Okay – as the creator of this concept, it was my goal to not fall behind in #wordbound, but it’s only February and here we are. In Week #5, I just had a surprisingly crazy week and was feeling more emotionally affected than usual by current events, so I missed it entirely – and then in Week #6 I came down with a cold that basically rendered me useless for like six days. Now it’s Week #7 and I’m a little overwhelmed, but I can totally do this.

But one of the surprising and wonderful things I’ve seen already in this little community is that people are really big on catching up with week’s they’ve missed, so I’m going to go ahead and say that is a TOTALLY acceptable approach. The weeks and deadlines are just guidelines – the real feat is just making sure you complete them all eventually!

So… now that I am feeling better, I am going to try to power through these puppies. Expect to see more blog posts from me this week.

WEEK #5: Blogging Prompt: What is something you’re embarrassed to admit you’ve written?

So I went back and forth on this quite a bit… was it better to show you actual writing I still have lying around from something terrible and embarrassing, or tell you about something even worse that’s long been lost to the depths of digital time and space? I couldn’t decide, so I’m going to do both.

First things first: I once wrote a fanfic that could only be described as quintessentially Mary Sue-esque that took place at an American Wizarding School that I named Halfmoon Academy. You might think this is possibly somewhat clever – and I still think the name of the school was perhaps a better choice than “Ilvermorny”, but the crucial point here is that this entire wizarding school only existed as a vessel for myself, my middle school best friend, and the two boys we had crushes on to be wizarding students and inevitably fall in wizarding love. This is the only Harry Potter fanfic I ever wrote that didn’t end up on fanfiction.net, because I didn’t even bother changing the names. I just put my best friend and I in all sorts of wacky scenarios in which we would end up spending magical pre-pubescent time with the boys we had crushes on, and we were all excellent at magic, and it was terrible.

The second thing I want to share with you is another suspension of disbelief piece – I once wrote a fanfic about how they installed an elevator at Hogwarts, for no apparent reason, for the sole external purpose of it breaking down and causing Harry and Ginny to get trapped inside. You know, so they inevitably would confess their love for each other and make out. The funny thing is, this has to have been the very first fanfic I ever wrote, because I actually really don’t like Harry/Ginny as a couple and didn’t even remember a time when I would write them together, so reading this now just adds even more insult to injury. It is also eleven chapters of cringey-goodness.

Here is a choice excerpt from the piece:

Harry put his ear up to the wall and shouted, “We’re stuck up here! Get us out!”
McGonagall shouted back, “Harry? Who else is up there?”
“Ginny!”
McGonagall sighed. “Well, we would be able to get you down, but Professor Dumbledore put a spell on the elevator so that students wouldn’t be able to tamper with it with magic. Well, coincidentally, the spell was too strong and not even the teachers can fix it.”
Ginny rolled her eyes. “So just send Dumbledore out to fix it! I don’t want to be late for my first class!” she shouted.
“He’s away at a council meeting with the Ministry of Magic at the moment. He won’t be back for a little while. Don’t worry you two, we’ll get you out. It just may… take awhile.” McGongall finished before closing the shaft door.
Ginny’s heart fluttered. Alone in an elevator? With Harry? “How long do you think we’ll be up here?” she asked him.
“A few hours at least…” Harry muttered, sinking to the ground.
Ginny followed, so that she was sitting across from him.
“Hey, it could be worse,” he joked. “You could be stuck up here with Malfoy!”

Ironically, every fanfiction I ever wrote after this piece was Ginny/Draco.

For your convenience, I skipped a lot of boring will-they-won’t-they and fast forwarded to the good stuff. Here’s more:

Ron sat in the Great Hall, stewing over the fact that Ginny and Harry were alone together in the new elevator. He’d warned her – she had better not do anything.
He felt his anger getting the best of him. He didn’t know why it bothered him so much, but it did.
He ran out to the elevator and kicked the door with his foot. “Ginny!” he yelled.
When he heard no response, he pulled his wand out of his pocket and muttered a few words.

Ginny heard the thud, and then heard her name being called. Knowing it was Ron, she just ignored it.
“Harry?” she asked.
Then the small elevator started shaking.
“What the-?” Ginny shrieked.
“Hold on!” Harry called to her, grabbing her hand with his own.
It kept on shaking violently, jolting them around like popcorn.

Outside the elevator, Ron was shaking as well. His eyes had an evil gleam to them, and he could hear the elevator shaking inside the shaft. He felt another wave of anger wash over him.
Was he doing this? What was going on?

Ginny screamed as the bewitched elevator continued to shake. She felt sick. Harry managed to wrap his arms around her, and they held each other close as they got tossed around.
“What’s going on!?” Ginny cried.
Harry was about to say “I don’t know” when a blinding pain struck his forehead. He cried out in pain and his scar felt like it was going to split his face in two.
“HARRY!” Ginny screamed.
Then the elevator dropped. It kept falling and falling.
“We’re going to crash!” Ginny cried, as they plummeted downward.
Then everything went black.

Later when Ron wakes up in the hospital wing, he and Hermione have a very dramatic exchange of dialogue:

“Have they… figured it out yet?” Ron asked, groggily.
“Figured what out?” Hermione asked him.
“Who broke the elevator?”
“They don’t think it was a ‘who’, Ron. They think it was just technical difficulties.”
“It wasn’t technical difficulties, Hermione.”
“Come again?” she asked him, confused.
“I broke the elevator,” Ron said.

I literally couldn’t bear to the rest of the fanfic, but I assume that Harry and Ginny ended up together, Ron was possessed by Voldemort for whatever reason, and in the end they probably decided to remove the elevator from Hogwarts because it was too dangerous and a terrible idea in the first place? I don’t remember. I wrote this thing fifteen years ago.

I’ll leave you with this:

“What happened?” the nurse cried when she saw the unconscious students.
McGonagall shook her head. “We’re not quite sure. It was an elevator accident.”
Madame Pomfrey’s eyes widened. “Oh dear.”

Thank you for joining me in this trip down memory lane, and please leave a comment letting me know if you ever put your characters in similarly ridiculous situations in your own fanfictions.

See you soon for the Week #6 prompt.

I’m 2 for 2 now  on 5 Fandom Friday! I’m on a roll. For those of you who don’t know what 5 Fandom Friday is, you can check it out here.

The topic this week is: 5 Magical Items I Would Love To Own

1. Invisibility Cloak (from Harry Potter): I’m actually sort of iffy on this one, to be honest. I KNOW I’d always run the risk of using the invisibility for bad reasons – spying, etc. You know you’d never find out anything you actually wanted to know that way. But I think that risk is worth it, because the real reason I want an invisibility cloak is to like, sneak into concerts or other events that are sold out or are extremely expensive. Though as I am typing this, I realize that picking The Doctor’s psychic papers would probably be a much simpler way of achieving this goal. Okay. I’m switching to psychic papers.

2. The Babel Fish (from Hitchhiker’s Guide): I think this one is fairly obvious. Being able to understand any language would be beyond badass. I don’t even think I need to justify this with any more explanation, I just wanna travel and this would make travel so much easier.

3. Transformation Brooch (from Sailor Moon): Okay, even if it like, didn’t actually work, you know? Even if the brooch only transformed me into a girl in a Sailor Scout costume, that’s still worth it. I JUST WANNA TRANSFORM, DAMMNIT. I wanna yell “moon prism power make up” and then I want jaws to drop because of the magical lightshow that engulfs my body. And then I want to be wearing a pretty sailor suit.

4. Everlasting Gobstopper (from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory): It’s the only candy you’d ever need. I just want one! I could create a whole review series “today it tastes like popcorn.” “today it tastes like beef stew.” “oooh oatmeal, that’s new. anyone else got to oatmeal yet?”

5. The Clow Deck (from Cardcaptor Sakura): This is sort of my catch-all final magical object, because really any power I didn’t get with my previous objects will be in here somewhere. A deck of 52 cards, each containing a different creature with a unique ability.. yes please. Flying, jumping, control of wind, etc. It’s all in there. Just don’t make me have to catch them all first.

This was a surprisingly difficult list to put together, but I had a lot of fun. In a conversation I had with Joe about this after writing it up, he pointed out that I forgot to mention a Time Turner, which I immediately regretted. But! After thinking about it a little more. I decided I didn’t want one. While time travel would be amazing, I would definitely Hermione all over that thing. I know myself, and I would only use it to get more work done, and in the end that would not be a good thing for me.

What would you pick? What would your magical items be? Let me know in a comment!

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This week marks my 7 year anniversary of making YouTube videos, and I’m sort of in shock thinking about how long that actually is. SEVEN YEARS of getting to interact with you guys on a regular basis, seven years of memories, and seven years of growth as a content creator.

I’m feeling really nostalgic and excited this week, so I’ve made a Subblime list highlighting some of the most pivotal things that have influenced my channel and my personality over these past seven years. You also have a chance at winning the new special edition paperback box set of Harry Potter, with those gorgeous new covers. Don’t miss it!

I also talked a little about Patreon and my future plans for my YouTube channel, which will hopefully include some fun new writing-related projects! Be sure to check out my Patreon page for information about that and how to get involved.

Thanks to EVERYONE who’s ever consumed any of my work, and I truly hope you’ll stick around to see what the future brings.

Hey guys! Rather than try to figure out her vision myself for this post, I figured it would be better to give you guys the real deal. I introduce to you my friend and roommate Liz Leo, the mastermind behind the Spiny Serpent portion of our Knockturn Alley party.

The Spiny Serpent is home to all things creepy, crawly, and scaly. You simply can’t find stock like this anywhere else in the wizarding world. We have your spiders. We have your maggots. We have your miniature poison-egg-laying dragons (perfect for brunch with ex-boyfriends).

A regular here at the Spiny Serpent, Mr. Dungeon Troll (his parents weren’t very original), once told me a story about how a pesky boy wizard stuck a wand up his nose when he was just trying to go to the bathroom during a Halloween party. We decided to honor his tale with a pretzel and dip delicacy (the dip featured here is cheese, as we ran out of real bogeys just moments ago).

We have scores of dragons that lay all sorts of pernicious confections. Some eggs make perfect smoke bombs to be used for sneaky escapes. Others contain scrolls that predict the future. These- well these are chicken eggs that I hard boiled, gently cracked the shell, and soaked in red and black food coloring for a few hours- I tend to save the real dragon eggs for higher paying customers.

Maybe window shoppers like yourself might be more interested in some dragon scales and goblin blood- only a knut a scoop. Our dragons shed like mad in the summer, so we sell the scales by the bag all autumn long. However in a pinch blue tortilla chips and verde salsa will get you through a dry spring.Finally, if you’re like me and you spend a large portion of your time wrestling giant flesh eating slugs away from your nursery of carnivorous shrubs, sprouts, and seedlings, then you’ll be needing this drink to take your mind off of your struggles. This “Flesh Eating Slug Repellant” features margarita mix spiked with tequila, limeade, and ginger ale- plus the salt around the rim will make sure the slugs don’t go for your flesh as well. (Oh, and please forgive our signage’s spelling error. Our house elf Winky must have gotten into the sauce before practicing her penmanship.)

*cue ominous music

The Potter fandom is absolutely WRITHING with excitement today, as many of us woke up to the news of the newest addition to the HP franchise – a brand new movie (potentially a series!) based on the textbook companion to the Harry Potter books, “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them”. I read this little book from cover to cover back in my school days, and the idea of learning more about Newt Scamander, the fictional author of this piece, is hugely exciting.

Now that I’ve had a moment to stop and catch my breath, a few things have finally started to register. Not only does this story take place 70 years before the Harry Potter books, it also is set in New York city. So much of what we know of the wizarding world is so central to the UK, and very based in the issues and politics of the now. In this new series, we’re going to get to see so much more of Harry’s world; parts he doesn’t even know about. The American wizarding community, life as a witch or wizard in the early 1900’s, other professions we know very little about. I don’t even know what to be most excited about, or what to expect really.

What strikes me as the most incredible, however, is JK Rowling’s seemingly impossibly keen skill at pulling the wool over our eyes. The Cuckoo’s Calling news kept my Potter heart aflutter so much so that I never imagined something like this. And call me a conspiracy theorist, but I was just talking to my friends yesterday about how odd it was that the “8th Harry Potter Book” April Fool’s day prank started circling the internet again, out of nowhere. Coincidence? Maybe, but I like to think it’s some sort of intricate PR strategy that we all walked right into.

There’s not much more news yet – no release date, no word on how many movies, no director, no actors… but I couldn’t be happier. Our fandom is alive and well; there’s theories to be theorized, costumes to be worn, midnight showings to plan for – and there’s no group of people I’d rather do it with than my Harry Potter family. I have ALL the feels right now, and all I want to do is continue to see how the rest of the Internet is handling it. This is better than ten Christmases.

Check out LeakyNews for the full story, or more importantly, for predictions.

You wouldn’t be human if you didn’t have an absolutely completely awful horrible head achey bad day every now and then. Wednesday (yesterday) was that day for me and superficial or no, sometimes the only cure for a bad mood of this calibre… is new clothes.

This outfit makes me happy for a number of reasons. First of all, pattern mixing. Floral print and polka dots are, in my opinion, among the most carefree styles of clothing one can wear, so the combination of the two instantly took my mood from “totally sour” to “slightly less irritable”. Not to mention someone on tumblr referred to these overalls as “coversomes”. Is that a phrase? If not, it needs to be. I love it.

I also used the “pin your hair back in an attempt to hide the fact that you didn’t shower today” technique, which went off without a hitch. Sleeping in braids is the trick to this method, giving your hair a somewhat believable wave-like quality.

Next was the “random bracelets from my dresser” combo, which was part accessory, part potential sacrifice if my day happened to get worse and I needed something to explode. The ricocheting of fake pearls in every direction in a moment of massive frustration is a nice backup plan to have tucked away in the back of your mind as you face your absolutely completely awful horrible head achey bad day.

The last and most important element of my bad mood outfit was my Harry Potter sorting hat necklace. Because even on the worst of days, I know I’ve always got Harry to cheer me up. My necklace was a gift, but I just found this similar one on Amazon.

What are your go-to strategies for your bad days? What silly items of clothing or games or TV shows can make you feel better even during the most stressful times? Let me know in the comments – maybe they’ll help me too.

Update: As it is Thursday now, I feel I should let you all know that I am having a much better day, and the bracelets did not get exploded. They made it back to my jewelry box unscathed.

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