It's been a year since the last update. Yeah.
Right, so. People who've been paying attention to my profile will note that this story has been undergoing a rewrite. Unfortunately that won't be happening.
Why?
I have to force myself to fill in the backstory, to write down the reasons behind everything to think about how the characters would react to something as opposed to wondering why they've reacted that way. In short I've lost interest and enthusiasm for my story of blended cliches.
That and it's pretty much developed into a piece of original fiction with a splattering of In Name Only characters and other mistakes that make me sit back in reflection and ask 'What have I wrought?'.
I would like to thank you all for reading this sordid tale and I apologise for its lack of conclusion.
That said, the next chapter on this site is the unreleased material, general spoilers and plotline I have lying around on my hard-drive for those of you who want to know what was going to happen.
What follows is my own reflection on The Reluctant Lord, my errors in writing it and it's rewrite:
The Reluctant Lord started as an excuse to write erotica. It has all the trappings of it in the first chapter, one guy with a lot of girls and magic as an excuse to come up with weird and bizarre things that aren't possible in reality. They were mostly things that seemed like a good idea at the time, and if it's something I've learnt from experience it's that things written or conceived off at 3AM need to be thoroughly, thoroughly checked if they're going to be placed in anything other than the 'lolwut' folder in the writing section of my hard drive. No matter how 'interesting' they seem.
I didn't do this with TRL and I should never have published the first chapter before thinking things through. For an erotic quick-fic it's okay, it introduces characters, establishes that things are different enough to let this little fantasy play out but doesn't spend forever agonising over the details. It simply nods that, yes Harry is a Badass that someone the guys would like to be and yes the varying girls that he'd normally like to talk to are also covered in super snowflake glitter and we can get onto the emotional aspect of kinky BDSM multi-partner relationships our inner libido would kinda-maybe like to experiment with behind closed doors. Or maybe that's just me.
However I then started asking myself questions as to why this was happening. Why would the social norm be broken that much? I have read far too much of the later Anita Blake books because my mind immediately jumped to some kind of mystically boosting hocus-pocus thingumy plot point. The end result I eventually decided on was based loosely on the the Majesty Discipline from the Vampire RPGs with some judicious idea procurement from fanfics whose names I have unfortunately forgotten. The end result was the 'Lordship' ability which is basically a twisted mix of spiritual vampirism, empowerment and manipulation.
One of my problems with the rewrite was trying to come up with a reason for its existence other than 'just because'. I had magic use as the combination of two mutations, one in the soul that allowed it to store energies and the other in the 'mind' that allowed it to control them. Simple things with a complex and interesting result. The Lordship thing resembled something jacked into existence by a Xel'naga, god, Ancient Race or other Deus Ex Machina that I really didn't want to deal with. But I almost had to because it's abilities were very complex, very powerful and the plot revolved around it.
The whole 'Bubonic Dragon Plague' strikes 17th century magical world, and, due to teleportation, instant travel and all kinds of panic, regresses their technology and results in oppressive conservative governments whilst leaving awesome stuff for the cast to play with wasn't as much of a plot hole and I was still concerned about it. It wasn't even in the readers face, just paraded in as a token explanation as to why no one's done this before and then paraded out.
Similarly the whole 'bloodline abilities' thing was an excuse to have some erotic ritual scenes thrown into the story and have unintended kinky side effects. It was only after I'd written and published Daphne's scene that I realised that all the others would be pretty much the same. It was also my excuse for mass lesbianism. Which is either a good or a bad thing depending on whether you were reading the story for the smut or for the porn.
Thus I had the beginnings of a slow kink fic with a splattering of plot that would hopefully avoid the intricate descriptions of sexual organs that plagues terrible fanfics that revolve around sex.
Unfortunately my mind ran away with the concept and didn't just stick to the kink. Thus bloodline abilities started to become a very important part of the TRL setting. It reached the point where an 'Ancient' house was one with a bloodline ability and a 'Noble' house was one that could trace it's past back to the founding 'Lords' of Magical Britain circa eleventh-twelfth century. They even became a core point of this universe's Dumbledore, as a man who wallowed in the past, constantly attempting to preserve as much of 'their great age' as possible. At least that was his motivation for part of the story, it occasionally oscillated between that and ensuring that as many souls as possible left this realm for The Light. Yep, 'I shall take your darkness upon myself for your greater good' Dumbledore.
I'd read too many Cackling Evil Dumbledore fics and wanted to try for a more morally gray fanatical Dumbledore that cared more for the sanctity of your immortal soul than your life on this plane. Better for the masses to dies as followers of the light than to live long enough to succumb to darkness, after all.
I may have possibly been drawing too much on the HP/Warcraft crossover plot bunny I have lying around in a hutch somewhere.
But I digress, the introduction of bloodlines and the implications that the rest of society had them started the snowballing of TRLs greatest problem. It couldn't decide if it wanted to be porn with plot, plot with porn, a slightly erotic thriller or an exploration of concepts and frankly, neither could I. Both the story and my notes are filled with digressions, notes on planes, how the magic works in this setting and all kinds of other things that really aren't important to the story.
I was trying to take the Fridge Magic of Rowling and retrofit it into a logical framework where attempting the same thing and expecting to get different results was madness. Necromancy, Dark Magic, dark magic, normal magic, emotional magic, divination, the planes the energy came from, the creatures on these planes, wands, staffs, orbs, rods. I had plans for all of them, plots revolving around them and it was all going to degenerate into a humongous mess as magic was no longer simply a tool to help the story along but a plot point in of itself. And a pointless plot point at that. Story bloat had come in and transformed whatever I had on my hands before into a scum riddled mess that was going nowhere fast.
This is ultimately what killed the rewrite: Harry Potter had become a window dressing for a story that had very little to do with Rowlings world. If I'd have finished it I could have changed the names and tried to sell it. Harry Potter was more Ender than Harry, Voldemort was slowly turning into a crafty, competent sociopath using wizarding society and Harry as his own tools for his own crazy reasons. Dumbledore was a tired fanatic clinging to the flames of his belief amid a wizarding society that was a crippled husk of a bygone era plucked clean by the DoM and the last Great Lady of Magical Britain. Not exactly a schoolyard drama.
There were reasons for this that if you squinted at them right made this world resembled Rowling's - The Potter bloodline was the major one, as it was the most overpowered one in existance: mimicry. Of course Harry's had a fragment of Voldemort's soul and thus inherent magical abilities stuck in his forehead for him to mimic. Voldemort's 'arbitrarily augmented by dark rituals' innate abilities. I had this as at least making him stronger, smarter and healing a lot quicker as well as conveniently immune to killing curses.
My mental view of this world became gradually more jaded and further and further away from both what I'd started with and the base universe by Chapter 8 or so it had clearly moved on from a erotic quick-flick to something with depth and a half-assed attempt at a plot, the schism between start and end getting worse and worse until last chapter when I realised that, at the very least, I needed to rewrite it so that my backstory and bonus fun pointless items and powers made a semblance of sense. Frankly I'm amazed (and still am) that it was as popular as it was.
My decision to announce that I'd stopped work on it pending a rewrite felt like the best idea at the time. I had every intention of turning my flashbacks, half-baked ideas and other inconsistencies into a foundation that I could build a tale worth telling from. It went fairly well until I tried to firmly plot out the fourth year. The Triwizard tournament and the subsequent resurrection of Voldemort is the most important part of the series. The story moved from children's fiction to teen's fiction and it is either the end of the beginning or the beginning of the end, depending on how you want to look at it.
The problem I had with is was that no matter how I looked at it, I couldn't quite see a way in which the background I'd thought up led to the story I'd posted so far. When I was just experimenting with the thought of erotica and wasn't expecting anyone to pay any attention to my stories that was okay. With a story revolving at least in part around political intrigue and serious issues, it's not. That is ultimately why the story died.
In reflection I made two very large mistakes with this story: My first was publishing it too soon. I was trying my hand at something new and didn't know how it would turn out. That should have been a good a reason as any to postpone it, even more so when I realised that what I was actually writing wasn't what I had originally thought. The second mistake that I made was introducing too many elements to my story. For me a good story is somewhere between ten and a hundred and fifty thousand words that end with a viable conclusion. With all the unnecessary elements I'd added to this it was looking to be a good 200k+ when it would have been better to leave it as a main story with the possibility of a few short stories exploring the setting I'd made up in my head. [/rant]
Hopefully this has been a vaguely interesting insight into my lines of reasoning behind canning this story.