Okay, colours weren't quite the sort of challenge I was expecting. However, so be it. The first prompt is "red". And today is the 1st of July.

When I was a kid, Dominion Day (as it was then known) never meant a great deal in our family. We lived in the suburbs, and had little to do with municipal celebrations. I wouldn't say I celebrate Canada Day much today, either. However, this year has been kind of an odd one. There's been this bug going round. And it's a real bugger of a bug....

We've all spent most of the last few months in lockdown; and, in Toronto, we are only starting to come out of it now. For me, it's not been as bad as for many people. I've not got sick. (So far, fingers crossed.) I've not been affected financially. And I tend to be more than okay on my own; so isolation hasn't bothered me much. I initially thought I'd use the down time to DO something—say, write a couple of long plot bunnies do or a lot of work on Fanlore without interruptions. It didn't work out that way. I guess I've been more affected than I thought I'd be, probably by the stress of wondering what would happen. Anyway, I found it really hard to concentrate on any sort of big project.

So instead I wrote ficlets. Over April and May, I wrote twenty of them. All are Forever Knight (thereby demonstrating that, as far as I'm concerned, however many fandoms you may write, the oldies are still the ones you go back to for reassurance). Each features a different character or combination of them, since I posted them to both the old mailing list and AO3, and I wanted to amuse as many fellow FK fans as I could. Also, I'm a Die-Hard, i.e. in the old FK mailing list Wars, that was the faction I played with.

Die-Hards are not affiliated with any specific character or pairing. As a veteran of the last three Wars and my faction's war scribe, I take that as a challenge: I ought to be equally able to write everyone. At this point, I feel as though I almost have. By the end of May I was starting to feel a bit written out. I did have one plot left to write that had to be timed for Father's Day; but I had no particular idea for Canada Day.

However, the Sunshine Challenge inspired me. So I wrote "On the Grill". As I also put my fic on my website, I made it a web page with a red theme. This is partly in honour of the challenge, of course; but it also represents the barbecue to which Nick has been invited.

For those unfamiliar with Forever Knight, it's a TV show from the mid-90s whose hero is an 800-year-old vampire, Nick Knight, who wants to become mortal again. Feeling great guilt over his past, he tries to expiate this by working as a Homicide detective in Toronto. Half the cast relate to his job: his partner, Tracy Vetter; his boss, Capt. Joe Reese; and a pathologist, Dr. Natalie Lambert, who is colleague, friend, and confidant—and trying to help him find a cure. (The other characters relate to Nick's vampire life; but they don't come into this story.)

The main background I used for the webpage is a variant that I made from GRSites.com's misc236.jpg. Over this is a central panel that contains the story. This has a fancy border of nested tables, each with its own background tile. The broadest band in the border is a dark marbled pattern chosen to represent the coals of a barbecue. It is surrounded by narrower stripes in glowing orange.