Oooooh, Jilli, you need to pitch a self-improvement/makeover show to Sci-Fi. I bet they're looking for something like that to air 8 times a day. They could pair you up with someone more classically geeky and make-over geeks who lack that certain put-together-ness, while still keeping their identity intact.

I was actually less affected by Dumbledore than I was by Sirius. Partly based on degree of expectation. Partly because I was hunting clues even as I was reading HBP.

good paranormal fiction

Okay, I have to ask. Somebody gave me the first two Rowan Gant novels by M.R. Sellars, Harm None and Never Burn a Witch. Has anybody read any of these? And (stands back, drops match) do you have an opinion on them?

Can you tell that I'm still living in the very pleasant fantasyland where J.K. Rowling will go on to write novels about Hogwarts during the Marauders' era? Does it show much?

I can only see it because I am so with you. I would love to see a non-Harry prequel series. With a young Mr and Mrs Weasley.

And a young Minerva.

Than again, I also want to shag the living daylights out of Alan Rickman in his Snape robes, so let's take bets on which has a better chance of happening.

I can only see it because I am so with you. I would love to see a non-Harry prequel series. With a young Mr and Mrs Weasley.

That and Lily and James and young Snape...

Let's write it for her.

Than again, I also want to shag the living daylights out of Alan Rickman in his Snape robes

I'd prefer to do it with him *out* of the robes, but whatever floats your boat. I'll take Rickman any way I can get him.

I'd prefer to do it with him *out* of the robes, but whatever floats your boat. I'll take Rickman any way I can get him.

Well, I'm wearing my Hufflepuff robes, so it all works out. In my sick little mind, anyway.

wonders if she revealed juuuuust a bit too much about her little AR kink

Hey, robes are good.

::back away slowly...::

::blushes::

I would blush if I told you what I wanted to *do* with Snape...

Or Alan Rickman, for that matter.

And a young Minerva.

Aimee, There's a really good fanfic called "Oversexed, Overpaid, and Over Here," that's set during WWII (and, of course, the Grindelwald war in the wizarding world) and features a young and in-love Minerva working in the British war effort.

I also like Of a Sort, which looks at first-years being sorted in various significant years (including Dumbledore, Minerva, Tom Riddle, the Black Sisters/Lucius Malfoy, the Marauders, Tonks, and Neville's backstory (although the author has not gone back to this story in some time, so it is still incomplete)).

ETA: The WWII-era story makes me remember the fanfic I'd work up on an outline of which would probably end up pretentious and really bad if I ever wrote it, as well as extremely angsty--it's a wizarding Holocaust story, using the real-life person of Jan Karski as the connection between the oppressed wizards in Poland and Dumbledore and the Minister of Magic in London. I just don't think I have the nerve to write something so completely out of what I know, other than as history.