I may not be leaving MNFF after all. There are some things that may need to be hashed out, but assuming we can come to an amicable compromise, I would be more than pleased to keep all of my stories up here.
As a political junky first, and then an HP freak second, I got to say, there was one thing that bothered me at first about this, but in the end, that one thing is what made me like it. What I'm referring to is the fact that this is not specific. You don't reference anything in the books, there are no blatantly obvious allusions or hints that jump out and say, "Hey, I'm referring to this scene or that scene in canon."
The end result is that in so doing, you have taken a poem that could be applied to the Harry Potter universe, but have made it in and of itself universal. In the current events of today it applies ever so much particularly with the iraq war. But even here the vagueness of the subject transcends ideology, or perhaps conforms to many differing brands of ideology.
You could be speaking about those who have fallen in a war, unborn children lost during abortions, people who have unfortunately succumbed to a persistent vegitative state, etc.
And in so doing you make one point clear and that death is in and of itself universal, transcending the boundaries of ideological thought, and even in some way moral belief. You broaden the subject, and at once make it very personal so that anyone who reads this can apply it to themselves and their own feelings.
Well done.
What can I say? I think the concept alone is brilliant, and lovely. You know I have a certain affinity for this kind of thing, so, you already got me on your side there. But then the execution is done with a rare grace and style. You really feel both Ron and Hermione's pain in the first half, and that stream of consciousness from Molly in the second half, quite brilliant. I favor dialogue a lot of the time, so when I see someone able to convey that much emotion without a word being said, I'm pretty much dead impressed. Very well done, and I hope you continue to write.
Author's Response: Thank you Grimrook. As i have said before, to see a writer of your calibur say things like that means more to me then i can put into words.
You have a very interesting premise here, but I could not finish reading as you don't have a single paragraph break. This is very disappointing, so please put some breaks in there, and contact me and I will eagerly finish reading this and leave a review. thanks.
Author's Response: Thanks for the tip, Kyle! I haven\'t made that particular mistake in months, but I\'m glad you caught it. (There were breaks in my original text, but I\'d forgotten to add the HTML version too. Ah, well.)
It\'s fixed. I hope you like the story.
~Ken
Well, first things first. Feel honored. Anymore it is a very rare thing that I ever read fanfic, most of my time usurped by the writing of my own, and even rarer is when I review. But, your premise was so unique, I had to at least check it out. Still, I thinking as I began I had this strange feeling of apprehension filling me. You were blending two very different things (archaeology and magic), and the last time I saw something of that sort, the result was hideous. Really, I'm not overstating it at all. You have not read absurdity until you've read a conversation between Harry and Dumbledore regarding the feasibility of Harry committing suicide in the hopes of creating a warmhole. Yeah.
To my great surprise, what I actually read was no such affair. Erudite and well researched, I found myself instantly fascinated and immediately plunged into the world of an archaeological dig, each sentence uncovering bits of the past that, sure, I may already have known, but still feeling fresh and new.
At the same time, I was stricken with the level of detail that went into describing the methods of unveiling magic. What could easily have seemed contrived and downright silly you have made authentic and wholely believable.
Thank you for creating something so refreshingly unique.
Author's Response: Thanks again, Kyle.
Hmmmm, not a fan of Nightmares of Futures Past, eh? I rather like it, although I\'ll admit that the quasi-physics was a bit hard to invest in.
I\'m glad you liked the difficult tightrope walk between magic and science. I find myself doing something like that over and over again -- it crops up in \"On the Headmaster\'s Wall\" and in \"The 312th Edition,\" as well as in another fic I\'m working on now. The problem is that, once you accept that magic is governed by some sort of regular rules instead of being purely at the will of the particular wizard, the only sorts of rules that come easily to mind are mathematical and/or scientific ones. The trick, I think, is to avoid too much detail; just enough to make the story hold together, and let hte reader fill in the blanks.
Here, I wanted to make the traces of spells detectable (something like DNA or ashes from old campfires) so that a connection could be made betwen the Caretaker and the Tomb, so I had to come up with the notion of a \"resonance signature\" -- I have absolutely no idea what that means, but it filled the gap.
And this may be one reason why I rarely review, as I'm very prone to being drawn into long discussions. Wow, I can't believe you read the same story as well. Actually, I think I was approached to beta read that story, but I can't remember, it's been a long time since I did beta reading. Anyway, yeah, the physics thing was tough, very tough for me, but I do appreciate the tightrope walking when it is done well. I mean, I have to, don't I, given the nature of my own stories, and some of the tightroping I do there (some revealed, some not to be revealed for some time now). Some other things I wanted to mention that I left out in my initial review. The moment you started to describe Harry's house, the bodies embraced together, my mind instantly flashed back to a news story about human fossils in such an embrace. So it was kind of neat to see you site that at the end of the story. I remember thinking 'I thought so.'
Also, you may not get this reaction from anyone else, but I was also a little creeped too. None of this is your fault, it's just that to pass the time I bought a game called Barrow Hill for my pc, and have been playing it avidly the last few days. It's a myst type game with a horror setting and a knowledge base steeped in archaeology, so I think for a while anything archaeological is going to creep me out.
I know that what you intended to be intriguing and a little touching is not something you hoped to be received with "creeped me out," but take heart. The game I'm playing has lots of archeaological bona fides, and for your story to make the necessary brain cells wire and fire in the same vein means that your reports are probably pretty authentic. Okay, okay, I'm just gonna step out of the way now.
Author's Response: And I, to avoid a long conversation here on the review page, will simply thank you for two very interesting reviews and point out that my Live Journal page (see my profile) has room for lengthier conversations. :) ~Ken