In your own space, set yourself some goals for the coming year. They can be fannish or not, public or private.

Well, as I come a bit late to the Snowflake Challenge this year, one goal is to do some more of them. (Not all, mind you; but more than just this one!)

But seriously folks....

One big goal I have this year is to work on expanding a story that I did for ficinabox back in 2022. "Trial by Jury" was never supposed to be 38K long! I did, on the other hand, intend from the start that it should end on a cliffhanger. By Christmas, though, the darn thing had made it clear to me that it had aspirations: it considered itself no more than the first part of something bigger. So my goal is to get some work done on its goal.

IceBreaker Challenge! Tell us about yourself.

Assorted miscellaneous facts:

• I was born in England; but my family came to Canada when I was not yet six. So I grew up in Toronto, went to school here (except for going off to grad. school), and still live here.
  
  
• When I was in junior high, my parents allowed me to watch two extra hours TV per week provided I read a non-fiction book every day. (My choice, but duplicates didn't count.) Over a period of about five years, that adds up to an awful lot of books. It's fair to say I read pretty fast, since the non-fiction was vastly outnumbered by the fiction I also read!
  
  
• Lasting interests from back then: anthropology, archaeology, history, physics, chemistry, biology, geology, paleontology.... Alas, I don't read as much today as I used to: there are too many distractions. Still, there's always Nova. And Wikipedia: the links are the closest thing I know of to flypaper-to-catch-humans.
  
  
• I've collected superhero comics since the late '60s.
  
  
• I love sudokus, especially the "jigsaw" ones.
  
  
• I read the Toronto Star. Yes, a daily subscription to a real paper newspaper.
  
  
• I love Christmas trees, and have a large collection of glass ornaments—more than I'll ever be able to fit on the one I own. It's a 6-foot artificial tree, bought back in the late '80s. The secret to keeping glass ornaments safe is using an artificial tree, since they don't dry out, droop, and drop bells and balls as the needles go. It takes so long to dress, that I usually keep it out till the end of January.
  
  
• The first fanfic I wrote was a Star Trek K/S pon farr novel. I did it on an electric typewriter in the late '80s; and, as I wasn't in fandom back then, it's never been published. I still have it in a box somewhere; but I haven't looked at it in literally decades.
  
  

In your own space, share a favourite piece of original canon (a show, a specific TV episode, a storyline, a book or series, a scene from a movie, etc) and explain why you love it so much.

Boy, this one was hard! I think it's the "favourite" plus "love it so much" that made it so tricky. I have so many things I like, albeit to varying degrees, that it was really hard to pick. Then I decided to treat this challenge as more a matter of reccing something obscure that others might not know.

Jean in the Morning is the first volume of a four-part series. The author (whose real name was apparently Elizabeth Jane Cameron) was, in the day, better known under the name "Jane Duncan". She wrote a long semi-autobiographical series of books that is usually called the "My Friend" series because their titles take the form My Friend [NAME]. In later volumes, the protagonist, Janet Sandison, now widowed, finds a publisher for some books she's been writing about a working-class girl named Jean Robertson.

Then "Jane Duncan" wrote those books for real.

Jean in the Morning was published in 1969 under the "Janet Sandison" pseudonym. Three more books followed, not all focused on Jean herself; the series has a rather wobbly overall story arc. Of the four volumes, the first is by far the best.

Written in the first person, it covers "wee Jeanie"'s story from her first day at school in 1911 till she leaves and goes to work as a housemaid, i.e. seven years or so. She's born in a slum tenement for the families of railway workers, gradually works out the social hierarchy of the commuter suburb of Glasgow in which she lives, and sees the home front of World War I from the very bottom rung of society.

She's a street-smart, canny kid. She sees a lot.

Talk about a current fannish project (fic, art, vid, crochet, funko pop village) (that you are creating or enjoying)

How current is "current"? Given how little work I've done on the goal I mentioned in the Challenge #2 post, that one doesn't qualify as anything but wishful thinking! Yet, anyway.

Last year, though, I did get another installment done for the Depths of Cold series I started back in 2019. It's based on what backstory we have on the version of Captain Cold (Leonard Snart) that appeared in the Arrowverse, specifically in The Flash and Legends of Tomorrow. Most fic about his childhood dwells hard on the abuse he suffered at his father's hands. However, it seemed to me that anyone who got half-starved and beat up as much as he does in fic would hardly grow up to look like Wentworth Miller, the actor who played him. I wanted to write something more nuanced.

There are at least a couple more installments to go; but I got Part 6 up last year. "Cold Storage" actually is about Len's meeting Mick Rory (Heat Wave) in Juvie; but, after all, that's part of the backstory too.