February 25, 2021
For some time now, the fate of “Harry Potter and the Dark Lord’s Equal” has been up in the air. I spoke about it on a podcast with TheBlack’sResurgence some time ago and ever since, there have been a fair number of people wondering what I was going to do with the story.
The short and unfortunate answer is that, as of now, I can officially announce that “Harry Potter and the Dark Lord’s Equal” is dead… kind of.
First, allow me to explain my decision before everyone is up in arms, as well as state exactly why I am sure none of my other stories will suffer from this fate.
I started writing fanfiction long before I was posting on fanfiction.net. As I have stated in one of these blog posts before, I am a high-level athlete and have been for many years. I also have horrible ADHD, which makes the travel necessitated by athletics a real pain. Especially back a few years ago before I chose one sport to pursue at a professional level, because I was involved in so many different things.
High-level athletics in general is also just very stressful. I know many people say that athletes at the highest level don’t deserve what they make, and I don’t even necessarily disagree with that. I can say first-hand that the money, at least in track and field, really isn’t great at all unless you are one of the very few athletes with major endorsement deals. If anything, I think a slightly more even spread of pay may be more appropriate than just taking it from the top guys, but I digress. The point is that, while that statement can easily be argued as true, I’m not sure how many people actually understand the mental stress that competing constantly at that level causes. That is to say nothing of the training or the lifestyle that comes along with it.
I’m not saying this to make it sound like athletes are these impressive beings, I’m saying this for background information.
I started writing “Harry Potter and the Dark Lord’s Equal” when I was 15 to avoid the monotony of travel. I did not post it on fanfiction.net for several years and when I did, it was really only to get feedback. At that time, I had no plans of taking writing seriously. Then, “Ashes of Chaos” happened, and I actually started making serious attempts to advance myself as a technical writer. I am very proud of the progress that I made because, before 2020, I was awful by comparison to where I am now and it shows.
It especially shows with “Dark Lord’s Equal”. Again, I started writing the story years ago. I wrote the vast majority of year one at the age of fifteen before coming back to it later and, in short, I am just so unhappy with it. It isn’t even so much the technical writing. That is awful at the beginning, don’t get me wrong, but that is something that can be fixed with relative ease. My problem with the story is that I had no concept of how one should be told. I made foolish narrative mistakes in the first 5 or so chapters that trapped me in a box I now cannot escape from, and that is something that cannot be fixed.
It is primarily for that reason that I am officially abandoning “Harry Potter and the Dark Lord’s Equal”. I am a perfectionist to the highest of levels. I do not want to work on something that makes me cringe when I think of it, as I find it very mentally taxing. I also just can’t do most of the things I want to do in DLE because of the narrative errors I made at the beginning of the story. They aren’t actually that egregious, but they are very limiting and they take the story in a direction I am no longer happy with. Also, from a clinical, business standpoint, it isn’t great to have the story up either. It is miles behind what I am currently capable of and it does not reflect positively on me as an author. As someone who is looking to move into original fiction in the future, that isn’t what I want someone’s first impression of me as an author to be if I am hoping they might one day buy my original work.
That is the long and the short as to why the story is getting abandoned, but allow me to elucidate on why this is not a concern anyone needs to have for any of my other stories.
All of my current stories — “Ashes of Chaos, Fabric of Fate, Conjoining of Paragons” and now “Perversion of Purity” were written when I was much older and when, more importantly, I actually knew what I was doing. I can honestly say that I am immensely happy with all of these stories and that I have made no choices in any of them that I consider to be a narrative error. I am greatly excited for the prospects of all of these fics going forward and it is for that reason I can promise they will not be abandoned. “Dark Lord’s Equal” was the last fanfiction I wrote years ago before I decided to become a competent author. My past ineptitude presents no threat to any of my other fanfictions, so please do not make snarky comments about my others getting abandoned, because it will just never happen.
The news about DLE is quite obviously the bad news, but I do have two bits of good news with which I will counterbalance it.
Firstly, the story is not completely dead. I actually like the premise of DLE quite a bit and think the general arc I had planned has serious potential if it’s done in a very different way. I can honestly say that, in the future — but only when I finish one of my current projects — I fully intend to write a similar concept to DLE. It probably won’t start in first year or if it does, its pacing will be much faster and more novel-appropriate, but I do have ideas. Again, this is not happening any time soon. I am finishing all of my current projects before I start on any others. The only reason I took on “Harry Potter and the Perversion of Purity” as a project was because I was planning to abandon this one, so it really just takes its slot as opposed to adding to the workload. PoP is also just much more manageable than DLE or AoC, because it is novel-appropriate pacing instead of years that stretch between three hundred and four hundred thousand words.
Speaking of PoP, that is the other bit of good news.
I HAVE A NEW STORY!
“Harry Potter and the Perversion of Purity” is a realistic dark Harry story. It starts in first year and I make no major AU changes to Harry off the bat. He is slightly more affected by the Dursleys’ treatment of him and he is slightly more curious/motivated. That is it at the beginning. No Harry who can levitate objects with a thought, no Harry who memorizes every first year spell in a week, no Harry who is immediately evil and begins planning world domination from the age of eleven.
“Ashes of Chaos” is, in a lot of ways, me just saying “Fuck canon and everything it curtails” and going completely off-script. PoP is what I actually think could have feasibly happened had Harry been sorted into Slytherin. A slow, steady progression from naive, eleven-year-old boy to something much darker. This is not to say the story is a canon rehash though. Trust me, you will know by the end of year 1 it isn’t. It actually diverges faster than AoC does. If you drastically alter something pertaining to the main protagonist, I think you would be shocked to see how many other things change.
But that is a story for the PoP release blog, which will be out in the next day or two. The first chapter will be out on Discord by the time you read this and Patrons are getting THE ENTIRETY OF THE STORY’S FIRST YEAR TODAY! That is thirteen chapters and over eighty-thousand words.
I do apologize for anyone who enjoyed “Harry Potter and the Dark Lord’s Equal”, but I hope you can all understand my rationale. I will be deleting it off of FFN when this announcement goes live and putting a mention of this blog in my profile. For those who did enjoy this story, I hope you are all looking forward to the semi-replacement that will one day come.
Stay safe and happy reading!
Cheers,
Ace
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