Potterwizbiz is monthly edition of featuring wizard/witches in writing amazing Potterverse stories! We aim to introduce the best Harry Potter fanfiction story there and about the writer who was behind it monthly.
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Squibstress is a retired professional writer and editor with a nasty fanfiction habit. Since 2010, she has written more than 40 HP fanfics, most featuring Minerva McGonagall, Severus Snape, Albus Dumbledore, and the other adults in the series. Squibstress is a Squib, but if she had received her Hogwarts letter in nineteen-mumble-mumble, she would have been sorted into either Ravenclaw or Hufflepuff. She lives in California with her long-suffering husband and two Squiblets.
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Young Minerva McGonagall is a brilliant witch born into a genteelly impoverished pureblood family. Forced into an arranged marriage to save her family's fortunes, rather than risk her child inheriting the madness that runs in her husband's family, she tricks Albus Dumbledore into fathering her baby. She eventually escapes her disastrous marriage and returns to Hogwarts to teach alongside Dumbledore, but her secrets eventually come out, and the things she's done to ensure a future for herself and her child threaten her newfound happiness and her relationships with Dumbledore, her son, and with her beloved, Alastor "Mad-Eye" Moody.
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1. What made you start writing on Wattpad? What is the best thing when writing a Harry Potter fanfiction according to you?
I first heard about Wattpad through one of my favorite authors, Margaret Atwood, who caused a bit of a stir when she joined in 2012 and posted some poetry. The platform intrigued me because it's built to encourage young writers and help them improve and find audiences in a way that the other major sites hosting fanfiction weren't. I was hardly a "young" writer, even back then, but I was new to writing fiction and dying to explore all the ways to experience it as a writer and reader.
The best thing about writing fanfiction is the shared love and understanding of the common fictional world you're exploring with other fans. Because everyone knows the canon backstory, you can start in media res and get to the fun, meaty part of the story quickly. For me, that means exploring character and relationships in the context of the Harry Potter world. What's fun about Harry Potter fanfiction in particular is the way one can examine themes and elements of real-world "Muggle" society through the lens of a magical society that has built up alongside it.
2. Your story revolves around one of the most loved professors - Minerva McGonagall and her life story before her education profession. What is the inspiration for this? Did you intend to explore her new side or open what is hidden from the main franchise?
The initial inspiration for the story was a line from an Emily Dickinson poem: "Tell all the truth but tell it slant," which I used as an epigraph for the story. The Alastor/Minerva angle was suggested to me by the scene in the GoF film where Minerva upbraids fake-Moody for Transfiguring Draco into a ferret. The chemistry between the two actors (Maggie Smith and Brendan Gleeson) made me feel there was more to the story of that relationship.
In canon, McGonagall is presented as stern, upright, doughty–and I certainly see her as all of those things–but yes, I absolutely wanted to explore a hidden side of her in this story. I wanted to know how she came to be the person we see in canon. One thing I especially love about fanfiction is the way writers can subvert expectations about characters, and McGonagall, because she's an older woman seen only through the eyes of an adolescent boy in the books, seemed ripe for that treatment.
3. In this story, you focus on adult love and marriage. If you can describe Minerva's love story with three words, what would they be? And why?
Uh, oh. I've never been noted for my brevity, but I'll give it a shot.
Surprising, because I think even Minerva was surprised that she could fall in love, and with someone as outwardly different from her as Alastor Moody.
Crooked. Some hack once wrote that the course of true love never did run smooth, and while that's true enough for most of us, it's especially true for poor Minerva.
Tender. One of the things I enjoyed most about exploring this story was finding that the relationship between my Minerva and my Alastor had far more tenderness than I might have expected when I first started writing it.
4. What is your favorite part of writing and building this story? (e.g. world building, character development, love storyline, twists, etc..)
I enjoy exploring character, and I really enjoy putting a character I love into awful situations to see what they'll do. (Like most writers, I am a secret sadist.) A Slant-Told Tale is by far my "plottiest" work to date, so it was also a fun challenge to see what I could come up with to get Minerva from Point A, as a young pureblood woman in an arranged marriage, to Point Z, a confident, professional woman with a (relatively) stable and fulfilling life.
5. If you were a Hogwarts Professor, which subject would you be teaching? And why?
Since, as a Squib, I lack magic, I think I'd be relegated to teaching Muggle Studies. If Binns would finally retire to the postmortem realm, I might take a crack at History of Magic. Or maybe I could help Hagrid with Care of Magical Creatures? One of my earliest jobs was as a veterinary technician, which I quite enjoyed. I think I'd be good at clipping Hippogriff talons.
6. What is your future project for you? Do you plan to continue writing Harry Potter fanfiction?
I have some stories in my Epithalamium series to finish, which I'm working on. I also have about eleventy-billion ideas, some more fleshed out than others, that I want to get to. We'll have to see how many I manage before my fingers or my eyes give out.
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