The attic was quiet, sunlight streaming through windows and illuminating the swirling poofs of dust that eddied up when the girl finally set the last papers down, staring at it quietly. The box before her was empty, and pages were spread out all over the floor, filled with headlines in old script and moving pictures, with oddly-flowing words and images of a captured life--a sort of photograph of a school.
She stretched langorously, sitting back on her heels into the sunlight, the golden rays bringing out red highlights in her hair and made the ink on the pages shimmer with multi colors--probably the intent of whomever had written them. The girl smiled, and slowly began to collect the papers that were on the floor around her, stacking them up carefully. Though they were old, the paper seemed fresh under her fingers, and she had the fleeting thought that it was charmed to not show age before she laughed it away.
Was it real? Was it all false? She smiled as she picked up the final pages and realized with amusement that she didn't care. It was real to her.
Standing up, she dusted off her blue jeans before pushing her hair behind her ears, looking around for signs of any papers she had left behind, but there were none. Her quiet footsteps made dust swirl up on the floor in golden arcs and dizzying spins and flashes of gold, and she paused at the beginning of the steps going down, watching the dust settle and spin lazily, looking over to the empty box on the floor. She smiled lightly and opened her mouth, as if to say something, but at the last moment changed her mind. She blew a kiss lightly to the room and turned to walk down the steps, closing the door quietly at the bottom.
The room was quiet for a moment; the sunlight slanted down across the floor at a lower angle. There was a sound of a laugh, and a single paper fluttered down into the box, light as a feather.
The Oracle was written originally in June '03, end of June/beginnng of August sometime in there. I had seen a fic written that mentioned a newspaper and my muses had started bugging me about actually writing a newsletter like that. I looked through GoF (this was pre-OotP), and read a few of the articles to where I had begun to get an idea of the style of writing, since JK obviously liked writing newspapers.
Sirius always writes his article, not in modern impersonal third person, but in opinionated first person; i.e., his referring to times Malfoy had been caught with Dark Arts books in his possession in the first edition. This is the way that JK wrote things--when Rita Skeeter was getting an opinion from the opposing view or a view she didn't agree with, she usually slurred them in some way to make them less reputable.
If you really want to go in depth, I've practiced different writing styles with each character. Sirius is a good writer, clever and subtle when opinionated and doesn't come out and slur his opponets, but certainly brings them down like quicksand rather than a hangman's quick drop. James is much less subtle--when he wrote the article the differences were tremendous. Alice Remerta isn't nearly as good as a writer--she's crude and outright, skipping over the finer details which is sometimes ironic on her part. Moony is sarcastic, loud, and arrogant in his column, if intelligent, and quick-witted to laugh at some of the poor questioner's plights. There is a popular myth that Moony was sensitive, book-wormish, and soft spoken and I have tried to dispel this rumor.
The Lioness I had some trouble with. When I first started writing her, I didn't even know who she was besides a Gryffindor, and I vaguely thought 'Lily' in the back of my mind. And though I write Lily in the same way the Lioness thinks, the Lioness is not Lily because Lily is too wry for poetry. The Lioness is, as is now probably common knowledge, Professor McGonagall, who will soon be getting her own fic. Minerva secretely laughed at the Marauder's pranks, and that comes out in the Lioness. She is sometimes whimsical and sometimes just weird, but she is always unpredictable.
If you've followed the Oracle, you'll notice several flucuations in the paper. Usually I try to keep it the same basic format--main article, Ask Moony, Lion's Roar/Lion's Skin, the Lioness, and House Points. Sometimes there is Weather, by Jim (James), and sometimes I've left out Lion's Roar in favor of Ask Moony (especially before it got its own fic because the demand was so large). But when I began to take an interest in school gossip, the Lion's Roar was revised, and I'd say many of my schoolmates could recognize alter-egos of themselves in it.
The Oracle also had the advantage of, when first aired, being on the main page for a few hours. The main front HP page gets a lot of traffic and I think the summary pulled people in, so I got lots of reviews (and also the start of my real fans who just had to discover it). Thanks everybody for helping me hit 400.
Overall, the Oracle has been a good run. I don't normally do many chaptered fics, but this one has been fun for me. Thanks to everybody for making it popular and the reviewers for keeping me going. Thanks to everyone who reviewed with poems, questions, and ideas that made the Oracle such a success. I couldn't get by without you. I love you all.
-Abigail Nicole