Signs of a good fic:

[thistlechaser]

I just finished the Durmstrang Chronicles by Loup Noir, but the characters won't get out of my head! After reading six stories in the series, I know a lot about them, but there's so much more!

Jones's friendship with the Aurors. She seems to really like them, but how much of it is because of self-preservation?

Werner. Mrrrowl. Who would have ever thought that I'd be interested in a good guy? Well, he's an Auror anyway, I guess not so much a good guy. That's what makes him so fascinating: He's supposed to be a good guy, but things work differently at Durmstrang.

I liked Wronski through the series, but in the last story (Duty) my like turned to love. He's so *human*, all the characters are. They all have good and bad in them, some more of one of those, some more of the other.

Loup (the character, not the author) bothers me a little, but it's her character. She is, quite literally, a bitch.

Loup (the author) has done such an amazing thing: He's done to Durmstrang what JKR did to Hogwarts. It's a rich setting full of realistic characters. And personally I like Durmstrang a whole lot more: It's a dark, adult place where the balance of power is ever-shifting.

Need...more...stories!

Comments

[juliansinger.livejournal.com]

Somewhat irrelevantly...

Was this the place you were trying before? Ex-Diana/Xena over on Garou is trying it out, and seems to like it ok, but she's in the exploratory stages.

[thistle-chaser.livejournal.com]

Nope, though I did visit there. Hogwarts MOO was the place I went through the character app process. I did poke my head into that one, but there were no players on even though it was evening. Seemed like an okay place, other than that.

[juliansinger.livejournal.com]

Yeah, they just had a Sorting tonight.

Shrug.

[loup_noir]

Wow! Thank you very much for the kind words.

I'm finishing up "Stacking the Deck", the ninth in the series. In the timeline, it comes after "Between the Devil and Durmstrang" and parallels "The Ticking of the Clock" (both on Schnoogle and on my gray site). It will probably be the last one for a while. I have one other done, but it needs some rewriting and has almost nothing to do with the Potterverse as it takes place in Paris' le quartier magique and deals with my version of the legal Dark Arts. It also takes place about a year later than the current time line and there is one, possibly two stories in between.

Glad you like Paul and Werner. Sort of like night and day.

[thistle-chaser.livejournal.com]

You're welcome! You deserve them all! :)

At the time I made that post, I hadn't found the two last stories yet (Between the Devil and Durmstrang and Ticking of the Clock), so luckily I did have more to read after that post. I loved loved loved Between the Devil; it might have been my favorite one in the series (it's hard to pick just one!). Jones interacting with "the boys" is just so fascinating! They all have such interesting personalities, I'm eager to see more of them.

I'm in the middle of reading Ticking now. If you don't mind me asking, who will be the major characters in Stacking the Deck? Will it be a Jones story or a Loup one? (If you don't want to spoil it, I'll totally understand).

Thanks again for writing all these! You're a wonderful, great, amazing writer!

[loup_noir]

"Stacking the Deck" is a Jones story. It isn't the Jones story I set out to write, though. That one will have to wait for a bit.

Most people like Rose Jones a lot more than le loup de l'ombre. I'm fond of them both, but for entirely different reasons. If you have the time, I'd be interested in your take on "Ticking".

[thistle-chaser.livejournal.com]

"Stacking the Deck" is a Jones story.

Yay!

Most people like Rose Jones a lot more than le loup de l'ombre.

If you read the couple of other LJ posts I made about the series, then you know I'm one of them. :)

I'm not done with Ticking yet, but I'd be happy to give you my thoughts on it once I am. (I'm on chapter 12 now. I expect to get done today, unless something big happens at work and takes my time.)

[thistle-chaser.livejournal.com]

Firstly, thank you for the text size and the coloring of the background. Very easy on the eyes.

While Ticking wasn't my favorite story of the series, there were a lot of things I liked about it:

- The ending. While cold and sad, it really worked. Wronski never even knowing what he was doing, what his potion would really be used for... Poor guy gets the short end of the stick a lot! But since he's "only" a character, that's fine -- makes for a good story.

- The whole part about the client, especially the escape scene. I think for me the escape was the highpoint of the story.

- I liked Loup's fear about getting hit by a car in her wolf form. It really fits, and it makes a lot of sense.

For the most part, what I didn't like was more amorphous. The biggest thing was that I don't like Loup as much as a character, so this story held less for me than the others. I still liked it a lot, just not as much as one with one of the others as the central character.

Just one more little thing, and this is only my own opinion: I think putting JKR's characters into your stories takes away from your own work. In one of the earlier ones, when the Draco family was encountered, it totally knocked me out of the story's mood. Lupin did the same for me in Ticking. It was sort of like having a Buffy character walk through the scene, it just seemed not to fit.

So to wrap this up, I want to say that I love your writing style. I have one chapter left in my rereading of OotP, and last night I couldn't bring myself to read it. I wanted to read more of Ticking. I read a lot of fics, but it's rare as heck that I fall in love with OCs. I love almost all of yours, and I hope to someday find you so that I can knock you over the head and steal them from you. :) Kidding, of course.

Can't wait for the next story!

[loup_noir]

*takes notes*

I like grays. Easy on the eyes.

Thanks for the information. I now have two completely conflicting reviews! The other person didn't care for Loup's little side trip and would have preferred only references to it. Others have prodded me to hook into JKR's universe more. I'm not too keen on using JKR's characters at all. They're hers.

A past beta wants me to write the Lupin at Durmstrang story. (She threatened to write it herself, which prompted me to get started on it.) As I have no plot, just the basic idea, that one will sit for a while.

Loup and Jones get different sorts of stories. Jones is more fun to write, but Loup lets me delve into the darker sides of human nature. My original intent was that each character would get a story, but that hasn't happened. Haken's tale stalled out when I realized how little I knew about East Germany in the early 80's. De Rais is a much better background character (or one suited for a novel - which may happen some day).

If all goes well, "Stacking" should appear in August. My beta just got the first ten chapters again. The next ten get reviewed today.

Thank you for letting me know what you thought of "Ticking".

[thistle-chaser.livejournal.com]

I now have two completely conflicting reviews! The other person didn't care for Loup's little side trip and would have preferred only references to it.

*laughs* Oh no! Maybe we're looking for two different things in the story, I guess. For human-relationship issues, I'd rather see Jones or some of the others. Seeing Loup try to make heads or tails of her "friendship" was... painful. And as she's rather snippy with her mate, that relationship wasn't enjoyable to deal with either. Reading about her as a wolf was fun, reading about her on jobs was really fun and totally interesting. I learned and saw new things in those two areas, but in the relationship field? We knew she's not good at that, and so everything else was just agreement with that original knowledge. Underscoring it where it didn't need to be underscored.

I can't wait to see what happens with Jones, the professors, and the Aurors. I was thinking about this a lot last night, about how future interactions with the Aurors/professors would go, now that Jones is close to them and has a thing with one of them (or at least is trying to have a thing... That is so totally cute, that he (twice as big as her) keeps running away.). If there were more rounds of "questioning" (like in Suspicion, using their binding spells and such), how would the relationship play into that?

My original intent was that each character would get a story, but that hasn't happened.

Including the Aurors? Seems like some of them would be really interesting. Werner and Massys especially. It'd be understandable if you wanted to keep them more in the dark though.

Thank you for letting me know what you thought of "Ticking".
It's the least I could do!