Hi hello! I am here. Good afternoon everyone!

Aw, thank you! It amazes me it still gets so much attention after all this time -- when I found out it was in my top fics by hits on AO3 regardless of age, it was quite the surprise

One of the things I notice about fics written by new writers is that you can often tell the part they really wanted to write -- the emotional heart of the story for them. Usually there's one or two scenes a writer really wants to get to. I always say the best thing to do is to write those first, because then you can go back and put more work into the rest, since you've had that emotional catharsis. I've noticed writers who do what they want and then build the rest of the story around it generally are willing to put more work into the building if they've got the heart already set.
(Also having friends who will give you an honest opinion -- but it can take a while to get accustomed to that!)

Thank you, I'm so glad it resonates for you! I think...well, part of the reason I was drawn to writing Remus to begin with is that I felt like he was somewhat representative of me -- he was disadvantaged in some ways I wasn't, but at the time I was a broke grad student, so I was poor and trying to figure out how to be a good teacher/mentor, so that spoke to me, and I felt like...there weren't many people in my life who were gentle, and I wanted to write about someone who was gentle but still trying to survive in a world that wasn't. I was weirdly also influenced by the writer George Bernard Shaw, who wrote a lot of that -- specifically the play Major Barbara, the character of Cusins -- this is a real deep cut but he's "Capable of murder, but not of cruelty or coarseness" which probably says a lot about my Remus

Aw yeah I love crossovers (and Lord Peter crosses over so well!). I think...there's a very popular sort of crossover that basically boils down to "two sets of characters meet and compare notes" which...is a fun exercise, very gratifying in some ways, but not usually something I want to read, and I try to write stories I'd want to read. So I try to veer away from just "these canons are similar" and instead aim more for "these two canons could coexist, and what would change or be interesting if they did?" One of my more popular HP crossovers was Remus Lupin visiting the Discworld and running into their resident werewolf Angua, which was about...a character discovering a new world, and how it might change his perspective on his own world.
Often with crossovers, more often than with other genres, I'm also aiming for comedy, so sometimes it's "which part of this mixture would be the funniest?"

Well, in canon I think it's pretty what-you-see-what-you-get, it's just an enchanted map made by extremely talented and bored young people. In CC specifically, it absolutely was a horcrux -- it just didn't require a murder to make it. (BTW if I'm grasping the wrong end of the stick on that question please feel free to clarify.) I grew up in California in the 1990s and I knew a lot of gay people who even if they had supportive families and communities still felt what I think of as very soul-torn about coming out, about being their authentic selves. I think there are many ways to be agonized in the soul, and Sirius pouring all his fear and loneliness into the map created a horcrux where the only person hurt was himself. I always think of him removing Harry's scar and replacing it with his own mark was a form of him healing from that hurt.

Stealing Harry was written after book four but juuuuust before book five, yes, and I believe wasn't completed until after book five came out, though my memory at this point is hazy. I don't have a great memory for the fics I was writing later in my HP "career", and the dates are fuzzy since the original posts were mostly deleted when my livejournal was hacked, but I think it was basically Stealing Harry/LC, Cartographer's Craft, maybe one or two others, and then I trailed off into other fandoms.
I think towards the end I was spending a lot of time attempting to fix what I didn't like in the later books, which really sadly was a lot of the content of the later books. I struggled with where JKR took the story, which is not necessarily a criticism, just a personal difference of opinion.
But I was always most interested in writing the story of the adults, or of the children when they were older, and in some ways that did get easier in the later books, since the books themselves matured in tone.

No, not at all. I think when I wrote Draco it was often a mixture of "I really do find this character interesting" and a kind of reactionary attitude to where he was in fanon at the time, which was kind of sexy-bad-boy. In Stealing Harry in specific, I just thought it would be really fascinating to see who Draco could have been if he'd had an almost Harry-like upbringing. In other fics, Conservatory comes to mind, I wanted to explore how someone might realize what an absolute dipshit they'd been and how they'd go about fixing that with...dignity, I suppose. I treat Snape in much the same way -- someone who knows they're in the wrong but is too prickly and proud to admit it, but still knows they need to make amends.
I like to think that nobody is above finding their way back from wrong to right, especially a child who never had any better role models but who is intelligent enough to see "oh, my upbringing isn't the only way there is."

I am probably a terrible role model when it comes to writing. I'm better now than I was when I was actively writing HP fic, but for example -- Stealing Harry? I had no idea where it was going when I wrote the opening sections. In HP fandom and other "early" fandoms I wrote in (from 2003 to about 2010 or so) I rarely knew where a story was going, I just had an idea I wanted to express. So in that sense my pre-writing ritual was often just me lost in thought while walking around or riding my bike or even stuff like going to the movies, having an idea, and getting to a keyboard as fast as possible. This was pre-smartphone so sometimes it would be getting a notebook out and scrawling the idea down in it, too. I think I wrote about half of Stealing Harry and possibly more than half of Sweet Home in a notebook I was supposed to be using for class notes in History of Theatre or similar.
These days, by contrast, I usually will get an opening scene down and then do a very brief outline of where I want things to go and how they'll get there, but that outline still usually shifts a great deal as I work.

I feel like we definitely need a better word for "originals" but I don't think we have one yet. I think I'm still within that process, honestly. Nameless, my first novel, came out of Cartographer's Craft and was a real lesson in the skills that fanfic doesn't necessarily teach you. The one thing I think writing fanfic doesn't help much with is worldbuilding, because in a fanfic there's a world your reader already knows about. There are touchstones that we all agree exist, and those are what you generally build the story on. That doesn't happen with non-fanfic. So it's not only the hardest part of moving from fanfic to non-fanfic, but it's also one of the most visible parts of fiction in general. How do I build this world without infodumping? How do I avoid endless exposition? And I'm still learning that, I think. Getting better at it, but definitely still learning.
I'm in the process of converting Stealing Harry to an original novel and that's harder still because I have to divorce it from JKR's world while still retaining the elements of that world which made the story so compelling. Which is how I'm like, 1/3 of the way into Stealing Harry but 50K words into the original version....

[follow up response: That would for sure be an interesting reading]

There's bits of it up on Tumblr, and hopefully I'll get more of it done in the coming year. I moved Hogwarts from Scotland to Cape Cod, which amuses me, and made Remus a native of Worcester.
What bits are posted are under this tag: https://copperbadge.tumblr.com/tagged/the%20ozyverse
Apologies for all the other random stuff on that tag...

Hmm, that's something I hadn't considered, a reverse of the "what doesn't cross over well" consideration...I guess I look at my flaws more than my triumphs. I think fanfic is extremely good for building strong prose skills -- being able to evoke a sensation or a feeling, being able to choose the right words and turns of phrase. Characterization, too, since often you're trying to "match" your writing to the writing someone else is doing, which makes for great critical analysis skills. If you have an idea in your head of what you want a character to be like, fanfic is great for training you to express that, and that works even when the character in your head isn't coming from another canon.
I think the thing about AUs is that they are great training for increased worldbuilding, but you're still leaning on canon in most of them -- even if it's not the setting, you're still relying on assumptions people may have about the character. I LOVE an AU, as may be demonstrated by how many I write, and the further out you go from canon sometimes the more compelling they can be. I think they're a powerful stepping stone to move from fanfic to original writing if that's what the writer wants. But I also think they're a lovely end in and of themselves.

In a general sense, I have an entire file on Google Drive devoted to ideas I have not yet written. In a specifically Harry Potter sense, not as much -- I wrote what I wanted, and when I stopped having ideas for HP fic, I let it go. The sequel to Stealing Harry was the last HP fic I clung to, and eventually I just had to admit I didn't have the passion for it any longer. But yeah, I have tons of ideas in general. I actually just sat down today and made a list of 12 stories I'd like to work on in the coming year, and I'm going to try to do one a month all next year.

[Follow up: Oh I love that plan! Thank you.]

Well, it's ambitious, but we'll see how far I get. Sometimes I need to kick myself in the pants a little. But hopefully things will "catch fire" and I'll get at least a few stories done.

LOL! Well, thank you, that's kind of you to say. Not all of those stories are, admittedly, of a quality I'm still entirely proud of, though I wouldn't remove or change them -- that would be dishonest to my history, I think. Some were written in an afternoon, some took months; writing is just something I really love to do, and I've been fortunate in my life to have a reasonable amount of leisure time in which to do it. When I mentioned having a story "catch fire" that's something I think of not literally, of course, but it has a meaning to me; it means I get passionately into a story and it's what I think about, what I steal time to write about. I've written in grad school classes, in lulls at work, in the evening, in the early morning; I'm also a fairly shy homebody in person so in some ways I've had more spare time than my peers, traditionally. It's just what I love to do, though, and so I've worked to make time for it.

Oh gosh. I could write a book about fandom's evolution and even if I did it would still only express a small fraction of what fandom is and does and how it behaves. In some ways I'd be ill-suited to even discuss it because I'm something of an outlier -- I often write fanfic but in many fandoms I wasn't much of a fanfic reader, historically I haven't really engaged with meta-discussion unless I was the one hosting the discussion, and I don't regularly read any discourse tags on tumblr, or didn't hang out in communities much when LJ was a more active fandom place. So that being said as preface, let me see if I can vocalize my thoughts...
I think AO3 was revolutionary in fandom, even though I wasn't initially involved with it and didn't join it for a while. AO3 is what allowed fandom to move from a livejournal or dreamwidth structure (single posts with comment threads, like Reddit) to more fluid platforms like Tumblr (single posts with many branching discussions not always accessible to each other) and Discord (chatlike structure with many subcommunities) because we didn't need that more rigid, stable structure for archiving fanfics. We outsourced that from social media to AO3. That was a massive shift. And there have been distinct advantages and disadvantages to that. An advantage, for example, is that I think for all we talk about how horrible fandom wank can be, it's actually way less vicious and centralized than it used to be. I think fandom is a more open and welcoming space now, even if there's still a ways to go on some fronts.
In terms of disadvantages, it really does make it harder for fandom to centralize, which means you have this one big subculture, "Fandom", and it is CHOCK A BLOCK with tiny subcultures within that, and the more separate those grow, the harder it is for them to interact, because they all have their own rules and ways of behaving. Like...I really struggle with discord because it's not what I'm used to and I'm often afraid of giving offense or making a mistake out of ignorance. That's not the fault of discord or of its users, that's nobody's fault per se, but it keeps me from a huge swath of fandom.
But I think also there is something immutable about all of it, there are things that simply remain the same throughout the decades and have since even before the internet. We come here because we have a passion that only a specific subset of people really accept or understand. Fandom's enormous sweep and diversity allows us to build homes and communities, to explore other lives.
Uh so. That's....probably a weird and extremely long way of expressing it, but I've been in fandom for my entire adult life, and it's the only community I've had for that whole-ass time, so it's precious to me in all of its forms.

Interestingly this is something I often wonder about other people! I was sort of...prepared, I guess? For something like being podficced, because I was a playwright when I was younger -- in undergrad and grad school I wrote plays that were occasionally performed, either as staged readings or as partial or full productions. So I got inured young to hearing my words spoken aloud, sometimes (often!) in ways I didn't anticipate. It's very jarring the first time it happens but by the time I had a story podficced, I'd seen several of my plays done and so the jarring sensation had long since gone away. There is a certain cadence to some stories in my head, but sometimes even that has changed due to hearing a podfic and going "Oh yeah...love this."
I'm always delighted by podfic because I love audiobooks and podcasts. And I love hearing how people interpret the work.

I think, at least for me, there are always surprises in terms of what people emphasize, or the emotion they might put into a line. Sometimes lines I thought of as "throwaway" lines, not really important to the story, take on a new importance when someone else puts serious thought and emotion into them. I don't know that I could give a specific example because I'm deeply lucky to have had a lot of podfic done of my work, but yeah -- I think podficcers often bring out nuances in a story a writer might not even know they'd put into it.
Also it REALLY points out when you've written something awkward. My goodness.

I'm sure I must have, although admittedly I'm coming up blank on specific examples. I think part of it is that much of the fic I've written has been what I'd think of as "pop" fanfic -- it might have a certain level of depth but it's not meant to be intensively symbolic or difficult/complicated to access, so there are a broad variety of meanings any single story might have for people. This was even more true when I was writing HP fanfic, so much of the time it was very self-evidently "what you see is what you get" and if people had interpretations that were specific enough that I'd be surprised by them, I think they mostly just kept those interpretations in their own heads. I really am wracking my brains for an example, but most of the ones that stick in my mind are funny for being negative encounters.
I did have a person once who thought I had read their essays about Hermione and was deliberately writing her wrong to annoy them, but I think that was what we might consider a mental health issue more than anything.
In a very broad sense I am consistently surprised by Stealing Harry's continuing appeal; I like it and I'm proud of it but it's undeniably of a specific era. It's still a relatively popular story even though fandom is a very different place now.
It's easy for me to say I like it, 'cause I wrote it, but it's always a little startling when other people like it too, I guess.

I suppose in terms of having been written prior to the 5th-7th books coming out it actually is extremely accessible because it's set before all of that and doesn't really reference a lot of what those books established, that's true. But I think also there are certain trends and tropes that rise and fall in fandom, and it feels to me like the characterization in particular is very of its time -- I haven't read a lot of recent HP fanfic but from what I understand there's an edge to it now, especially within wolfstar, that you didn't often see in the era. I know from having spoken to younger readers that a lot of the content of older fics that deals with cultural homophobia comes across as a little out of date, which is honestly kind of delightful, that we've come so far in such a short amount of time.
In some parts of fandom there are changes in the way certain characters are viewed because we see more of their backstory or whatnot...it's actually been interesting to watch peoples' takes on it evolve over the years, because you've got young Millennials and Zoomers reading fanfics written in the very early 2000s about things that happened in the 90s, or even in the 70s
If you weren't alive in the 1990s it must be very different to read about them than to have lived through them.

I was more or less neutral on Snape, in most of the earlier HP fics I wrote. It wasn't that I disliked him, I just wasn't super interested in him. But I started really loving writing him in Stealing Harry, in part because it was a challenge to keep him prickly and kind of a jerk while still making him likeable. I think he's the character furthest from canon in the Stealing Harry-verse, because he had the influence of this small child on his life and then the Tonkses sort of abducted him into their family, so he's what an isolated, damaged loner can become if he actually gets a shot at acceptance and is willing to take it. I really like who Snape was by the end of my writing of him, much more so than I liked him at any point in canon.
Much of my work in honestly any canon is about acceptance and support -- building community or having it built around you, and how that can be transformative. Even now with my latest novel, one of the major themes is about how there are intrinsic rewards for being kind

Funny story actually. I think it was about five years ago I decided to re-read some of Anne McCaffrey's dragonriders books, which I read for the first time when I was 11 or 12 but continued to love throughout my teens. And as I read them I started getting this insane sensation of "Oh...OH MY GOD" because I absolutely base a ton of my prose structure on her. The way I structure dialogue, the way I write descriptions and even sometimes the way I open paragraphs or chapters is all like, super duper Anne McCaffrey. It's uncanny and hilarious, honestly. But also in a deeper sense, in terms of what I choose to write about and how I choose to write it, I think I owe a great deal to my equal obsession with Terry Pratchett's Discworld books and George Bernard Shaw's plays and essays. Shaw in particular is great at puncturing convention -- at setting up a situation where you think "well, obviously this is a bad thing" and then he'll ask "why?" and upend all your assumptions. Pratchett and Shaw are very good for teaching one how to keep things in proportion and stay thoughtful and critical.
And I also owe a great deal to certain fandom elders -- when I was very young, about 14, and writing my very first fanfics, they were extremely kind. They saw potential in my storytelling but they also saw how terrible I was at basic grammar, and they gently guided me into being a better writer by helping me to learn critical editing skills for my own work.
(My fanfic from 14-18 or so is mercifully invisible, mostly not even archived anywhere -- as far as anyone in modern fandom knows I burst fully-formed onto the scene at the age of 23)

[Follow up: As a beginner writer, it's actually very relieving to know you didn't "burst fully-formed onto the scene" Gives us hope hahah]

Lord no. My early stuff was terrible and it's just as well it's gone. And while I am proud of what I wrote in my 20s, I can also see myself learning and growing as a writer.
I think one of the most important things I learned about being an artist of any kind is a quote by Steve Furtick, a pastor, which goes "The reason we struggle with insecurity is because we compare our behind-the-scenes with everyone else's highlight reel." The fanfic I've got out there is my highlight reel, and I think a lot of writers don't even know that for other writers there is a LOT of behind-the-scenes mess that goes into it.

I'm currently reading a memoir I'm really enjoying, "Mastering The Art Of Soviet Cooking" by Anya von Bremzen, which is about her and her mothers' childhoods in the soviet union prior to immigrating to the US, but also an interesting history of Soviet culture. After seeing the tv show Resident Alien earlier in the year I checked all of the Resident Alien comics out of the library and loved those, though they're very different from the show. I also just recently read the Hunger Games books for the first time and found them shockingly relevant to 2021 -- so much of those books are about how we acclimate to hardship without, sometimes, acknowledging that's what it is.
Katniss's flat acceptance of the hardship of her family's life, while most of the culture still believes they live in an advanced society with high ideals, was a bit prophetic, I think. Reminded me greatly of Octavia Butler's writing in books like Parable of the Sower.

It's always tough to tell because usually I don't notice until someone else points it out, but an enduring theme in my work that I think is probably pretty evident in the HP fic in particular is the question of identity. I studied masks for my master's degree and so that plays into it visibly with several scenes of masking in my fics, but more broadly just issues of who we are, who we think we are versus who we really are, how we present ourselves in order to fit in or stand out. It's a longstanding interest probably because I'm very bad at gauging how others see me. And...well, it sounds absurd, but also food. I write about food a lot and I love putting meals into stories, for which I blame Patricia Highsmith. She wrote the Talented Mr. Ripley series and those always make me super hungry because the food in them is so fancy and lovingly described.

I loved studying masks -- specifically theatrical masked traditions throughout history. It's REALLY visible in a few of the fics...Masked Revels probably most obviously, but also there's a ritual in Sweet Home involving them, and in Nameless there's a costumed ritual related to mumming (theatrical masking in Britain).