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A Slant-Told Tale Now Complete!

Book cover: A Slant-Told Tale

A Slant-Told Tale is now complete in 47 chapters and an epilogue.

It’s a canon-but-not-Pottermore-compliant novel of love, loss and redemption, featuring Minerva McGonagall, Albus Dumbledore, Alastor Moody and a host of canon and original characters. With a total of 65,800 reads on FFN to date, this is one of my most popular stories.

Before she was Professor McGonagall, she was Minerva Macnair. After an arranged marriage forces her into an impossible situation, Minerva does what she must to survive. When she makes a new life for herself, her secrets follow and threaten everything, including the only love she has ever found. The tale of a woman, her secrets, and how she keeps them.

  • 168,000 words
  • Minerva McGonagall/Alastor Moody; Albus Dumbledore; Original Characters
  • Mature audiences

Read It On

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New Fic: Exotic Matter (Minerva/Severus, Hermione/Ron; R)

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Exotic Matter

The wonderful Minerva Fest has just ended and the reveals have been posted.

My contribution was a long-ish short story, “Exotic Matter.”

Title: Exotic Matter
Characters: Minerva McGonagall/Severus Snape; Hermione Granger/Ron Weasley, plus a host of other characters you’ll recognize from canon.
Summary: When Hermione is asked to update the National Dictionary of Wizarding Biography, she discovers some surprising things about her favourite professor. An angsty, nerdy time-travel romance.
Rating: R (for brief sexual content and some violent imagery)
Word count: 17,000

Excerpt:

It was going on three o’clock when she rose from her bed and removed the wards from the box that was Concealed at the top of her wardrobe. Gazing into it, she made a decision. Or rather, she acknowledged the decision she’d made the moment she looked into Harry’s blank eyes.

Three hours later, she used the privilege of her position to Floo directly to Albus’s quarters, surprising him before he’d risen from bed.

“There may be a way to save them.”

“Tell me,” he said, pulling on his dressing gown and gesturing for her to sit
He listened to her without interruption, seemingly without reaction, but she’d known him long enough to understand that the slight twitch of lips meant she’d surprised him.

When she finished her tale and showed him the item in question, he said, “Are you certain it will work properly?”

“It did forty years ago.”

He looked into her eyes, and she waited to feel the press of his Legilimency against her mind, but it didn’t come.
“You haven’t used it since?” he asked.

“Never.”

He was silent, looking at her appraisingly, and she understood that he was recalibrating her in his mind, reconciling the Minerva McGonagall he’d thought he knew with one who could make the only functioning prototype of a dangerous magical instrument and keep it a secret for decades.

“Why did you take it?”

His question surprised her. They almost never spoke of personal matters, of their whys and wherefores. That path would be too fraught with hazards neither wanted to engage.

Because I was angry, she wanted to say. Because they didn’t deal fairly with me. Because Rufus kept his bloody job, while I was tossed out without a reference. But he knew all that. He wanted to know the excuse she gave to herself, wanted to judge whether her private lie should affect his actions. He was not a scholar of time travel, but he was a man who understood that a lie could affect the fabric of reality just as surely as the tiny instrument that hung from a chain around Minerva’s neck.

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New Fic: A Perfectly Potent Potion (Minerva/Severus; NC-17)

Fic

I contributed this (humorous, I hope) little bit of pron to this year’s HP Rarepairs Cliché Fest on LiveJournal. The clichés I selected were Polyjuice!fic, Hogwarts professors (naturally), and gender!switch.

The ever -wonderful Kelly Chambliss was my beta.

Characters: Severus Snape, Minerva McGonagall
Summary: Severus brews some extra Polyjuice and plays a trick on Minerva. Amorous hijinks ensue.
Rating: NC-17
Word count: 4,957
Warnings: Professors getting it on. Multiple pairings (sort of): f/m, f/f, m/m. Maybe some crackiness around the edges. Oh, and non-con, in a way.

Excerpt:

“What are you doing?”

She turned to him, eyebrows raised. “Since you’ve effectively scuttled my intention to win back last week’s House points through the inventive use of various orifices—bravo, by the way—I thought I might try another tack.”

“I don’t see why.”

She stood blinking for a few moments, and when her shoulders squared, he knew he had her. With Minerva, there was no surer aphrodisiac than debate.

She said, “Quite aside from the ethical considerations, I believe I’ve already told you: while I adore Albus Dumbledore in any number of no-doubt inappropriate ways, I have no desire to shag him.”

“But you wouldn’t be shagging Albus, you’d be shagging me.”

“Using Albus’s body.”

“It isn’t really his body. It just looks like it.”

“It is morphologically the same. Polyjuice produces an exact replica.”

“Aha! Replica. Last I checked, a replica wasn’t the actual item.”

She waved a dismissive hand. “Semantics. Although the original still exists, your body is now, cell-for-cell, the same as Albus’s. In my book, that makes it his body. Just as if I made a magical copy of your last article for European Potions Review. You would surely object if I then decided to publish my copy in The Practical Potioneer.”

“Of course. That paper was far too good for them. And I think you’re mistaking Potions with your field. You need to get out of your ivory tower. I haven’t been changed into Albus, whatever you say about cells. My mind is still my own, and so are the cells it controls.”

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New Fic: Sybill Trelawney & the Unexpected Gift (Sybill, Minerva; PG-13)

Fic
Sybill_Trelawney

This was my contribution to this year’s HP Friendship Fest on LiveJournal. The prompt was from MMADfan (who also wrote a wonderful story, “Not Entirely Tedious”): After being sacked, Sybill turns to drink again. Minerva intervenes. Can be either a hopeful fic or more ambiguous.

Title: Sybill Trelawney and the Unexpected Gift
Characters: Sybill Trelawney, Minerva McGonagall
Summary: “You can’t use your Gift, it uses you,” Professor Dorsett tells Sybill, and over the years she finds out how lonely a Seer’s life can be. But when she turns to drink to help her manage it, she finds help from an unexpected source.
Rating: PG-13 (for depictions of alcoholism and some violent imagery)
Word count: 8,095

Excerpt:

The dinner was interminable. Sybill managed a few bites of potato and nothing else; even if she had had any appetite, her hands were shaking so badly that she could barely get the fork to her mouth. Finally, blessedly, the pudding arrived, signalling that Christmas dinner was nearly over.

When Dumbledore stood to offer a closing toast—in pumpkin juice, sadly—he caught Sybill’s eye and smiled encouragingly. A vision of him lying in the mud, his long white hair matted with blood, danced before her.

She screamed.

When she took her hands from her face, the vision faded, but she couldn’t look at Dumbledore. Desperate for anything to distract the Inner Eye from the terrible thing she had Seen, she fixed on the two boys standing near the end of the table. “My dears!” she said to keep herself from uttering anything she shouldn’t. “Which of you left his seat first? Which?”

Minerva said something, but Sybill couldn’t hear it. The voices were speaking to her again.

As she fled the Great Hall, no one heard her murmur, “Choosing death, you will defeat it.”

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