Wednesday, June 09, 2004

As I Was Saying


Okay, to continue with the interesting thing I mentioned in my last blog: Professor Jenkins mentions a website called The Daily Prophet in his article Why Heather Can Write (I figured out how to link us! Sort of.) He describes it as "a Web-based 'school newspaper' for the fictional Hogwarts," and says it is run by a teenager, who hires columnists and edits their work.

Which is all very cool and supports Professor Jenkins' thesis (Yikes! I said "thesis!")that writing fanfiction encourages writing and gives young people opportunities to have their work read and critiqued. And the site is very sophisticated looking, by the way.

But what I found really interesting was that when I did a search for The Daily Prophet I found masses of sites with that name. (No, I don't know exactly how many items make up a "mass.") You had your newspapers and your message boards and maybe a blog. I couldn't figure out what some of the sites were supposed to be. A number of them hadn't been updated in a year or two.

And then I found this one site that had a true piece of fanfiction in it. A manuscript-type story involving Sirius Black and another character, who I only vaguely remember from the books. And they like each other. They like each other a lot.

I wish I knew if the author was a teenager. And I wonder if Professor Jenkins has seen this site. Which I'm so tempted to link to.

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