Underwater Light where are you?

July 23, 2011 11:31 PM

Help me find old Harry Potter fanfiction by Maya, also known as Mistful.

I was stuck in a doctor's office waiting room last week and ended up flipping through a recent issue of Time magazine that featured an article about fanfiction. The magazine included Time's recommendations for some fanfic, some of which I had read years ago and enjoyed, by an author called Maya.

Unfortunately for me, it looks like Maya pulled all of her fanfiction offline in 2008. I've Googled but have not been able to find a working download site for Maya's works. Some pages from 2008 and 2009 said that the author had sent out a pdf of all of her work on request for a while, but there's no mention of her doing that more recently.

Anyone know where I can find such fine old fics as Underwater Light and The Professional's Guide to Badgering People? Or, can you tell me about the etiquette of requesting fanfic from an author who has since become a professional writer of original fiction? Hell, is there anyone out there who has the pdf and is willing to share?

posted by terrierhead to media & arts (3 answers total)

For future reference, there are a lot of Livejournal communities designed for looking for lost fanfics. This one looks like it's pretty active and has a fairly decent response rate.
posted by badmoonrising at 3:15 AM on July 24, 2011

Anyone know where I can find such fine old fics as Underwater Light and The Professional's Guide to Badgering People? Or, can you tell me about the etiquette of requesting fanfic from an author who has since become a professional writer of original fiction? Hell, is there anyone out there who has the pdf and is willing to share?

I know you have a best answer already, but just in case anyone else is reading: please don't contact Maya about it. She took them offline deliberately and she doesn't want to talk about the fan fiction anymore. She would really rather people didn't share the PDF as well, but she can't do anything about that.

I was also a fanfic author before I became a novelist*; my stories are still online. I know a lot of fanfic authors who became novelists. In general, if we don't care if people find the stories, they're still available easily by Google. If we care, they're hard to find for a reason.

*I am, in fact, STILL a fanfic author.
posted by headspace at 9:38 AM on July 24, 2011

Thank you, headspace. I'd wondered about that and am glad not to have bothered the author.
posted by terrierhead at 10:29 AM on July 24, 2011