Ruth Sadelle Alderson

I've been devouring Harry/Draco fic at a steady rate for the past couple of days. I usually say I like first time stories, but I don't think that's it. I've read a lot of things that end when they get together, but leave me thinking, "But how does it work now?" (Generally speaking, I'm too practical for typical romance. Have you heard "Remind Me" by Brad Paisley and Carrie Underwood? I'm pretty sure it's supposed to be terribly romantic, but every time I hear the lyric, "you missed your flight/but that meant we had one more night," all I can think is, "That's so irresponsible!") I think what I really like are not necessarily getting together stories so much as learning to be together stories. This is why I love stories with non-sexual intimacy before they're actually together and stories where they're sleeping together before they fall in love.

This weekend, I read saras_girl's Reparations, a getting together story, and its sequel, Foundations, which is the next step of them being together. (Argh! I read them at an archive with horribly ugly formatting I had to turn off and only now do I find that they're also on LJ, which is where those links go.) They were so good I don't really need to read any more Harry/Draco fic. (Although, let's be honest: I probably will.) Harry is in training to be a Healer when he gets assigned to the Chemical Dependency rotation. Chem Dep is officially under the purview of Healer Redrow, but Stage Two - the post-detox rehab part of it - is entirely run by Draco. Harry and Draco learn to get along, then find they're attracted to each other, figure out that they can be together, and then move on with twining their lives together. Each story has a plot, and the plots felt real and interesting and not as if they were there only because the author thought she had to have a plot other than people falling in love. She also does an incredible job with the sex scenes. There are a lot of them in the second story, but I didn't get bored with them. Like the plots, they fit naturally into the story and never seemed shoehorned in for the sake of smut. The only warning I have for you about reading these stories is that they are very long, so if you, like me, don't have the self-control to walk away and come back to it later, you may want to wait to read them until you have a large chunk of time to devote to them.

I wrote a snippetish thing in the comments of the last entry. It's Gabe/Patrick-the-Malfoy-cousin, and I hope you find it half as amusing as I do.

If that doesn't do it for you, you can watch Matthew Lewis, Rupert Grint, and Tom Felton try to "talk American." In this istance, that also includes singing "Party in the USA." It's so funny I cried.

( Video from MTV )

I almost didn't make a post about this, and here's why: I read the book once, and quickly, and once I was done, I was, in many ways, done with Harry Potter. I no longer remember any details about the book, so seeing the movies was like meeting the story anew all over again. There's something they kept in the movie that made me wince (see below the cut for details), and I remembered it bothering me in the book too, so I went back to see if/how I talked about it at the time. Half the comments on that entry are people telling me I'm wrong, and I was surprised by how much that hurt. After thinking about it, I realized I was still upset about the first time people told me I was wrong about Harry Potter (even though it was ten years ago, and even though I turned out to be right after all). But then I thought about it some more and I decided (a) to hell with this; I'm an adult, and I can handle people disagreeing with me, and (b) I've decided that if last year's summer meltdown involved flashbacks to high school and this year's involves flashbacks to college, that must be progress. So here's a post with my four HP bullet points and my two recs requests.

( Spoilers )

In one word: amazing. In more than one word, there are three things I think made this an excellent film. They're more about the movie as a movie than about the movie as Harry Potter, but I'll cut them anyway, in case you want to avoid even the slightest knowledge about it before you see it.

( Three Things )

Today's fantasy rec is the Fantasy Into Reality series by miraminx. This is a Harry Potter Snape/Harry series in which they play out their fantasies. The tenth story brings a plot into it, and although I'm sure I've read the rest of the series, I never go back to it. I prefer to stick to stories from the first nine where they're just playing.

Today's rec is Seeker's Unexpected series, and there's a story that goes with it. You see, Unexpected is a Snape/Harry series in which Snape is deaged and then he and Harry have some increasingly kinky sex. I was in a panel at Escapade a couple of years ago, and I said something like, "Seeker just deaged Snape so Snape/Harry would be hotter," to which Brenda Antrim said something like, "That's not why I did it," and only then realized that no one knew she was Seeker and she'd just accidentally outed herself. (I've always found this interesting because I could never get into Brenda Antrim's fic, but really liked a lot of the Seeker stories.)

Anyway, the stories are hot and increasingly kinky, if, like yesterday's rec, based on a somewhat ridiculous premise. I apparently like the middle of the series: Unexpected 3 (Harry teasing Snape during class, and then fisting him on the demonstration table), Unexpected 4 (in Snape's bedroom as he's recovering from part 3), Unexpected 5 (Hagrid fingering Snape while Snape sucks off Harry), Unexpected 6 (Harry shares Snape with Lupin), Unexpected 7 (wax), and Unexpected 8 (Harry/Snape/Remus/Sirius).

Title: I Have Felt the Wind of the Wing of Madness Pass Over Me
Author: Ruth Sadelle Alderson
Pairing: Draco/Ginny, Bill/f
Rating: FRT
Disclaimer: Not mine, not making any money off of this.
Archiving: My webpage (http://www.graphousa.net/rsadelle/fiction/), anyone else should ask. Archived versions must retain all headers.
Summary: Life in the aftermath.
Author's Note: I worked on this and let it sit and had it edited for so long that I no longer remember who all helped along the way. Many thanks to those of you who did. Title comes from Charles Baudelaire: "I have cultivated my hysteria with delight and terror. Now I suffer continually from vertigo, and today, 23rd of January, 1862, I have received a singular warning, I have felt the wind of the wing of madness pass over me."

( I Have Felt the Wind of the Wing of Madness Pass Over Me )

norwich36 and I arrived before the rest of our party, so we sat ourselves down at the end of the line. This put us right behind two gay boys named (and I swear I'm not making this up) Jesse and James. One of them was very good at Apples to Apples, which norwich36 bought for us to pass the time. The other one has pole-danced in nine-inch heels. Because he used to live with a lesbian stripper. Reality continues to trump fiction.

And now to have breakfast and read the book.

This is the last of my HP unfinished fic, (except for the Harry/Luna one I started on Monday, which I still might write more of; I also have two more finished but never posted HP fics, which I will attempt to polish up and post before Friday night), and I'm very sad to admit that I'm never going to finish it. This was my baby, my epic. I knew what was going to happen three years into the future of the story. I was experimenting with one, long, unbroken narrative. I last worked on it on June 15, 2005.

This is very long, so I'm breaking it into two entries. If you want to know what happens after the end of the story, that's at the end of the second one.

( Astra-Story Part I )