JK Rowling unleashed a torrent of creative energy into the universe when she introduced an unsuspecting world to Harry Potter, the Golden Trio, and Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry… And we’re all so much the better for it.

But there’s no way Ms Rowling could ever sate the insatiable appetites of fans—young and old—for new stories and deeper dives. That, of course, is why there are literally tens of millions of fan-produced stories found all over the internet. This fan-produced fiction (fanfic, for short), explores new storylines with familiar characters… old storylines with new characters… and sometimes, like I do here, new storylines with new characters.

In Filled—what I hope is the first of several Western Wands stories—I take Potterverse fans to the American West. This is a place where rapscallions and religious refugees rub shoulders and the old social order is upended… It’s a place where the powerful are quick to forget the lessons of their ancestors—whose families fled Old World oppression and then New World xenophobia, only to do their damnedest to recreate them both—in the shadow of the everlasting mountains and the intoxicating perfume of sagebrush, salt, and thunder.

Filled focuses on the lives and loves of an unlikely protagonist—a gay, working-class wizard of limited means and unlimited imagination—and it all begins in the lobby of a railway station, in Salt Lake City…