I have published three stories involving characters from the Harry Potter world. The two longer ones, The Garden and Hermione Can Learn, include my takes on several of the characters, but both of them focus rather closely on Lavender Brown. They provide alternative explorations of her character and behavior, but they resemble each other in suggesting that that there is more to Lavender than many might expect. In one of these stories there was always more to Lavender than most people suspected, but she concealed certain aspects of her persona. In the other, she was pretty much what she appeared to be in the canon, but she matured considerably after the Battle of Hogwarts. In both cases I have tried to stay as close to the canon as possible. In Hermione Can Learn, I've tried to explain Lavender's behavior, as well as Hermione's, during that terribly conflicted sixth year when Hermione and Ron almost saw their friendship slip away, and Lavender quite suddenly attached herself to Ron. And in The Garden, I've examined the sort of person she might have become after the war ended. My third story, The Mole, is an extension of The Garden, and it begins immediately afterward.

So why this focus on Lavender? I've wondered about that myself. Perhaps it's because I've known a few people like her through the years, the kind of people who are so easily written off as fools and worse by so many other people, and I wanted to explore the world from their point of view. Or perhaps I've found myself thinking about her simply because she was such a unique character in the Harry Potter books, and I felt that there should be more to tell about her. She seems to be rather silly and vacuous, yet she's a Gryffindor, and she joined Dumbledore's Army, trained enthusiastically with the rest of the group, and fought (and suffered horribly) in the Battle of Hogwarts. And I kept asking myself, who is this person? By the way, some of what I've written is colored by the representation of Lavender in the movies, where she is played brilliantly by Jessie Cave.

A guiding principle for me, inspired by J.K. Rowling and others, has been to try to depict characters that have unique personalities and behaviors. And while magic is an innate part of their lives, as it is in Ms. Rowling's books, these characters spend much of their time in the Muggle world, doing many of the things that Muggles do. One of the wonderful things about the Harry Potter books is the complexity and variety of her oft-conflicted characters; they wrestle with the same kinds of problems as the rest of us, and they don't always get things right.

In the stories that I've written, Harry and his friends are in their later years at Hogwarts, or in the period just after the war ends, or in their early 20s, trying to move beyond the traumas of the war years. As 20-something young adults, they hug, they kiss, they cry, they worry about their romantic attachments. And they also spend a lot of their time eating. I haven't yet explored other times in their lives; maybe someday.

While I try to examine motivations and behaviors in these stories, with a mix of seriousness and humor, they are basically sentimental and romantic, written at the "T" level by someone who is way past "T" in his own life. But I can remember those years.

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Other authors have also been intrigued by Lavender. Some wrote stories about her long before I ever discovered fan fiction, and I maintain a community in which I've collected some of my favorite stories about Lavender, linked here:

/community/Lavender-Brown-A-True-Gryffindor/128818/