The Prologue And Chapter One...

[Bob Schroeck]

I'm not ignoring everyone here, I was just waiting for a critical mass of comments to reply to all at once.

Must be relieved, eh?

Only a little, Fred. I'm never completely relieved until I finish the last chapter.

You do manage to capture British/Scottish voices exceptionally well. It really adds a nice sparkle. I honestly doubt I could do it aswell and I live here. Or near enough to it.

Thanks, Dartz. I worked especially hard on that, as I pride myself on dialogue. Part of it comes from lots of British TV I've watched over the years. Part of it comes from internalizing the characters' voices from the books. And part of it comes from my prereaders, although it was Helen, who's not British, who caught most of my Britspeak errors. (Helen, I should note, watches almost as much British TV as she does Japanese. The potential intersections are... strange.) In general I feel comfortable enough about my Britspeak to actually have written a section on it in my fic writer's guide.

hmm, you know, it's possible that God's Toothpick might be mistaken for Doug's wand at some point.

Wait for chapter two, Timote. I already have the mandatory Ollivander scene written. (BTW, have I made it clear enough in the concordance that I'm trying to whack most of the HP fanfic cliches about the head and shoulders? About the only ones so far which I haven't figured out how to shoehorn in are the mandatory marriage contracts and the wongfully-imprisoned-in-Azkaban plots.)

.... You've never had English Breakfast tea, have you?

Oh, lots of times, BA. It never seemed all that much more powerful than orange pekoe to me.

I wonder, was Trelawny's new prophecy recorded? The Ministry apparently has some means of detecting them and producing the orbs, and a new prophecy in the aftermath of the fate alteration cascade would probably garner just as much interest as Harry's prophecy did for having survived.

Actually, how prophecies get recorded and stored in the Hall is never explained in canon. For the purposes of my story I'm assuming a much simpler process -- at least one hearer reports the prophecy to the Department of Mysteries and gives them a memory copy. Otherwise they would have had warning of Wormtail's flight to Voldemort back in POA.

Since I was so suddenly attuned to grammatical structure, I also noticed a missing comma after shadows in the second sentence.

Heh. Usually I overdo the commas; it's one of my systematic problems as a writer. I think this is the first time anyone's ever suggested I was lacking one anywhere. As for the first sentence, yes, I suppose that on the technical level you are exactly right, but it still says what I wanted to say in the way I wanted to say it. Except "pitch dark", which was supposed to be "pitch black". How that got past all 13 of the prereaders on my ML plus Peggy during live readings, I don't know.

Where Wizarding buildings are involved, space is extremely flexible. Just because there's a bunch of rooms on the first (second) floor, it doesn't mean there must be more than a front hall and dining room on the ground (first) floor to support them.

True enough. It's just that 12 Grim seems to be more into the "rational architecture" thing than the Burrow.

What strikes me the most at the moment is the new side of Doug we get to see here... the one that has studied everything he could about the way magic works in order to help understand his own abilities. Its so easy to overlook in the previous stories because the events there have been so much more action based, I suppose if someone from the pits of Voles could complain hey where did that come from, but that would be because they've not hung around here enough to know what you;ve explained to us.

While some of that will appear in DW1 (and thus, technically, establishing this trait of Doug's well before DW8), yes, this and (to a far lesser degree) the Sailor Moon Step are places where you see it really come to the fore. (And in DW13, too, but it's much more practical than academic there -- he's not teaching or guiding, but using that knowledge to build the tools to build the tools to... etc.)

In short, you've proven to me that Doug really does have the Magic! skill at the intelectual level, despite his personal casting limitation and its good to see the proof of that here.

You ain't seen nothin' yet!

I can see Doug not knowing who Fred and George are at first. However, Doug will evetually be able to tell them apart via body language, since Doug is a master of some martial arts.

Ah, but there's another way to tell them apart.  Fred writes fanfic with Nendo-kata.  George doesn't.  
-- Bob
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Then the horns kicked in...
...and my shoes began to squeak.