I thought I'd rec three stories that are not in my two longstanding main fandoms:

• "Donation" by merriman - Anthropomorfic (Libraries)

  This was written for Yuletide 2014; but I've read it several times since. It's the story of a new acquisition to a university library. Or an old one, since it's a well used copy; and thereby hangs the tale. This is a snuggly fic to curl up with.

  
  
• "The Emperor's Garden" by hedda62 - Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosiverse

  I think A Civil Campaign is probably my favourite of all the Vorkosiverse books; and this is only partly because of the plot and genre. It's also because of Ma Kosti's delicious food and Ekaterin's gardening. This story focuses on the latter. Gregor wants the imperial garden completely updated; but that raises the question of the best effect to achieve, and everyone has different opinions.

  
  
• "An Internal Affair" by nirejseki - The Flash (CW TV series)

  This is a role-reversal ColdFlash story in which Leonard Snart is a police officer. Just off an undercover assignment, he's now been transferred to Internal Affairs, where he's a new broom sweeping the CCPD clean—and very suspicious of the mysterious behaviour of one Barry Allen. One of the nicest things in the story (aside from the plot) is the introduction of a fun group of fellow CSIs for Barry to interact with.

What to promote? What to promote? Well, I've loved Forever Knight for years: it's my oldest active fandom. It's a TV series about an angsty vampire working as a homicide detective to expiate his feelings of guilt.

FK ran for three seasons in the 90s, first as a late-night show after the news, and then as a syndicated series.

Det. Nick Knight

For a while it was in reruns; today you have to search out the DVDs. In truth, though, there was a fair amount of searching for it even back in the day. At the time, I wondered whether that might even have something to do with my being so devoted to it. When you've scoured the TV Guide trying to find a station that carries it, and then hunted it round the dial as it changes time slots, you tend to feel the show has to have value to it. How else do you justify the effort? (Or is that a chicken-and-egg question?)

As FK started in a Crimetime After Prime Time line-up, it's basically a cop show with a difference—the difference being, of course, that the hero was born in the 13th century, has incredible powers that aid him in solving crimes, and a family (of sorts) that keeps wanting him to return to the vampire lifestyle. Nick Knight—born Nicolas de Brabant, with myriad aliases down the centuries—was played by Geraint Wyn Davies.

A knight returning from the Crusades in 1228, Nick was "brought across" in Paris by an older vampire, LaCroix, and thereafter travelled for centuries with his master.

LaCroix

Almost every episode has a flashback to this period of Nick's life. Cumulatively, we see how, over time, his feelings toward killing shifted. Today, Nick drinks bottled blood; as a homicide detective, he tries to save lives; and, for centuries, he has tried to find a way to become human again. However, from LaCroix's point of view, to seek mortality is suicidal: vampires are immortal, but humans die. LaCroix—who, in life, was a Roman general—is autocratic, dogmatic, and dangerous. He sees himself as pater familias, and Nick as a recalcitrant son. With them also travels Janette, brought across by LaCroix in the 11th century: she is, so to speak, Nick's sister; but she has also, off and on, been his lover. Today, she keeps a Goth nightclub called The Raven, a haven for the vampires of Toronto. Though more sympathetic to Nick than their master is, she still feels that he is utterly misguided.

In his quest for mortality, Nick is nowadays aided by a police pathologist, Dr. Natalie Lambert.

Dr. Natalie Lambert

Obviously, she is his present-day love interest! However, there are plenty of reasons why neither of them is open with the other about the way they feel. Natalie is Nick's doctor; he has a long history of draining (and killing) women he falls in love with; and the vampire community would not approve of anything that might draw attention to them. Still, as Nick works Homicide and she autopsies murder victims, the two of them see each other all the time professionally. And they are certainly close friends: they spend a lot of off-duty time together, and Natalie is Nick's only human confidant. If LaCroix is his "bad angel", then she is his "good one". Though that does, of course, depend on how you feel about his antipathy to his vampire condition.

But, of course, this is only one side of the series. Forever Knight was, first and foremost, sold as a cop show. So every episode has its murder mystery; and, as a Homicide detective, Nick works for the Toronto Metropolitan Police force. He has a boss (actually a different one each season); and he has a partner (Don Schanke in the first two seasons, and Tracy Vetter in the final season).

Capt. Joe Stonetree &     Det. Don Schanke Season 1	Det. Don Schanke &     Capt. Amanda Cohen Season 2	Capt. Joe Reese &     Det. Tracy Vetter Season 3

Each of the police captains has their own style: Joe Stonetree (played by Gary Farmer) is pretty laid back; Amanda Cohen (Netsuko Ohama) is crisply by-the-book; and Joe Reese (Blu Mankuma) is ambitious. As for the partners: Don Schanke (John Kapelos) is a family man, and an experienced cop who is more able than he seems on the surface; Tracy Vetter (Lisa Ryder) is the newly promoted daughter of a senior officer, both advantaged by and resentful of her father's influence. The prominent cast of human characters also means that Nick is mostly interacting with mortals who have no idea that he is a vampire. A source of angst, sure; but, even more, a source of humour.
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Goals, eh?

I just had a quick look at a locked sticky on my journal. It was written in 2017. "Pending," I called it. There is nothing there that is not STILL pending. Which is not to say that I've done nothing at all in the last few years. I just haven't done any of those things. I have had a lot of trouble writing without a deadline—which, in practice, means that I've been writing very little outside gift exchanges.

However, last year I had two projects that did not have recipients. First, in the heart of the initial lockdown, I made myself write ficlets every few days so that I'd do something other than follow the news. To myself, I call them my "COVID Collection" (which is a ghastly name, I know). In fact, the stories have no illness in them, let alone plagues or pandemics. They're simply short pieces featuring various Forever Knight characters, and were posted to the old mailing list as well as AO3. I did a couple of dozen of them. Then, in the late summer, I signed up for fearbuddies, specifically Small Fear, with the intention of completing a series of Arrowverse stories about Leonard Snart's childhood. I'd started with three connected ficlets in a gift exchange; but more than a year had gone by, and I'd not got any more done. Well, I didn't finish; but I did get two more parts completed. Admittedly, regular reporting to my FearBuddy helped a lot: sort of mini-deadlines, you might say.

So what this shows is that I can do it. Sort of.

The "Pending" post has several prospective stories listed. I have ideas for:

• a Forever Knight futurefic about Capt. Reese set in 2010 at the G20 Summit in Toronto
• a crackfic crossover between FK and Thomas the Tank Engine
• a Charioteer story about Ralph Lanyon's first voyage after he was expelled from school
• longfic in which Leonard Snart is rescued from the Oculus explosion, leaves the Waverider, and returns to Central City to start the Rogues.

On top of that, I want to revise two stories I've already written, both FK stories done for gift exchanges. One just needs a bit of tweaking; but, for "A Dark and Stormy Night" (written years ago for Yuletide), I got some ex post facto concrit that I think was justified. The story needs to be refocused a bit, and have a better ending.

So what's my goal?

Complete "Depths of Cold", the Arrowverse series about Captain Cold's childhood and youth. I think there are probably three more parts to go.

Yes, it sounds pitiful. However, the things I've listed here are all utterly open-ended. I want to be at least slightly realistic about the prospects of actually achieving anything.

First, let me thank you for writing me a story in one of the fandoms we share. I'm excited about all of them.


GENERAL POINTS:

• I love worldbuilding and character pieces—stories that explore more deeply—through backstory, or by elaborating the setting/history/culture or exploring people's motivations and personal interactions.


• I prefer gen. DNW non-canon relationships unless requested. I'm not asking you to ignore canon relationships; but please don't make them the focus of the story. I don't care for anything more than PG-13: explicit sexual detail is definitely a DNW for me.


• I love casefic; and, more generally, I like stories that are canon-compliant. The general exception to this is ignoring canonical character death if you want. Canon-divergent AUs are also okay. (There may be other specific exceptions.)


• I'm okay with violence if necessary to the story; but not gore for the sake of gore. On the whole, I prefer not to have characters die in the story; but references to canonical deaths are okay. (I'm fine with having original characters murdered in casefic, and that sort of thing.)


• I enjoy comedy—being able to recognize the ridiculous when it pops up; also wit and wordplay. Having said that, I totally leave it up to you whether you write a serious or comic story—or a serious story with comic interludes.


• No second person fic, please. First person is definitely okay for book canons that were written that way by the author. However, I don't generally care for it with TV fandoms. Epistolary fic is fine.
  

REQUESTS: ( Read more... )

Challenge No. 1: Introduction

I've not done the Snowflake Challenge before. I've seen friends do it, but always seen their posts part way through the month and decided it was too late to catch up. This year I subscribed, so I'd get the notification. (Okay, starting a little late maybe, but not too much so.) I don't post very often to my journal; but that's not to say I'm not involved in fandom. Nowadays, this mostly means gift exchanges. However, I started on mailing lists, followed by LJ communities; and I have to say that I do miss that sense of community, where you got to know fellow members.
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greerwatson on AO3.

First, let me thank you for writing me a story in one of the fandoms we share. I'm excited about all of them. They're listed in alphabetical order, so as not to play favourites.


GENERAL POINTS:

• I love stories that explore canon more deeply, whether through backstory, or elaborating the setting/history/culture, or exploring people's motivations and personal interactions.


• I prefer gen. DNW non-canon relationships unless requested. I'm not asking you to ignore canon relationships; but please don't make them the focus of the story. I don't care for anything more than PG-13: explicit sexual detail is definitely a DNW for me.


• I love casefic; and, more generally, I like stories that are canon-compliant. The general exception to this is ignoring canonical character death if you want. Canon-divergent AUs are also okay. (There may be other specific exceptions.)


• I'm okay with violence if necessary to the story; but not gore for the sake of gore. On the whole, I prefer not to have characters die in the story; but references to canonical deaths are okay. (I'm fine with having original characters murdered in casefic, and that sort of thing.)


• I enjoy comedy—being able to recognize the ridiculous when it pops up; also wit and wordplay. Having said that, I totally leave it up to you whether you write a serious or comic story—or a serious story with comic interludes.


• No second-person fic, please. First person is definitely okay for book canons that were written that way by the author. However, I don't generally care for it with TV fandoms. Epistolary fic is fine.
  

( Read more... )

I've just put in my nominations for the yuletide gift exchange: Forever Knight, Mary Renault's The Charioteer, and the old British comedy cop show, New Tricks.

I feared that last year would be the end of FK's eligibility. In fact, we now stand at 976 fic spread over AO3 and FF.net, which means we are still (barely!) under the cut-off. I guess there were fewer personal sites discontinued this year.

Anyway, I nominated Nick, Schanke, Vachon, and LaCroix. If any other FK fans are doing Yuletide this year, do please consider adding more characters to the tagset. Sadly, one is only allowed four per fandom, and there are so many fascinating people in the FK cast.

YOU CAN NOMINATE HERE.

There are so many missing characters! The absence of women is particularly obvious. If you do decide to nominate, please comment here or on the mailing list so that people can coordinate.

First, let me thank you for writing me a story in one of the fandoms we share. I'm excited about all of them. (They're listed in alphabetical order, so as not to play favourites.) I should also say up front that I'm easy on getting either a trick or a treat.


GENERAL POINTS:

• I love worldbuilding and character pieces—stories that explore more deeply—through backstory, or by elaborating the setting/history/culture or exploring people's motivations and personal interactions.


• I prefer gen; but I'm not asking you to ignore canon relationships, though please keep them in the background. I don't care for anything more than PG-13: explicit sexual detail is definitely a DNW for me.


• I love casefic; and, more generally, I like stories that are canon-compliant. The general exception to this is ignoring canonical character death if you want. Canon-divergent AUs are also okay. (There may be specific exceptions.)


• I'm okay with violence if necessary to the story; but not gore for the sake of gore. On the whole, I prefer not to have characters die in the story; but references to canonical deaths are okay. (I'm fine with having original characters murdered in casefic, and that sort of thing.)


• I enjoy comedy: being able to recognize the ridiculous when it pops up; also wit and wordplay. Having said that, I totally leave it up to you whether you write a serious or comic story—or a serious story with comic interludes.


• No second person fic, please. First person is definitely okay for book canons that were written that way by the author.
  

( Read more... )

Well, the sunshine_challenge may be over, but—looking over what I've written on the colours—I find I still have a bit more to say.

In the last post, on VIOLET, I took colours beyond the spectrum and round the colour wheel, finishing up where it all started, i.e. with RED. However, I had the devil of a job doing that last bit:

VIOLET					RED

Although the end points were fixed (and I knew that #FF00FF needed to be in the middle), I kept fiddling with the hex codes, tweaking them over and over in an attempt to get a smooth set of transitions. Even now, I'm not satisfied.

Thinking about it after the fact, though, I think I've put my finger on the problem. Something silveradept wrote:

It's interesting - when I imagine the platonic examples of colors (which usually involves a crayon box), almost all of the shades of the Newtonian spectrum are dark, with the exception of yellow,[...].

I grew up with a set of basic colours that were essentially derived from the subtractive primaries. Oh, there was RED (instead of magenta + yellow) and BLUE (instead of magenta + cyan); but, as one mixed more paints together, things got darker. People who think in terms of additive primaries—originally scientists in Optics, but nowadays particularly people dealing with computers—are accustomed to having colours get lighter as they're added together.

What this means in practice is that, instead of the sequence above, I ought to find it easier to get a gradation by using dark shades.

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With violet we come to the last hue in the visible spectrum, which is to say:


(Which was named for the colour of the flowers of Viola odorata.)

To me, violet is a shade of PURPLE. That is to say, "purple" is one of the basic colour words in English; and the word refers to a broad range of colours in the same way that BLUE, RED, YELLOW, and GREEN do—though PURPLE is not quite as basic a colour as those, being more on a par with ORANGE and TURQUOISE.

I would not, however, say that violet is focal PURPLE, i.e. the most perfect, ideal shade of PURPLE. That, to me, is a shade slightly more to the BLUE end of the spectrum:




Or, to put it another way, the perfect shade of PURPLE lies between indigo and violet: indigo is the colour transitional between PURPLE and BLUE; and violet lies at the far end of the spectrum. (Beyond that lies ultraviolet, which can't be seen by the human eye.)

BLUE	INDIGO	PURPLE	VIOLET

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Given that I've already done TURQUOISE (Newton's "blue") and BLUE (Newton's "indigo"), what's left for INDIGO?

Well, the plant produces a blue-purple dye; and the colour is usually described as lying between blue and purple. So what's that?





Some might call this simply BLUE, especially if it presented in contrast with YELLOW, RED, and GREEN:





If, however, we compare it with BLUE and PURPLE (what I think of a a perfect PURPLE), then we can see it lies in between:





What we're looking at here is, I think, a sort of transitional colour: one that lies on the border between two basic colours. In the same way, GOLD is transitional between ORANGE and YELLOW; and CHARTREUSE is transitional between GREEN (especially lime green) and YELLOW.
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So now we come to BLUE proper. To me, this is inherently a dark colour—though, of course, there are plenty of shades of blue from midnight to ice. It's the colour most associated with sapphires and delphiniums (though both come in quite different hues as well); and it's the colour of those little blue squill, Scilla sibirica, that are so commonly massed under shrubs in flower beds in the spring.

One association of blue is with the police; and one of my favourite fandoms, Forever Knight, is a cop show as well as a vampire show. Although Nick Knight himself is a plainclothes detective, there are uniformed officers in the police station in every episode; and they, of course, wear blue:




[NOTE: if you can't see the picture, click on it: I put a link on.]

In 2011, I wrote a story about Nick's first day in Homicide. "The New Guy" was written for lastscorpion in the small fandom-specific gift exchange, fkficfest. The story was originally posted to LiveJournal (where the exchange was then run) and later crossposted to AO3 and my website.

The plot of "The New Guy" is based on the flashback to a Season 1 episode, "Only the Lonely", which tells how he first met Natalie Lambert. It is canon, therefore, that he was brought into the morgue in a bodybag, having been blown up by a pipe bomb while trying to stop a robbery. Then, being a vampire, he regenerated on the autopsy table. To her great astonishment, of course; but she was intrigued enough to offer to research his condition in the hope of finding a way for him to turn mortal again.

At that time, Nick was not yet a police officer. (Or, at least, not in Toronto. Another flashback told us about his time as a uniformed cop in Chicago in the 1960s.) It was sometime thereafter that he contrived to join the Metro Toronto Police and get immediately assigned to work Homicide at the 27th Precinct.

Since "The New Guy" was about Nick as a policeman, I decided to go with a plain blue background, and bordered the central story panel with a textured blue and black border picked out in gold. I used a police badge in various sizes as a divider between the sections: this was clipped from a screencap. Admittedly, it was a close-up of Det. Schanke's ID. (He was Nick's partner in Seasons 1 & 2.) But Nick's would have looked the same.



When I later wrote two more canon-based stories told from alternative perspectives, "Shift" and "Copper's Instinct", I reused the same webpage design.

To me, turquoise is a cool, fresh hue that reminds me of water and the tiles you find in bathrooms and swimming pools. However, if you say "tiles" to any Forever Knight fan, they will immediately think of Natalie's office in the Coroners Building in Toronto.

The exterior views were filmed on location; but the interior was a permanent set. By positioning the camera behind whatever wall was broken away, it always looked a lot larger than it actually was, which—from the few steps needed for the actors to cross it—must have been pretty small. The most prominent feature was an autopsy table in the middle of the room, since Dr. Lambert (played by Catherine Disher) was a pathologist. But one corner had her computer and filing cabinets; and the opposite end had a lab desk; so it was by way of being a sort of all-purpose room that you'd never get in the real world. Let's just say that the series was done on a low budget!



[NOTE: if you can't see the picture, click on it: I put a link on.]

Most distinctive were the turquoise tiles that covered the walls from floor to ceiling.

Some years ago, when I was making icons for all the FK factions, I went through screencaps until I found one that had Natalie standing close to the wall. I carefully cropped out a tile, picking the one that the camera was pointed to dead on. As a result, the graphic "tiles" perfectly.



I promptly used it, in miniature, for the icon representing the NatPack, i.e. the faction for fans of Natalie. (Click on it to see it enlarged.)



However, I've also used the tile a couple of times when making webpages for stories that focus on Natalie in her role as pathologist, rather than her role as Nick's friend. The most recent is a ficlet, "Morgue Maniacs", that I wrote at the end of April as part of my attempt to keep busy while in lockdown. It features Natalie and her lab assistant, Grace, chatting on the night shift.

For its webpage, I complemented the authentic tile by bordering the central panel with nested tables whose most prominent feature is a band of coffee beans, representing the women's off-duty chit-chat. This came originally from GRSites.com; but I reduced it in size so that the detail could be seen in the relatively narrow width of the border. I trimmed it with ripply graphics that look a bit like turquoise ribbons bordered in gold, both derived from an original I got from 321clipart.com.

This fifth Sunshine Challenge is for the colour blue. But what is "blue"?

I'm one of those people who sees a distinct colour between green and [what I call] blue. This intermediate colour has various names: printers call it "cyan"; and a lot of computer types very imaginatively call it "blue-green". Some people use the words "teal" or "aqua"; but, to me, these are more specific terms. (I'd use teal only for darker shades, and aquamarine for lighter ones.) To me, the general term is TURQUOISE, which is also what I'd name the focal hue, i.e. the ideal, perfect shade of the colour.

TURQUOISE lies between GREEN and BLUE:

So, from my perspective, in going straight from "green" to "blue", the Sunshine Challenge is leaving a colour out.

Oops.

But opinions differ. Is TURQUOISE really a separate colour? When I was a little kid, it never occurred to me that it wasn't. I only realized that not everyone agreed when I was in the second half of Grade Four. It was the day when our teacher, Mrs Smith, decided to give us a lesson in colour terms.
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As someone who likes green, I look at it in comparison with other colours, and I think it gets sadly short-changed. I mean, just consider this:

YELLOW			YELLOW
ORANGE			GREEN
RED			GREEN
BROWN			GREEN

I mean, sure, we have names for the different greens. I'd call the lighter one "lime" and the muted one "olive". But they are still considered to be types of green. ( Read more... )

Green is one of my favourite colours. I remember when we moved house in the fall of 1968, my parents suggested that, as our big Christmas-cum-housewarming presents, they buy my sisters and me each head-and-feet for our beds, which had previously just had bed frames and mattresses. I always prefer to put my bed along a wall so as to maximize the space in the centre of the room; so I asked instead for a carpet, specifically a green one.

My mother, who adored shopping, took me round so many stores. We saw rag rugs and Persian rugs and Navajo rugs and all sorts of "modern" patterns. Eventually, it was all too obvious that she was getting fed up with my fussiness. (But it was MY present!)

"You said 'green'," she kept saying. "Well, this one is green!"

Finally, in one of the large department stores, a sales clerk suggested we look through some piles of "ends" of plain, solid-coloured wall-to-wall carpeting material. One by one, these were turned back at the corner to show the next one underneath. And then, suddenly, it just GLOWED. A rich, glorious emerald green.

I adored it instantly.

With horror, I heard my mother protest that it would need to be finished with a fringe, which would make it cost too much. However (gasp! relief!), it turned out to have been bound at the edges so it wouldn't fray.

I still have it.

Pure yellow is not a favourite colour of mine. However, the English language has a term for shades that are close to yellow, i.e. "gold" (or "golden"). Actually, by contrast with the usual colours of things, the term gold can be used for shades that, in isolation, one would probably call light orange, tan, or green, e.g. golden retrievers and golden mock-orange. I like golden tones a lot, especially when the leaves turn in the fall.

One of my favourite books of all time, S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders, has a quotation from Robert Frost:

Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour,
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

At the end, the hero, Ponyboy Curtis, gets a letter from his now-dead friend, Johnny, that explains the symbolism of the colour gold in the poem: you're gold when you're a kid. "It's just when you get used to everything that it's day."

The Outsiders is set in 1965, when Hinton began writing it. It was not finished and published, however, until 1967; and I guess it was probably that fall when our local library got copies on the shelves. At any rate, I first read it when I was fourteen, the same age as Pony. It hit me like a ton of bricks. So much more real in its evocation of adolescence than A Catcher in the Rye, which we'd read at school and had bored me to bits.

I borrowed it over and over; and, when it finally came out in paperback a couple of years later, bought my own copy. In the decades since then, I've read it often. I guess over the past few years some time might pass between readings; but it's one of those books I go back to. Each time, I find more in it.

A couple of years ago, someone requested it in a gift exchange I was doing. I'm not sure I even put it down as an offer: certainly, I didn't match on it. However, it got me thinking—and taking it off the shelf once again!—and ideas came, as they tend to do. When, last year, it came up as a pinch hit in the Wayback Exchange with prompts that fit, I grabbed it fast.

Whether luciferinasundaysuit was expecting quite what they got, I don't know; but they seem to have liked it. "A Different Shade of Gold" turns the symbolism of The Outsiders on its head. It's not about Pony in his youth, but about Pony today. Still more or less the same age I am, in other words. He and his wife are turning out the attic; and he finds the old essay he once wrote for his English teacher. A lot of water has passed under the bridge since then....

As with all my fanfic, it's also on my website. Of course, I gave it a gold theme. The main background is a variant of GRSites' brown128.jpg (though that's an old graphic found elsewhere, too). I've made many variants of it, using the software on GRSites and/or Microsoft Picture Manager. This one is shades of soft gold and brown; and the same tones are picked up in the broad border of nested tables surrounding the central panel with the story.

Orange is one of my favourite colours, along with brown, which is derived from it. I think rust/copper/tawny shades are probably my absolute favourite. In fact, when I bought a little rust-coloured velvet cushion once, and my mother said, "But you've got cushions," I just pulled it out and she said, "Oh, of course you bought it: it's Greer-coloured."


We all learn young that RED + YELLOW = ORANGE. In the limited palette of a child's paint box, we also find that this is true in practice as well as theory. It ain't always true! I mean, try mixing red and blue to make purple: given the shades available to most kids, all you ever get is purplish mud.


It has always puzzled me, though, why so many colour charts and rainbow sequences (say on flags or in ads) show as "orange" a colour that is very much closer to red than yellow. Often, it's almost red! You'd think they'd pick a shade that is bang in the middle.

Instead, all too often, it looks more like this:





Now, obviously if you compare the middle colour to red, it looks "un-red":





But, if you put it side by side with the yellow without red for contrast, then it actually looks more like a light red. Certainly, it's far redder than anything I'd call a true orange.





Surely, what you want to use for "orange" is a shade that contrasts equally either way. You want something that is clearly different when compared with red:





And also clearly different when compared with yellow:





So why do people so often use a very dark orange in making rainbows and colour wheels and the like?

Isn't this how it should be?

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.

All told, I wrote five stories for Yuletide in 2018. Besides the two Renault fic I wrote, there were "Joust on Vellum" (medieval manuscripts), "Flight at Christmas" (Mrs Pollifax), and "The Dapple Flows into the Dawl" (Lud-in-the-Mist). From which one may correctly conclude that no one requested Forever Knight that year—besides me that is—for, if they had, I would certainly have contrived to come up with something, whatever they'd asked for.

"Joust on Vellum" was written for oneirad. Odd illustrations in medieval manuscripts were a nonce fandom that Yuletide; and several writers essayed their own takes on the subject. The "old parchment" background represents the source material; and the border around the story is dominated by a broad band of oak, representing the tables and desks in the scriptorium of the monastery. This is light oak because it darkens with age, and the furnishings back then would have been newly made. For further decoration, I snipped out a number of details from pictures of actual illuminated manuscripts—being sure, of course, to include a jousting snail.

"Flight at Christmas" was written for philomytha. With no idea how to "Pollifax" the webpage design, I decided to go for a Christmas theme. For the main background I used a tile of snowy branches, laying over it my usual animated snow graphic. The border panel is red, green, gold, and tartan, with touches of ice and snow.

The Dapple Flows into the Dawl" was written for moon_custafer. It's a brief postscript to Hope Mirrlees' fantasy, Lud-in-the-Mist, which is a great favourite of mine. I don't think I've ever seen it requested in an exchange before: it is one of the rarest of fandoms. I was utterly delighted to write a treat based on it. To illustrate the story, I modified a layout that I'd created some time before, but never used. The main background is a variant of brown128.jpg in shades of beige and aqua blue. The dominant panel in the border is a muted aqua green tile from BoogieJack.com, which I've used before. Here, it is combined with a glistening pale blue variant of Heather's Animations' gold-refraction.jpg, and a light variant of marb032.jpg from GRSites.com. To glitz all this up a bit, I added a couple of narrow ripply cream tones. All in all, quite a variety of shades were used. Nevertheless, they produce an overall pale, cool pastel impression. Very dainty, I think. Perhaps too much so. As an accent, therefore, I outlined the panel with a dark brown texture.