Milestones, in time and words (and lanterns)

[starfishstar]

When I finished posting "If You've Got a Lantern Hold It High" (the small coda/companion story to my big "Be the Light in My Lantern" series), I looked at the series as a whole on AO3 and remembered – oh, right: now I mark it complete. This series I started writing in 2010 is now complete.

It actually feels kind of bittersweet (end of an era?), especially because the people I knew back then when I was writing the early parts of that story and when I first started engaging with fandom on LJ, the Remus/Tonks folks, are no longer active here (not to mention that even LJ itself has imploded in the meanwhile.)

Aah! Don't dwell on sad things!

Here's an awesome one:

Now that I've posted this latest fic to AO3... I've passed the 500,000 word mark on AO3! (Technically, 510,788. Plus there are another 42,000 here on my desktop that haven't been posted yet. And so on.)

But also? Of those half a million (!) words on AO3, a really significant portion of them, nearly half, are the "Be the Light in My Lantern" series. That one massive story, which I started because I was so new to fic that I didn't know better than to take on a massive multi-book-length project as my first thing out of the gate, really has kind of defined a whole arc of my life in the years since I rediscovered writing: who I met, what I learned (so much!), what characters I explored, what I'm ready to do next because I had that foundation first.

Wouldn't trade it for anything. <3 <3 <3

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

On a less intensely emotional note (though...maybe not really?)  .....happy Deathly Hallows anniversary everyone! It was ten years ago today that Deathly Hallows was published and the Harry Potter series was complete. (I mean, yes, there are expanded-universe things like Pottermore and Cursed Child and now the Fantastic Beasts movies, but surely nothing quite has that same feeling as the book series itself being complete?)

Does it make you feel old? Or just a bit strange? For me, Deathly Hallows came out before I even moved to Berlin (though I already lived in Germany), and now I no longer live in Germany at all – even though I spent the bulk of my adult life so far there. How can all that have happened in the time since the last Harry Potter book came out?

Comments

[nerakrose]

Ohhh, this day ten years ago was my last full day on my first ever visit in Finland, and I texted my mum at 5am on the bus to our last destination (a small seaside town in the south) and asked her to go out to get me DH so I'd have it the instant I got home (which I did the following day). And then I didn't read the book for another week for a good number of reasons, but when I did....well I was very glad I was home alone those days.

I have a lot of ten year anniversaries this year in addition to DH, which is very strange to think of.

[starfishstar]

So many Deathly Hallows memories, right? And so much that can happen in ten years.

[indybaggins]

Congratulations on finishing such a huge project! It must feel so special :)

And happy Deadly Hallows anniversary! All the memories!

[starfishstar]

Thank you! :-) You know I thought I'd had all the feels about finishing that massive project when I wrapped up the main story last year (this was just a little extra in addition to it), which is why it came as a jolt of surprise to see that oh, right, *now* the series gets marked complete.

And yes, all the Deathly Hallows memories!