AN: All right, friends. As I've told you several times, I'm not happy with this story, and now I'm going to stop complaining and tidy it up. Before I've just gritted my teeth and kept moving forward, but all that did was make me even less satisfied and made you all wait longer and longer for updates because I was too lazy to go back and fix things. So that's what I'm doing now; I'm going back and changing the story until I'm happy with it, then I'll continue moving forward. I'm pretty satisfied with the style of writing itself, but the characters desperately need a revamp, and the plot could also use some tweaking to keep things moving.
What I need to do with the characters: I need to make everyone more consistent, if nothing else. I do need to get Hermione and Bellatrix more in character, but the others are all right. My main problem is that Hermione is too naive and impulsive and Bellatrix is too weak. Hermione is nothing if not smart, but I haven't shown it at all, instead trying to make her compassionate to a fault, which really suits Harry better. It's taken far too long to give her a real reason to help Bellatrix when really she should have justified her actions fully before doing anything. Next, I wanted to show Bellatrix breaking down after her beloved master died, but she's just too chaotic. Her mood swings are even out of my control, and she cries too easily, which makes it far less powerful than it should have been if she just was seen crying once, as I intended. So, I need to go back and change these two idiots until I'm happy working with them again.
What I need to do with the plot: I mostly just need to give the whole story a sense of urgency. The past several chapters have been all dialogue, and there's no rush. The castle is in ruins, Death Eaters are still waiting in chains to hear their fate, there are two Weasleys to be buried, and Bellatrix has a death sentence over her head. Yet everyone is just sitting around talking to Hermione, and not doing much else. This should be simple: I'll just have the Ministry set a date for the wedding when Kingsley tells Hermione about it. That way she has to get things moving by that day. Really, the only action I had was killing Bill, and between this story and The Hard Way I think I just keep spontaneously killing people off because I like to describe the corpses, which doesn't really help the plot much. So, things need to happen faster.
Writing all of this down was just as much to let you know what I plan to do as it was to help me figure out what I plan to do. If I want to get my act together, it will take a while, and I can't post anything until all of it is done. Then I'll just upload the heavily edited chapters, post any new ones, and we can all get back to posting normally, and hopefully more frequently. What I need from you, readers, is just some patience. You've all been great putting up with me so far, and while I won't be posting on this story for a while, I do have other works in progress (namely, a Izumi/Lust story for Fullmetal Alchemist) and I'm not doing any overhauls on the other things that I already have up. For the few of you who liked The Kinslayer, I do plan to do a second chapter from Bellatrix's POV, but I have no idea when I'll be in the same weird mood to write it. That's all the news I have for you, so now I have some work to do. I hope you all stick around to see it when its done.
-Ophelia
Edit: 12-01-12 Hey everyone, I know its been ages since I posted this but even after all this time I've only finished the first ten chapters, and chapter eleven is where I think things start to go wrong. I have a lot of work done but still have 50 pages left to edit, and on top of reworking the characters I have been rewriting everything in third person instead of first and second, which I only did in the first place because I'm too lazy to deal with pronouns in femslash smut scenes. I hate to do this but I still need to ask for your patience, and hope that I can get more work on this done, especially with the holiday break coming up. I have not been so diligent on working while I was getting used to being at college, but my goal is to get this done by Christmas.