Hello, everyone. I thought I'd add some bonus features to this story; mainly some behind the scenes of the inspiration behind the story, which actually came from a few things. The first thing that inspired this story was a YouTube video. It was this Harry Potter Ambiance with music, and it said "Magical Sunrise" and I read this comment, and this comment wrote down their final hours at Hogwarts, and when I saw that, I got an inspiration to write, using that comment as an example. I thought "If this character saw Hogwarts that way, and wrote down their final hours like that, how did that person get there in the first place? What kind of adventures did that person take? What kind of problems did that person face?" And it sort of triggered me to write.
The second inspiration, is that a friend and I started a story, we were going to go on an adventure in our minds, kind of like an RPG game, like we were free to do whatever we wanted in this game, (Nothing inappropriate of course, because Hogwarts doesn't tolerate sexual behavior, plus she was married at the time, so there couldn't have been anything like that going on.) and we just kind of started this story and see what would happen, but it never really got finished, so I did it for the both of us. I kind of left details out of the story that we started. Originally, Winter was going to have a snake named Lucifer, and this snake got bigger when her anxiety got bad. In a way it was like a wizarding world trained service snake, and I thought "Well what if I made it an occamy instead?" But that didn't really stick well in my head, and I just left it out, and made her this...shy character who...you really don't want to estimate, and made her someone you don't want to piss off, because she's a strong person on the inside, whether you see it or not.
Another thing that inspired this story was the new Star Wars movies coming out soon, but not the sequel trilogy with episodes VII, VIII, and IX, but the series that involves the old republic, where we get to see the Jedi in their heyday. I thought "If Star Wars is going to write something away from the world of the Skywalker saga that we're so familiar with, then what's to stop me from writing a story about some new characters in the wizarding world?" Yes, we saw some old characters that we knew, and yes they were very old, but they are still there, and I feel like we needed their presence.
The thing that bothers me most about writing stories is coming up with different names for different characters. I don't know whether to give them a common name like Mike or Mark, so I kept all of our names, accept for Winter. That character was named by the person who created her, so that name was almost the only one that isn't based off of a real name. The others, I wanted my friends to know that they were there in my Hogwarts adventures and I wanted to show them off, I guess, so I kept their names so they knew who they were. I also really like Zane's name, and Jazz' name sounded like a cool nickname someone gave them-self, so I had to keep it.
The inspiration for the arc behind the story was...the fact that I suffer from depression, and I think that everyone does, just some suffer more severely with it. I wanted to give everyone the message that the more you focus on that negative energy, and the more you focus on depression, the more likely you are to be driven to madness. However if you focus on the people around you that love you, support you, and that are there for you and have your back no matter what the condition is, the more you're helping yourself, and that's the message that I wanted to get across.
In all honesty, looking back at this story, I missed a lot of stuff that I had in my head for it, and I want to go back and write some more, so stick around. Keep this book in your library, and keep coming back to read it, because I am definitely going to come back and add more to it.