#peterxpettigrewx

It was a big deal for Mary, coming to something like this. In fact, she couldn’t remember the last time she had. It was big and scary and one sister had been encouraging her to put herself out there while the other was mourning a close friend. Someone Mary was friends with too. Someone whom Mary knew had been killed by magic, though her sisters had little idea that things were that bad.

It had become a habit, at some point, to pop into a bookstore every time she passed and part of her aim was to see if any of her books were being sold. It was perhaps strange that she had never been in Flourish and Blotts before, therefore, but she just didn’t tend to go down Diagon Alley if she could help it. She knew it was the big one, though. The one her publisher had made a point of telling her when Hairy Snout, Human Heart was stocked by the shop. She hadn’t had such a letter about her other books but she was still curious and, besides, it had been seven years since Hairy Snout, Human Heart so she wondered if they would still be stocking copies or not.

It had been a while since she had been to Flourish and Blotts because despite having bought one of the books the shop assistant had directed her towards, written by another werewolf, it had been very expensive compared to the charity bookshops she usually went to. It had felt good to know she was contributing to another werewolf author’s royalties, though, and she was both energised by the prospect of doing so again after a particularly nice tip at work and intrigued by that particular section of books. She had written a book for Neville for Christmas, which one of the teens in her pack who had a fun cartoon-y style of art had illustrated for her, and it had reminded her how fun it was writing for children. No publisher had ever been interested in those books, however, not like they had been in the works that were pure smut or the anonymously penned auto-biography that detailed the struggles she had faced since her bite. They had said it wasn’t appropriate for werewolves to be portrayed as sympathetic characters in a children’s book but Artemis knew there could be a market for it and here was one of the biggest bookshop names in Wizarding Britain and she reckoned those books would go perfectly on their shelves.

She knew the shop assistant she had spoken to last time wouldn’t be the one to talk to about such a thing but she was glad to see him when she went in anyway. He had been friendly, he had brought that section up of his own accord, and he hadn’t judged when she had been so clearly interested in it. “Hi! Peter, wasn’t it? Could you remind me where those books were? The ones written by, uh, dark creatures?” Then something else occurred to her. It had come up a lot recently and she was starting to think maybe she should educate herself a bit more about it. So while she still would probably ask him if he knew anything about how books got onto their shelves and if they still would if she went down the self-publishing route that one of her colleagues had mentioned, for the moment she let herself get distracted by another matter. “Say, you don’t have any books about the war, do you? How it all started and things like that?”