Strange name I’ve chosen, isn’t it? To be honest, I chose it in a hurry when I signed up on this site just to leave a review - before I even remotely considered writing a fic of my own. As the Harry Potter fics are the only ones I read on this site, a HP-related name would probably have made more sense, but after all, who wants to be sensible all the time? And I do like the Asterix comics. For those of you not familiar with them, the gentleman on the left is the respected Druid of the village Asterix lives in, brewing the magic potion that allows his friends to defeat the Roman soldiers again and again. A VERY old colleague of Snape, so to speak… As for his physical appearance I cannot help but wonder if JKR might have been inspired by him when she created Dumbledore…

I love the Harry Potter books and when I discovered that there is such a thing called fanfiction I started to spend more time on the web than I should …

Severus Snape is one of my favourite characters, although I am very thankful that I never experienced a teacher quite like him in my school career. So I like to read fics with Snape and Harry as main characters (but no slash).

A few words about my stories “Sectumsempra“: I started with “Sectumsempra – The Consequences” and , like in the books, I didn’t want to change the POV and wrote everything from Harry’s perspective. While I was writing the 4th chapter though, I increasingly felt that it was a pity not to have any access to Snape’s thoughts, that’s why I came up with the twin story. Sometimes I have wondered if I made a mistake by keeping the stories separate, if I shouldn’t have combined them alternating the chapters (in fact my first beta had the idea first), but I started this way and so I kept it like that.

My stories are not exactly canon, but it has been my aim to keep Harry and Snape (and the others as well) in character (whether I’ve succeeded or not is for you to decide). I have put up a warning that the stories contain corporal punishment. Yes, I am aware that this is not canon, but it doesn’t apppear to me that far-fetched, either. After all, in Britain the cane was legally banned in state schools only in 1987 and in public schools even a decade later. Aunt Marge didn’t ask without a reason “Do thy use the cane at St Brutus’?” and Harry thought he was going to be caned in book 1.

For the records, personally I am not in favour of corporal punishment. I think that it is an anachronistic punishment that doesn’t fit into our modern society, and there are other ways to educate children. Is it automatically abusive? This is probably a matter one can have heated discussions about and honestly, I do not want to lead any of those now. Still, I just want to add that to me personally some of Snape’s verbal attacks in Canon seem more cruel than the corporal punishment in my stories (eg. when Snape makes Harry copy James’ and Sirius’ misdeeds and comments “It must be such a comfort to think that, though they are gone, a record of their great achievements remains”, I think that is cruel beyond words).

Why do I tell you all this? Just to make sure that, especially while reading Snape’s perspective, you don’t confuse his point of view with mine (I am a much nicer person than he is ;) ). Why do I write stories with CP if I don’t believe in it? As I mentioned above, who wants to be sensible all the time? Once in a while I like to watch a thriller, and believe it or not, in real life I can well live without life-threatening adventures! I mean, it’s fiction!

Last but not least, I want to thank my betas, JadeSullivan and kbinnz for all their help and input.