I wouldn't say so much aside from the series itself. When I decided I wanted to write a story about a less-than-run-of-the-mill Animagus, I read up a lot on any canonical details we had about Animagi, which there'd dreadfully little, so I felt allowed to take some liberties, and since creatures like Unicorns and Dragons are viable Patronuses, which themselves are kind of a glimpse into a person's soul, it felt to me like Dragons were on the table so to speak. And then when it came to deciding just which one of the species Draco might favor... well, there was only one choice for me!

It helped quite a bit that the original version was never really the version I wanted to release to begin with; it was written for the 2018 Big Bang, and though I started over a year before the deadline, when you're modifying the original story so much, suddenly a year isn't as long as you thought! So many scenes that went the same way as in the canon were largely only paraphrased, simply to meet the deadline. In that sense, it was quite easy to go back and embellish, add little tweaks here and there or expand on things I wanted to explore more (or cut out things I didn't think were necessary). Some scenes that were massively changed (like Bellatrix's death in the final battle) were me looking back after I'd finished the fic and going, "Man...I really should have done X."

In short, I always meant to go back and revise the fic--but one puts these things off, and people seemed to like it well enough, so I left it be. In that sense, the removal from AO3 was just the impetus I needed.

While I still would like to make it more my own, I think I'll have to be satisfied with it as is for now and just put my efforts into new pieces!

Really, the mods were very gracious. I got about two weeks' notice before the fic was hidden (just hidden, not removed) in which time I was allowed to make changes to it. If at the end of the two weeks the mods didn't deem the changes sufficient, it would be hidden, and I'd be given a month to remove any offending content before it would have to be removed wholly. I took those initial two weeks to revise a couple of chapters I knew to be particularly close to the canon, in not just the content but the wording, and waited to hear from the mods if those chapters were good to go. If they were, then I knew I could revise the rest of the fic to comply with AO3's standards. Unfortunately, they still weren't acceptable, so while I took the rest of the time allotted to continue to revise in an effort to get to a point it would be acceptable, in the end it just wasn't able to be done--too many scenes play out exactly the same as in canon, and there's only so much I could reasonably do in the time given. While the mods tried everything to give me the time I needed to make changes, offering to extend the month-long revision time, I ultimately decided the fic would not be the same fic if I changed it that much and allowed it to be removed, at which point I began working to revise it wholly.

I worked pretty much exclusively on the revision from the beginning of February to the beginning of May, as reddit posts wondering what had happened to the fic were beginning to pop up, so I was working doubletime to revise and send out epub versions of the original to those who wanted them.

All in all, though, the AO3 gang was as lenient as they could be with me, and they still gave me plenty of time to back up the lovely comments and notes in bookmarks people had left over the years.

And in the end, I'm left with a fic I like better.

Suffice it to say, though, the next time I get the urge to rewrite a canon book, I'll be more adventurous!

For this particular fic, it was really easy, because I had the major canon-altering event in the first couple of chapters--and everything after that was ripples. I only changed what I felt would have reasonably been changed by that event. Most everything else was embellishment, building deeper into what we saw on the surface, especially Harry's thoughts on what was going on around him, or expanding on scenes we didn't see much of. The points that were closest to the canon that I only expanded on were largely ones I felt I wanted to see more of--like Dudley and Harry parting ways--whereas the ones that were altered majorly--like bringing Dumbledore and Grindelwald's relationship more to the forefront--were a lot of the time story-serving, getting Harry's mind ticking and thinking about 'the enemy' in a different way.

Because I stuck to the 'ripples' largely, most of the first 100k is very close to canon, which is something I would have wanted to change, given more time, as it's one of the weaker parts of the fic.

In an early draft, for example, Draco joined the trio much, much earlier and was one of the seven Harrys.

I adore antagonistic pairings, really! People who push each other's buttons like no one else but are still inevitably drawn to each other. Draco's very smart in canon, even if he's not very wise with how he uses those smarts, and he has a lot that he could offer Harry in the friend department if they had ever had the opportunity (ah, those cursed what-ifs), which was what made it really fun in particular to involve him in the friend dynamic Harry already had with Hermione and Ron on the run. I love writing about his cynicism juxtaposed against Harry's...well, Gryffindorness, and seeing him ground Harry while Harry trains him to live a little and take chances.

I really like exploring what it would take for them to become friends at all, let alone something else, hence why lots of my works involve them being kind of thrown together unwillingly.

As for other pairings, I haven't really dabbled in anything else--my brain is just 24-7 Drarry these days!--but I love including Hermione and Ron, especially as a background pairing, to kind of juxtapose and give Harry (and sometimes Draco) someone else to talk to who's going through a not-entirely-dissimilar experience.

Having the Dumbledore and Grindelwald relationship receive more focus--especially through a salacious lens like Rita Skeeter's, who would sensationalize the heck out of it if she'd known about it--was definitely a key point I wanted to include to give Harry something to focus on that wasn't his weird relationship with Draco, but I did want him to be more shocked by the fact it was someone he'd looked up to and thought was A Good Guy being that close with someone who was A Bad Guy. I did make an effort to normalize the community's thoughts on same-sex relationships, or at least Harry's personal thoughts on it. At worst, I wanted him to just assume he was straight with only idle stray thoughts he never paid much mind to, having no personal prejudice because it had just never been something he'd been around.

Harry was kind of forced to reconcile that there was a part of Draco that was, on some level, in love with him, and he had to get over it very quickly or else Draco might die. Harry's savior complex outweighs most other thoughts in my book!

I'm an avid longfic writer, so when I have an idea, I'll generally let it stew until it's really meaty and I know that once it's all done, it'll be clocking in at close to 100k. Having done this enough times now, I can generally tell when a story will need around that many words to be told (and when I write out my notes and start a skeleton of the fic, I know that the count will be tripled or quadrupled). So I guess in that sense I kind of write with a word count in mind as well as until the story I want to tell has been told, lol. I like to write stories that will occupy people for a couple of days (or in the case of certain mammoth fics, a couple of months) and keep them voraciously turning metaphorical pages, so I'm always trying to expand my ideas until I feel like they're enough to constitute a novel or longer.

MWLDTM wasn't supposed to be a Hallows rewrite, even--it was just me reading lots of Veela fics and thinking, "I want to try writing a fic where Draco is Harry's 'mate' but try to avoid common tropes... How could I do that?"

I find it helps to wait 100,000 words to introduce the other character properly.

BUT if you can't wait that long, then I suppose it depends on where your characters are starting at.

For Harry and Draco, it's a little bit easier to delay any perception of romance on either's part because when I write them, they're usually starting from a position of bitter enemies, or at least they really don't like one another. It's important to understand why they don't like each other, or if they're already friends, why they aren't something more.

You have to address those points first before the evolution of their relationship can really feel organic, I find. If Draco is horrible to Hermione and Ron, Harry won't feel like being friends with him. If he stops being overtly horrible to them (even if he's not
nice to them), then we can see Harry being a bit open to Draco himself, because it's visible progress without being too far out of character.

It's probably why my fics get so long! I like painstakingly exploring each little step to make the payoff even sweeter.

It also helps to focus on Harry's internal monologue if you're writing his POV, comparing his 'friendship' with Draco to that of his other friends. Slowly but surely, he'll begin to realize that there are definite differences, and eventually he'll start to poke at those differences and explore them further.

Oh gosh, that was a long while back! It definitely started with a lot of self-insert fics for smaller, obscure fandoms and then a lot of pasting-my-own-feelings onto characters for a while.

It was only once I got to college that I really started coming into my own, I felt, and it was when I started meeting other writers online, collaborating with them.

I also started reading a lot more fic then, which helped me learn to write as well. I didn't actually start writing HP fic until...well, until MWLDTM! It was my very first Harry Potter fic, even though I'd been writing fic for around 15 years at that point.

The Drarry fandom is full of such amazing stories--my bookmarks go back to the mid 2000s, and even then it was already a huge fandom--that it was really intimidating to dip a toe into, even though I felt like I had stories worth telling. MWLDTM was mostly just a bundle of notes and 'and then a scene where...' when the 2018 Big Bang announcement was made, and I thought it was a great goal to work towards and a good opportunity to get eyes on my fic since I was a new author with next to no following.

I can't get enough of it now, though ^^ It's really monopolizing all of my fic ideas these days, but I can't say I'm sorry.

Fanfic's pretty much always been a way for me to explore 'what ifs' from canon in a fun environment, hoping to find like-minded fans to discuss my fantasies with.

It takes just the right idea--and seeing a niche that needs to be filled--for me to feel compelled to write something, so the fandoms I write for, I rarely stop at one fic once I'm hooked, because it's a fandom that means a lot to me. Living in Japan, most of my fandoms for a good many years now have been anime-related (like Free!, Promare and Hikaru no Go), not least of all because the canon is easily accessible for me, it's easy to look up information for fics, and the fandom for the most part is quite active.

I can also have my fics compiled into actual books and sell them in person at events here--something that isn't really a thing (at least to my knowledge!) in the US, though I'm not sure about other countries. It's kind of fun, seeing people line up for your work at a table like they would for a fanartist!

That's also what makes it so easy to write detailed HP fic. I have an entire tab group just for Drarry fic resources that never gets closed these days! So many people have compiled useful information over the years, it's great to be able to capitalize on all of that when the itch to write my new favorite scene strikes me.

Outside of taking classes like a creative writing class, there aren't many venues for 'studying' how to write fanfic, so for me it was mostly reading and reading a lot--focusing on the kinds of stories that really drew me in, because those would be the ones I eventually wanted. Reading fics with certain tropes, reading fics with certain narrative quirks, I saw them executed by people better than me and it proved a good template for what I thought was a good fic.

For example, ages and ages ago I read the Drarry fic Friend Like Me by LadyVader. If you've never read it, the fic is written in second-person, being Draco's introspection speaking to himself, but it was the first time I'd ever seen that POV executed in such a way and it really stuck with me. Years later, I wrote my own fic in the same style, and found I really enjoyed it. Seeing someone execute something just so in a way that really resonates with you, it sticks with you, and consciously or subconsciously, you'll start to incorporate it into your own writing style.

I also used to write exclusively het, because that was just all I was interested in the time, whereas my interests have expanded to include slash ships largely now, and the way of writing a canonical het ship is rather different from a get-together non-canon slash ship, so I learned a lot about delving into characters' unvoiced thoughts.

For scenes that flowed more easily than others, the scenes where Dragon!Draco was interacting with Harry were actually easy to write, and not just because there was half as much dialogue lol. Draco as the Dragon let his guard down just a bit, leaning into the parts of himself that naturally had an affinity for Harry and enjoyed being around him/wanted his attention. That allowed me to have to focus less on how prickly Draco still was in those early days (and even a bit later) and more on how they could get along, eventually, once they stopped arguing and just behaved like normal guys.

For scenes I was proud of--I have to admit I really liked saving Fred, and having that one thoughtless action be what finally brought Ron around to Draco. Two birds with one stone! I also very much enjoyed letting Neville stretch his badass muscles in the final battle and get some karmic relief against the person who robbed him of his parents.

And strangely, one of the scenes I felt was a great button on the fic was one I only thought up on the fly. I had never really planned for Charlie to talk to Draco at Harry's party in the epilogue, or at least never to do more than ask how he was doing in passing (after the incident at the final battle). Having him bring up how precisely one year earlier they were also celebrating Harry's birthday, and how Harry had been preoccupied with Draco's condition, was only added when I paused while drafting the scene to try and remember when the last time Charlie had been home.

Whoooo. Well, it was my first one, and I mentioned before there's still aspects of it I'm not satisfied with, but I felt like I did what I set out to do: (1) write a fic that was a different take on the mate trope and hopefully didn't play too much into some of the cringier aspects of the cliché, and (2) write a fic that was true to the 'voice' of the canon, since I wanted to write a fic that was as close to DH (including personalities) as possible.

So all in all, I feel like for the things I find important in a fic--in-characterness and an identifiable voice--it ranks highly. It certainly isn't my tightest fic, or even the one I had the most fun writing, but it came out how I wanted it to, for lack of a better phrase!