonder who else is forgotten.

I'm an absolute sucker for veela. I have a third veela fic in my wips right now. I also really like the idea of vampires, the mixture of sexuality and hunger is such a rich combo, I have a story in progress but JKR's worldbuilding for vampires is really shitty, and its actually causing me a lot of issues. And I also have a fic where Draco is a dragon, which is very porny. I just like the way that creature fics let you tinker with human reasoning and physical experiences. I'm not very kinky when it comes to writing fic if its not creature-y, because part of the appeal in something that's not vanilla is the mental progression of the characters dealing with new anatomy or wondering if they should be enjoying what they're enjoying, etc.

I think that Ginny killing Voldemort with a Killing Curse helped to push back against that narrative, and also the fact that the wizarding world was forced to face what happened to the surrogates, that they didn't get to just sweep it under the rug. The crazy thing to me is that the First Wizarding War was 10 years long and the Order didn't ever change their position about using Dark Magic after so many of the young people in the Order were killed. The Ministry was using Unforgivables, but Dumbledore was swanning around disapproving of it. So, if anything, not having Dumbledore around to push this absurd standard of purity and self-sacrifice would hopefully help in the new wizarding world being less naive about the danger.

But at the same time, in Manacled, Dark Magic has price. The fact that JKR decided to make killing and dark magic something that could affect your soul is something worldbuilding-wise that you can't really get around. There's always a level of complexity to it that you don't have in the real world.

In my mind, they could have assumed that the manacled were "released" because of the fire destroyed them. I think there was room for them to maybe suspect that Draco might have tried to escape or somehow survived, but they wouldn't really want to admit that and the means of escape that Draco and Hermione used was pretty untraceable.

when I was in my teens I read the entire HP lexicon, because I was very weird. I also make liberal use of the hp wikia, when I have a potion in mind or I'm going to brew a potion in a scene, I'll read the whole entry for any related potions, and the ingredient descriptions and any other potions they're used in to kind of establish what effect the ingredients have and how they're prepared. And then, I will usually pad the potions that I develop with some herbal medicine tradition. So... say I was writing about how to make skele-grow. I'd read the entry on hp wikia, and the description of taste and smell, and then I'd look up herbs that were traditionally used for broken bones and bone healing, and I'd integrate the herbal preparation with the magical ingredient preparation, which makes it feel a little more "real" to me.

Or if I was writing a fertility potion, since those aren't in the books, I'd probably look over the ingredients for love potions, and then use a few of them, and then base the rest of potion on herbal tradition and/or other fantasy fertility ideas that are found across fantasy literature.

I am easily bored. And so I look for novel ideas to entertain my goldfish attention span.

I really just write about things that catch my interest. I am very much writing the stories I want to read.

No. I tend to write in bits and pieces during the day. My most solid writing period is at night when my youngest son goes to sleep, he's very sleep resistant so I have to sit with him, and I usually write while I'm doing that. So my pre-writing process is brushing my children's teeth.

Honestly beyond the initial surrogate premise and that outfits, I tried not to actually write The Handmaids Tale too heavily into the story. I really wanted that harsh brutalism feeling mixed with the gothic to set the mood of the story, and the TV show really leans into that brutalist aesthetic, so I mostly leaned into the details that evoked hat mood, because culturally the handmaids are recognizable. Its been interesting to me how often people say that Manacled and The Handmaids Tale are the exact same story.

Haha. I have a very loose idea for a little more cat!hermione, mostly so Draco can actually start calling her Kiska and maybe there will be more than heavy petting. But I have so many projects going right now, I haven't started it. I never really had a full story idea for vampire!blaise, unfortunately.

So the first scene in chapter 6, he was not mentally prepared for it at all, which is why he baulks when he sees her and the buys time getting a drink and then threw her out immediately afterwards because he was about to completely lose it, and he couldn't let her see. I always thought that he was taking something every time in order to perform and get it over with as quickly as possible. And in my story outline, its specifically mentioned that part of the reason that he does it from behind is because it's the only way he can hide how upset he is, as controlled and emotionless as he is, hiding the degree of devastation that he's dealing with is beyond him. I did see a lot of the wattpad speculation that he wasn't actually raping her, and that instead he was memory charming her or implanting fake memories, and that was never an option because legilimens can find signs of memory tampering, that's how Voldemort found Barty Crouch Jr, and he was specifically looking for any signs of tampering in Hermione's mind whenever she was brought it. That's part of why Draco's act had to be so careful because he couldn't erase any mistakes, when he kissed Hermione, he had to invent a cruel excuse in case she wasn't pregnant and Voldemort saw the memory. However, even if he could have not raped Hermione and just made her believe that he had, I don't really know how that's better. The trauma for Hermione would have still been the same.

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So. I have a grading system for reviews. If it's a review from someone who has consistently left me thoughtful comments through a story or across fics, I will take any critiques from them pretty seriously, and send them to my betas and ask what their thoughts are, and we brainstorm and discuss ways I can improve. If its someone hasn't reviewed before but who's clearly looking at the work as a whole and who seems to be offering the critique from a place not of thinking my fic is bad but that they think I could be better, then that's feedback that I take into consideration. If its anon or a review where the person is giving negative feedback because the story isn't the story they want, or they don't like me, or anything along those line, I don't care. I just ignore them.

Yes! I actually headcanon that they bought a house in New Zealand and spent a lot of the school year living there so that Aurore could go home on weekends and holidays. It's mentioned that when Aurore leaves for England, that Draco and Hermione are in a public place, just with their features altered. I think they both get a bit anxious if its too long, because they both are bit paranoid. But they definitely left the island.