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:

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