A Middle-Grade Harry Potter Fan Fiction

My daughter Lily is a big Harry Potter fan. She’s read through the entire series three times, and she’s only eight. Lately I’ve taken to writing short-short stories set in the Potterverse for her, as a way of preserving some slender channel of human contact with my offspring.

As an experiment in utter self-indulgence, I’m going to post one of the stories here, which I wrote when Lily asked me for something about Buckbeak. Buckbeak is a major figure in Lily’s imagination — I think in her mind he ranks somewhere around Ron and Hermione in terms of his importance as a character in the series. This is definitely not adult stuff, or even YA — Lily was 7 when I wrote it, so it’s a middle-grade joint, a level below the Harry Potter books.

But I’m happy with it. For reasons best left to psychoanalysis, I framed the story as what is known in the jargon as a hurt-comfort scenario, with Buckbeak being hurt, and my daughter — whom I recognize is not generally considered to be a “canonical” Harry Potter character — doing the comforting.

Probably there are massive canon-breaking errors in it too. I had to extrapolate a bit about what Buckbeak does in the off-season. What can I say: it’s fan fiction. Here it is (as a Word file): Buckbeak and the Three Potions.