My first book

After sending my first issue to most wizarding children, my mother was... Unhappy. She punished me... Kinda, and banned me the access to the printing press... Kinda. I just ignored the punishment since I was starting to really like this idea of being the editor of a newspaper for kid, especially after receiving a few letters from girls saying they loved my story. So the confinement was not enough to prevent me from sending the second issue, and the third, and the rest really. Even more so when after the fourth issue was sent I started receiving subscription money from around 90% of my initial readers. At that point she had to acknowledge it was too late to stop me.

Sending the first four issues freely was a stroke of genius in my opinion. This way my audience got the time to become addicted to the last NEW thing (and trust me, the word new is a big thing in the wizarding world, seeing how rare it is). Frankly, the only downside was the cost of paper and ink, and dad had load of them for HIS newspaper, so he buys it in bulk pretty cheap. The other little thing to note is the price of the cooking ingredients I used to bake cookies I gave to Tippy. The entire event where I gave her the gift was hilarious.

When I told her I got her some cookies for her and her friends after what they did for me, she was like a raving lunatic saying she was a 'good elf' and that she will never accept to be paid. She was looking at me like I was the lowest of the low for even suggesting it and the loathing she had for the bag of cookies... I can tell you I never saw so much raw emotion being expressed from someone's eyes. Then I told her she misunderstood, I was certainly not paying her since it was only the 'bad elves' that are paid, and she was clearly a 'good elf'. I told her it was not 'payment', it was a 'gift' to 'friends' to make them happy. Then she did a 180 and was looking at me like I was the next coming of Merlin and starting saying that I was one of the greatest wizard ever, and how I was too nice to 'waste' time baking cookies for them, that they were not 'worthy'. She took the biscuits after lots of convincing but she was looking at the bag like it was full of gold or something. I still wonder if she ended up eating them or enshrined them (I would not be too much surprised honestly).

After that she said she would be super happy to continue to deliver my newspaper since it wasn't much work (I ended up with 84 subscriptions), and it only happened once a week.

The big surprise I had when I got the subscription was messages from muggleborns. I realised afterward that I asked the little buggers to send the issues to 'magical child around my age' and didn't mention they had to be from a magical family. How did they send the message back ? Well, to know who was subscribing to my newspaper, I left a subscribing pamphlet in the fourth issue saying they just needed to tick the 'I subscribe' box (the name was optional) and put the money with it and a house elf would collect both, collecting their address while doing so (3 knuts an issue).

That's why I received nine pamphlets with questions written on it next to the 'I subscribe' box asking me various things, like "is it true magic is real ?" but mostly "do you take pound ?".

When I realised my blunder I decided to do the mature thing and act like it was not a big deal. I was not breaking the international statute of secrecy after all... Kinda. They were muggleborns, not muggles, so it was OK. I just converted the price to mundane Britain currency (so 4 pence an issue) and made another pamphlet for muggleborns. I did say in the pamphlet that they were under NO circumstance to communicate the information they read to non magical or there would be heavy consequences.

I still sent a message to the DMLE director Amelia Bones saying that nine muggleborn families had discovered magic and were subscribing to my newspaper. I didn't know their names, just the addresses. But with this, I had done my civilian duty. Would Amelia Bones hate me for this ? Probably. Did I care ? Sadly for her, I didn't. I did note that one of the address did ring a bell but for some reason I couldn't remember where I heard of it. Even using my occlumency, it was like a blanket was blurring the memory. Weird. but I somehow decided it wasn't important, and I should not bother with it.

And just like that time passed and the third big thing happened : the publishing of my first storybook !

Since I was keeping up with the one chapter per issue, I ended up completing several fairytale stories after a few months and decided to compile them in a single book : "Saturday's night stories" by Aelius Lovegood.

Aside from "The nundu king" I also wrote "Aladdin", and "The cursed castle and the muggleborn" based on "the beauty and the beast" from Disney. Of course the stories where heavily modified to include elements of our community, and I used the Patil's knowledge of the magical eastern communities to adapt "Aladdin".

Funnily enough, because of that lots of young girl and boys wanted flying carpet now. The funny thing ? One of the biggest 'mission' of the Indian ambassador was to try to cancel the ban on flying carpet in wizarding Britain. And I'm pretty sure he thinks that telling me stories about his home town motivated me to write that story, which ended up with pureblood kids wanting flying carpet, which in the end ended up with the ban being transformed to a 'controlled importation' law (which allow the important purebloods to import one for their kid and that's it). Still, it was counted as a win for him and I was thanked a lot for it. It also contributed at making the Patil twins mini fanatics of mine. After all, I did something their uncle couldn't, ain't I awesome ?