To say that 2020 was a horrible year is to state the obvious. It started okay: I came home from visiting my sister for Christmas, and signed up for Chocolate Box and the Worldbuilding Exchange. Then the pandemic hit; and we all went into lockdown. Just going to do basic grocery shopping left one with the feeling one was taking one's life into one's hands: outside was a place of peril. In theory, all that spare time could have afforded me the opportunity to do some major writing. Perhaps it should have! In practice, though, my focus was sadly diffuse. It was hard to think of anything but the news.

To try to take my mind off the world going to hell in a handbasket, I decided to make myself keep busy by writing a lot of ficlets. Every couple of days, I'd try to think of some character(s) I'd not yet written about and devise a tiny premise. All are Forever Knight, for which I require little or no canon review. Thus passed April and May, with the sequence broken only by my writing a shortish story for fkficfest. The result is an absurd number of little fic. To myself, I think of them as my COVID Collection. A ghastly name, I know; so, in the list below, I've just labelled them "CC".

By the summer I'd pretty well written myself out of small plot bunnies. In any case, life had mysteriously settled into a horrid sort of routine. (It's astonishing how a pandemic can become a new normal.) So in July I decided to change things up by doing the sunshine_challenge, for which—given the theme the mods chose—I wrote most of my posts about colours. After that, I signed up for fearbuddies. Though I'd been quite unable to tackle a backlog of unwritten stories earlier in the year, Fear Buddies enabled me to make a stab at finishing a series of Arrowverse stories about the childhood of Leonard Snart that I'd started for Worldbuilding in 2019. Twice a week I sent updates to my partner: the idea was not that they'd read them, but that the little deadlines would enable me to keep writing. Though I didn't finish the series, I did write two more installments—each of them substantially longer than the earlier ones had beem.

By the fall, my fannish life had pretty well returned to normal. In other words, I did Trick or Treat and Yuletide, and wrote multiple fic for both. And, if Christmas was sadly solitary, I did at least manage to get my tree decorated. I've a lot of balls and bells to put on it; so that's an achievement in itself. Alas, the original plans for my sister to visit me couldn't possibly come off in the circumstances. Next year, I hope.

So here's what I wrote this past year:

• "Professional Courtesies" (website, AO3)
  • M*A*S*H (TV), 1665 words, 7 February, written for not_laurence in the chocolateboxcomm
  
  
• "Double, Double, Time and Trouble" (website, AO3)
  • DC's Legends of Tomorrow, 5822 words, 16 March, written for rivulet027 in the worldbuildingex
  
  
• "Daughter's Day" (website, AO3)
  • Forever Knight, 416 words, 1 April - CC, written for April Fool's Day
  
  
• "Silk" (website, AO3)
  • Forever Knight, 189 words, 2 April - CC
  
  
• "Curbside" (website, AO3)
  • Forever Knight, 468 words, 5 April, - CC
  
  
• "Magister" (website, AO3)
  • Forever Knight, 370 words, 8 April, - CC
  
  
• "Palette" (website, AO3)
  • Forever Knight, 633 words, 9 April, - CC
  
  
• "Lamb and Eggs" (website, AO3)
  • Forever Knight, 361 words, 13 April - CC, written for Easter
  
  
• "Alma" (website, AO3)
  • Forever Knight, 462 words, 18 April - CC
  
  
• "Knight of the Rose" (website, AO3)
  • Forever Knight, 1451 words, posted 16 April, released 21 April, written for fkficfest
  
  
• "Morgue Maniacs" (website, AO3)
  • Forever Knight, 642 words, 30 April - CC
  
  
• "Disconcert" (website, AO3)
  • Forever Knight, 528 words, 3 May - CC
  
  
• "Floater" (website, AO3)
  • Forever Knight, 365 words, 5 May - CC
  
  
• "P is for Paris" (website, AO3)
  • Forever Knight, 640 words, 9 May - CC, written for the anniversary of VE Day
  
  
• "Nick of Time" (website, AO3)
  • Forever Knight, 243 words, 10 May - CC, written for Mothers' Day
  
  
• "Reflection" (website, AO3)
  • Forever Knight, 853 words, 12 May - CC
  
  
• "Firecracker Day" (website, AO3)
  • Forever Knight, 611 words, 18 May - CC, written for Victoria Day
  
  
• "Heartbreakers" (website, AO3)
  • Forever Knight, 634 words, 19 May - CC
  
  
• "Play Ball" (website, AO3)
  • Forever Knight, 313 words, 22 May - CC
  
  
• "Expedience" (website, AO3)
  • Forever Knight, 970 words, 24 May - CC
  
  
• "The Moon in June" (website, AO3)
  • Forever Knight, 489 words, 28 May - CC
  
  
• "Stake-Out" (website, AO3)
  • Forever Knight, 738 words, 29 May - CC
  
  
• "Doff the Serge" (website, AO3)
  • Forever Knight, 692 words, 31 May - CC
  
  
• "A Blonde for Father" (website, AO3)
  • Forever Knight, 546 words, 21 June - CC, written for Fathers' Day
  
  
• "On the Grill" (website, AO3)
  • Forever Knight, 942 words, 1 July - CC, written for Canada Day and the Sunshine Challenge
  
  
• "Cold Snap" (AO3) - "Depths of Cold" series, Pt. 4
  • The Flash & DC's Legends of Tomorrow, 4698 words, 15 September, written with the aid of FearBuddies
  
  
• "Play it Cool" (AO3) - "Depths of Cold" series, Pt. 5
  • The Flash & DC's Legends of Tomorrow, 4220 words, 5 October, written with the aid of FearBuddies
  
  
• "Jean of Yesterday" (website, AO3)
  • Janet Sandison's Jean Robertson series, 1617 words, 20 October, written for fawatson in Trick or Treat
  
  
• "Uncle Peter" (AO3)
  • Beatrix Potter's The Tale of Peter Rabbit & The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies, 31 October, fan art for cher in Trick or Treat
  
  
• "Dream" (website, AO3)
  • The Flash (TV), 767 words, 7 November, written for entwashian in Trick or Treat
  
  
• "Black Maria" (website, AO3)
  • Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons series, 2058 words, 18 December, written for mrsredboots in Yuletide
  
  
• "Queue for Exit" (website, AO3)
  • Josephine Tey's Alan Grant detective series, 1255 words, 24 December, written for skieswideopen in Yuletide
  
  
• "Embers" (website, AO3)
  • Diana Wynne Jones's Eight Days of Luke, 1784 words, 25 December, written for daegaer in Yuletide
  
  
• "Alec the Great" (website, AO3)
  • Mary Renault's The Charioteer, 1155 words, 25 December, written for deliarium in Yuletide
  
  
• "In Which Pooh and His Friends Celebrate Christmas" (website, AO3)
  • A.A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh series, 1767 words, 25 December, written for small_hobbit in Yuletide, sequel to "In Which Pooh Hunts for the Meaning of Christmas"