You're welcome! Thank you for writing in. GhV

Dear HJS,I did warn you about that twist! I decided that Terry and Sally-Anne were fundamentally incompatible, so the "triumph of love" with which a Cinderella story must end was moral and not romantic.Sally-Anne didn't get her own shop until she was 21. Sorry if I didn't write that clearly. But she spent the two years after she left Hogwarts mixing potions part-time at home and networking with Muggle retailers. It took her the whole of that time to accumulate enough capital to set up her own shop, and then it was a very small one - she didn't employ an assistant until she had her first baby. But she always ran at a modest profit, and she did indeed "make people more comfortable at home".Thanks for reading and for writing in,GhV

I didn't mean Sally-Anne's shop, I meant Megan's. Terry did seem a bit too stiff and self-righteous for her. He was quite obnoxious.  

Ah, Megan... Well, there wasn't room to tell her story here. She receives a little financial back-up from her brother Emrys, who is both a big earner and a big spender. She later marries a wizard a few years older than herself (a Welshman, of course) and he has savings. Her business in fact grows larger than Sally-Anne's because Megan's personality is better suited to tough business decisions.Yes, Terry is somewhat "stiff", because he has secrets to keep, i.e. the D.A., and Sally-Anne has no way of knowing that. An older man might manage to be more tactful about the whole business, but Terry isn't. (If he had been, there wouldn't have been any story!)In fact, I meant Sally-Anne to be the more self-righteous of the two, but of course the reader hears her point of view, while Terry's isn't stated. Before chapter 13, Sally-Anne has no concept of grace so she doesn't at all understand Terry's confidence, which isn't based in himself. Once she stops trying to justify her own actions (loses the self-righteous attitude), Terry is out of the story, so we still don't hear his point of view. That was a deliberate authorial decision, because I didn't want to use a work of light fiction as a vehicle of proselytisation.Some readers would have liked to see Terry and Sally-Anne reconciled romantically, but given their extreme youth, I thought they would both do better to find new partners. For the record, Terry marries a Muggle doctor.

Two interesting guesses - but, no, Blaise's sole motivation is to annoy Cecilia. He knew all along who owned the shoe, but he was hoarding it in case it came in useful to him. In terms of Cinderella parallels, Blaise is a kind of Anti-Prince.

Thank you. I'm sure I wouldn't want to believe it...

Thank you. You can't count on Cressida to be reasonable, full stop.

Congratulations on understanding the joke.

Perhaps easier than ashes mixed with cinders? But still a very spiteful move from the Wicked Stepmother.

I never heard the ashes mixed with cinders bit!  the version I know has lentils mixed with millet.  cinders would HURT!

Sally-Anne is very much like her mother, who hasn't exactly excelled in assertiveness. You know how the plot of this story has to go: Cinderella waits around to be rescued. But I might just change the ending!I credited Daphne Greengrass with three sisters, all of them named after nymphs from Greek mythology. Of course, JKR knows best, and the third sister is actually "Astoria". But there isn't much to my "Syrinx" OC - she's just an older and bossier Daphne.

I just like the name Syrinx.  It reminds me of the flute piece by that name.  I don't mind if Sally-Anne waits around to be rescued.  But in the original Cinderella (or what I think of as the original) the stepfamily ends up a little bit maimed, and cinderella still invites them to the wedding but they refuse to go.  I would kind of want Sally-Anne to draw the line somewhere.  I mean, she kind of is being abused.  can't she do something about that once she reaches her majority?  and what about her father?  I feel like there ought to be some sort of resolution with him, because Sally-Anne IS so loyal (what a hufflepuff!) but her dad doesn't respond in kind. 

Thank you! There is no fairy godmother in the Grimms' version of the story, only birds who magically produce clothes. But the Hufflepuff girls are indeed behaving rather like Perrault's Fairy.

Thanks for writing in,

. Interesting readers in the word outside Gryffindor Tower can be a challenge - so thank you for taking the time to read.

Thanks for writing in, mock turtle (I love your user-name!). JKR does give us a few brilliant glimpses of Mrs Weasley cookiing & etc., but she leaevs us to imagine most of it. I just put in the laundry details as padding; I'm flattered that you found them interesting. Cressida is one of these people who always gets her own way by sheer force of personality. After Flavian had an affair with her, he thought (because he's lazy) it would be less trouble to marry her than to dump her. Cressida is somewhat insecure (you know what her first husband was like, and she received little real support from her parents) so she asserts herself by being spiteful to weaker people. Muggles like Raymond are helpless; Julia cannot appeal to the law because she has no money; and children have few real rights anywhere when their abusers are their own parents. So Cressida is supreme for now, but the tables could be turned as the children grow up.

Dear mock turtle,Thank you for your loyal reviewing throughout this story. Perhaps I should have labelled that final chapter as "epilogue"? I felt that all the real action finished at the end of chapter 13, when Sally-Anne faced reality. All the basic conflicts (family dysfunctions, political duty, moral and spiritual issues, romance) were played out in the Hogwarts chapel. And I'm so pleased that you appreciated the "life" of that chapter!Sally-Anne stayed at home in 1996-7 because it seemed the best way to fight Voldemort. (Remember, there's no D.A. in HPB - the only really important event is the relationship between Harry and Dumbledore.) You also need to understand British education laws - you CAN'T leave school before the end of fifth year, but sixth and seventh year are entirely optional, and around 70% of Muggles make the choice to leave at that point (with the O.W.L.s safely in hand). Wizards seem to be under more pressure to stay on for the full seven years, but leaving once they have their O.W.L.s in hand must still be an appealing option in some cases. In Sally-Anne's case, yes, her mother's financial situation was one reason, but not the most important one.I'm very flattered that you wanted more chapters, but Sally-Anne aged 16-22 would have made a rather dull story because the dramatic conflict for those years just wasn't in my head.

Dear GhV,Thanks for your explanation of British education laws...you're right, I know next to nothing about them.  I'm from California :)  I guess I don't know how much wizarding school would parallel the muggle school code, but for the purpose of your story it's great.  (I get really hung up on the details, like, how DO wizards learn math?  especially ones who don't go to muggle school?  so many wizards are so clueless about muggles that not many of them seem to go to muggle school.  also, you put music lessons into your story, which made me happy).  Really?  70% of people leave school when they're 15?  I guess I don't know what the percentage is in America but the consensus here is that you will not amount to much if you don't go on to University so the statistics don't really get talked about much...if you drop out of high school it's kind of considered a failure.  At least in my community.  (I mean, I think a lot of people still do leave high school before they get their diploma, it's just that your options are very limited.  Oftentimes you can't even really support yourself.)I think the particular things I wanted you to write more about after the end of ch 14 were Sally-Anne's final year at Hogwarts when she was forced to go back (had she finished coming to terms with terry ignoring her?  what was it like to be a hufflepuff in the school during that year?  it seemed like a lot of drama!) and Christopher and Jeremy, the stepbrothers, b/c Jeremy married a girl from hogwarts (I suppose that's a separate story but I want to know how their romance went.  It's different, I think, than Seamus's parents' story b/c he knows she's a witch when he marries her).I think it's really interesting that there is a whole religious side to your story.  I have often wondered (since there was such an outcry against harry potter from the religious fundamentalists in america) what it would be like to discover that you are a muggle-born witch or wizard in a highly religious family.  what kind of personal struggle would that be?  and were witches and wizards ever particularly christian, considering the historical witch burnings?  your version in Hearthlinks is a fascinating one. 

Dear MT,I hope the Petulant Poetess will overlook it if we use her forum board to continue this rather complex discussion. You do ask such good questions!Regarding the parallels between Hogwarts and the British Muggle system: They are so strong that they must be deliberate. JKR was openly and obviously describing and parodying the 1970s system under which she was educated. I was also born in 1965, so I recognised it instantly.Most people are 16 by the end of fifth year. (Harry, having a July birthday, is still 15, but 5/6 of his classmates are already 16 when they take their O.W.L.s.) Sixteen is the minimum school leaving age in Britain - anyone who tries to drop out before then is inviting the police and the social workers around to their home. The O.W.L.s (which Muggles called the Ordinary Levels back in the 1970s, but which are now called the G.C.S.E.s) are effectively the school leaving certificate. Students who leave school with the G.C.S.E. are able to take an apprenticeship, secretarial course, etc.Universities in Britain were traditionally only for the "academic" types. In the 1970s, the government paid your fees; as long as your Advanced Levels (N.E.W.T.s) were good enough, you could enter a university at age 18 and emerge with your Honours degree three years later. But now there is the push to give more and more students the tertiary opportunity - fully 30% - the government only loans the fees. There is talk that standards have lowered in order to accommodate students of lower ability, but I don't know whether that is true or whether students and lecturers have simply been forced to work harder.Regarding wizards learning maths, I think the short answer is - they don't. Obviously they have had seven years of primary education before they started Hogwarts, and I imagine wizards are supposed to bring their children to the same standard as the Muggle state schools. But I think most wizards can only do maths at the same level as a Muggle 11-year-old. Even Arithmancy doesn't seem to require a much higher standard than that - and the majority of wizards struggle with this subject.I think the 1997-8 year at Hogwarts would be a great story, and many fanfic writers have attempted it, but the whole theme just seemed too grandiose for me to begin. Sally-Anne had accepted by then that Terry was not the man for her, and her commitment was to defeating Voldemort without being sidetracked by boyfriends. (What Americans call "dating" doesn't really happen in Britain.)Jeremy's future wife, Mary Fenwick, features in my series The Moon-Cursers, especially the final volume, The Banebrewer. She probably would make a very interesting subject for a romance, but I'm afraid I haven't thought ahead to the details. I just think that a lot of Wizard/Muggle marriages involve the Muggle sibling of a Muggle-born, because meeting your sibling's friends is a natural way to find your spouse.One of these days, I will finish writing the story of Seamus's parents, but I encountered a creative block just when I reached the honeymoon - we were about 24 hours from the Great Reveal, and I completely blanked out!Regarding the "religious side"... Well, you couldn't find a more blatant, in-your-face-obvious Christ-figure than Harry Potter himself. As a matter of literary style, JKR couldn't write convincingly about her symbolic Christ-hero in a book where some of her characters also talked about Christianity as a separate force - either of historic interest or as a spiritual factor. So she just didn't tell us about the specific religious beliefs of individual characters. It's fairly clear, of course, that Harry himself, whose mind we read, has none. However, I infer from what little she has said that wizards have exactly the same religions and non-religions as Muggles.It's interesting that you raise the dilemma of the Muggle-born religious in this column, because that's exactly the situation of Terry Boot. Although his parents are ordinary English Agnostics, he was a childhood convert to Christianity. I have always assumed that the problem of magic would be bigger for angry, book-burning Fundamentalists (of whom we have hardly any in Britain) than it would be for the young wizard himself. Terry knows intuitively that his mysterious powers have nothing to do with nature-worship. They are more like an alternative technology - much as electricity would have looked like witchcraft in the Middle Ages. It's clear that the Hogwarts version of magic has nothing to do with religion, especially not with Pantheism; real neo-Pagans claim to have cringed at the way the Hogwarts staff so crudely break the Pagan ethical codes and ignore spirituality.There were no witch-burnings in Britain - we only hanged the filthy Quislings who appeared to have sold out to Satan! And only in periods of social chaos when a scapegoat was needed. The Catholic Church published a formal report to the effect that witches did not exist as early as the twelfth century. Despite this, until the year 1700, almost every society in the world periodically persecuted witches, including Animistic societies. While this doesn't excuse the Christians, it does highlight that the conflict was not a specifically Christian one. In JKR's world, no real witches were ever caught, so I think they would have stood on the sidelines, weeping (or laughing) at Muggle stupidity. Wizards knew that, while safe, they were the real targets, and they also knew that evil wizards really might have been responsible for some of the social disasters, so I think they would have understood the Muggle fear of the supernatural. I don't know whether they would have blamed their society's religious beliefs for the persecution, given that the wizards themselves probably shared whatever was the dominant belief. A great deal depends on the amount of diversity permitted by a given culture and on the level of education of the individual wizard.I've probably confused more than I've clarified, but that was the kind of thinking that underpinned Hearthlinks. Thanks for your support,GhV

Dear

,I'm so flattered that anyone is still reading this story! There isn't much to be said for Cressida as stepmother, is there? I hope I showed Julia as a more reasonable one, and of course you shouldn't take Cecilia's perception of the second Mrs Runcorn as objective.I think Sally-Anne was by far a better person than her father or stepmother for trying so valiantly to hold her family together. But it really wasn't her job to fix her parents' mistakes, and her "family first" attitude had very quickly become "family only". The truth was, her family didn't need her time while the D.A. did. Everyone has some faults, and Sally-Anne needed to face up to hers before she could move on.What the reader knows - but Sally-Anne doesn't - is that Terry is bound by a magical contract never to mention the D.A. So he can't explain the reason he is breaking up with her, i.e. that it wasn't possible for him to be close to someone who had opted out of this dangerous secret. He botched it, of course; he ought to have given her some kind of better explanation for what he was doing, and maybe even offered her a second chance later. But he was only 15, and boys of that age aren't always tactful.Since Terry is a Muggle-born, there is more about him, his faith and his family in a forthcoming episode of Magic in my Tree.S. Capper appears only once in canon. He (or she?) is one of a number of Hogwarts students who checked out Quidditch through the Ages: you can read this name in the back of the book. I don't mention him any earlier in Hearthlinks because Sally-Anne didn't notice him during her Hogwarts years!I must confess to being irritated by fanfic Americanisations of Hogwarts as I've been a teacher as well as a student in the British system; but we mustn't be xenophobic. It's very difficult for American readers to grasp just how the British system is different because Americans haven't the first idea which questions to ask. Seven years at high school? Three terms a year? Summer holidays starting in July? No weekly percentage gradings? No graduation? Only three years to the Muggle undergraduate degree? Who would have guessed??

I hadn't read any of your stories before MIMT, but I expect I'll make my way through most of them now!Yes, I agree that everyone has faults and must face up to them, however I still feel Sally was harsh on herself given her age and circumstance.  Of course, as the author you have so much more backstory and this gives you a bit of a leg up on the perspective side! As a reader we can only see Sally-Anne and its easier to sympathise with her because of this.  I also found her a sympathetic character because she is so quick to forgive and slow to judge.  I found Terry to be quite judgemental in this story, based on his actions to Sally-Anne, so I look forward to seeing him from another perspective in MIMT.  I am still inclined towards feeling that these students are children, and the level to which they are expected and encouraged to participate in war is inappropriate (at least in real life, in fiction it makes for an excellent story).  I expect this also colours my judgement of Terry and Sally-Anne.As for the Americanisms, I hope its not xenophobic to be irritated!  I have read many amazing fics by Americans and other nationalities which have had a good grasp of the UK education system, and fics by Brit authors which have a woeful one, so I think what really irritates me most is lack of accuracy. The American angle just jumps out however because we watch so much of their TV!Ps-thanks for the S Capper info too :)