Hey friends,
I know this isn’t the marginalia update you were hoping for, but HOLD ON. This isn’t going in the direction you think it is.
First of all, thank you so much for your patience. I'm really sorry for leaving you on such a horrendous cliffhanger for so long. That was never my intention, but the AO3 curse got me so, so bad.
As most of you who follow me on Tumblr know, my health deteriorated significantly over the course of the last two years. It began with chronic migraines and brain fog, which then worsened and led to chronic fatigue, increasing cognitive/language confusion, and finally issues with balance and weakness in my extremities. Long story short, in February I was finally diagnosed with a Chiari malformation, and I had brain surgery last month. I'm happy to report that it appears to have been a complete success! My symptoms are gone. I feel better than I have in literal decades. The curse is lifted. Nice. Now I’m just doing the hard work of recovering from surgery.
In the meantime, a few things have happened:
First, I became a traditionally published author. My debut novel scooted out into the world last year, and I have more books coming out over the next few years. I have no idea how I got here, but holy crap!!
Second, JKR pulled more bullshit. And while I think it’s fantastically ethical, actually, to engage in the reclamatory spaces of fandom, my appetite for it is sort of gone at the moment. I doubt forever. These things wax and wane, even when the author isn’t a piece of shit.
So here’s what’s going on.
I’ve spent the last month reworking marginalia into a piece of original fiction. Which honestly hasn’t been very hard to do. I’ve written hundreds of fic over the years, and this is the first one that I ever felt compelled to revise into something else, because it's also the only one that I knew could stand on its own two feet as more than just an intertext with canon. This fic has always been a frank conversation with its source material, but the result of that has allowed me to bypass the constraints of JKR's world to create something entirely my own. It's also about so much more than that frank conversation. It’s about navigating a version of yourself you can live with under inherently unethical circumstances. It’s about chronic pain and invisible disability, and I do see the irony in not knowing I had either of those things at the time I was first drafting. It's about breaking cycles of abuse. It’s about empathy. I think the world needs more stories like this.
So my agent is going to begin pitching the reworked version to publishers relatively soon, at which point this fic will have to come down from AO3. I'm going to set the date for June 7th. From there, one of two things will happen:
1. The reimagined version will eventually get picked up by a publisher, will become a traditionally published novel—probably a duology, let's be real—and I’ll be very open about where you can get your hands on it.
or
2. No one bites. And this will go right back up on AO3, comment section book club in tact, and I’ll finish the story when the time is right.
In the meantime, I don’t mind you downloading it if you want, and I don't mind you sharing it with others if they ask. It’s a big part of why I’m giving you the heads up. And Pigoletta’s excellent podfic will stay right where it is unless she decides otherwise at some point. But what I do ask is that you don't repost marginalia publicly, not on AO3 and not anywhere else. And for the love of fuck, don't feed it to an LLM to try to generate an ending.
Okay, I think that's it! Thank you all for the gorgeous community that's grown around this fic. I'm excited to see what the next chapter brings.
xo zo
