17. Do you think readers perceive your work - or you - differently to you? What do you think would surprise your readers about your writing or your motivations?

Readers? I don't know. Most comments I get seem reasonably to the point.

Non-readers, definitely. Quite a few people who make anonymous comments on fail_fandomanon (FFA) seem to think that I was the person who wrote a problematic Dragonriders of Pern story ("Queen") that was written for Yuletide in 2011. This assumption has been dragged up off and on for years. It's irritating because, although "Queen" has a cute ending, it's not really all that good a story. Fortunately, it's fairly clear from other FFA posts that people who have actually read my fanfic don't believe the canard, basically on the grounds that I'm a better writer than that. (Thank you!!!) Gossip, right? It can be a pain.

I think most fan writers feel there's never enough feedback. Current FK writers owe a debt of thanks to brightknightie for, as the mod of fkficfest, she encourages comments and always herself responds at length; and people do follow suit. Of course, one would always like more comments on all one's fic in every fandom! Comments are gold.

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16. Tried anything new with your writing lately? (style, POV, genre, fandom?)

In one sense, obviously. Whenever I do the Yuletide gift exchange I do treats; and these are often for fandoms I've never written in before. On the other hand, I've been doing Yuletide since 2011; so that part not's new. This year, I wrote stories for Diana Wynne Jones's Eight Days of Luke ("Embers") and Josephine Tey's Alan Grant detective series ("Queue for Exit"). I've seen requests for the latter each year for quite a while; and each year I've put it on my "long list" of potential treats. But it was only this past year that a plot bunny finally poked up. It's not the first time a story has come to me in such a belated fashion; and the probability is high that I'll never write in either fandom again.

Basically, I don't think I've done anything particularly innovative lately. Same old, same old.

This is not necessarily a bad thing!

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15. Which is harder: titles or summaries (or tags)?

Oh, summaries. Definitely. Sometimes even a single, rather uninspired sentence is difficult. I don't want to give away too much, especially if it's a plotty sort of story. At the same time, I don't care for the common fallback of just quoting the first few lines. Especially given that my first lines are often short and snappy, but not very informative.

Tags are hard, too.

Not the character tags: they're straightforward. But the freeforms can be tough to decide on. The one that's easy is "canon-divergent AU": if it is, then that certainly needs to go in. If the story is heavily derived from a particular episode, then I cite that. Otherwise, I guess I may mention things like "historical" and "canon-derived", if they apply. Mostly, though, I don't use a lot of freeforms.

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14. At what point in writing do you come up with a title?

Usually, the name comes to me fairly soon. Occasionally before I even start writing! (There's a plot bunny named "Summit Blues" that has not a single word to its name.) Mind you, that's pretty rare; but it is true that, if I don't have a title to hang on the fic, I find it hard to get down to writing. Sometimes that means I use a working title, and hope that something better will eventually occur to me. Most of the time it does. If not, then somewhere towards the end I will start googling for quotations, quips, or sayings that have some relation with the theme or subject of the story in the hope that one will hit the spot. Normally, I find something in under an hour. And that's only if I have to go hunting.

It's rare for me to post a story and then alter the title; but it did happen recently. I wrote a M*A*S*H story in which BJ got a tin of peanut butter cookies from his wife, leading to some slice-of-life banter involving Hawkeye and Frank Burns. I initially gave it the title, "The Peanut Gallery"; but, at the last minute, I whipped in and altered it to "The Peanut Butter Gallery".

There was one multi-part story, though, that never did get its proper name. It was written piecemeal in response to a prompt on maryrenaultfics: "apple". As I couldn't think of a title, I simply referred to it as "my applefic". I did this so long that, when it came time to collect all the ficlets together, I couldn't think of it in any other way. So "Applefic" it remains to this day.

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13. Do you share your writing online? (Drop a link!) Do you have projects you’ve kept just for yourself?

Most of my stories are on the Archive of Our Own and my own website. However, there are two groups of things that are on my website but not on AO3: my virtual season and my war!fic.

In the case of the war posts, it's partly because it would mean little to someone who was not on the FK mailing lists, and partly because—even if you are a Forever Knight fan—you'd need the rest of the War to really get what's going on. I fought in Wars 13, 14, and 15, as well as writing a couple of ficlets set in the war!verse.

In the case of the virtual season, it's a matter of formatting. Actually that's the reason I have a website at all. I wrote FK4 in a modification of full script format. Trying to adapt that into text in order to post to the mailing list proved so much of a nuisance that it was actually easier to learn HTML. (Plus, of course, it afforded the chance to do pretty things with webpage design. The actual episodes were uploaded as zipped Word files, each linked to its own title page.) AO3 also has formatting constraints; and, although I did essay the translation of the first two episodes into a form acceptable to AO3's server, in the end I never bothered to do any more of them. So FK4 is on my website.

There are things that aren't on line. These include a few things written once-upon-a-time long-long-ago, i.e. my old K/S Star Trek novel and five or six Next Gen scripts. Also an unfinished novel that started out as Alias Smith and Jones fanfic, but had the serial numbers scratched off before I'd even finished Chapter Two. I only got eight chapters in, plus the final chapter.

Wow! I'm more than halfway through this already!

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12. Do you want your writing to be famous?

Let's face it: I write fan fiction for what mostly are very rare fandoms. By the standards of anyone into a megafandom, my stuff is scarcely read at all. And outside fandom, no fan fiction has any fame—well, unless it's had its serial numbers scrubbed off; and, even then, it pretty well has to be badly written BDSM smut. (I assume you know what THAT jaundiced remark refers to!)

Seriously, though, of course I would like my writing to be famous. (I'm only human.) It's just that my own definition of "famous" involves things like being found in libraries and taught in university courses. So I doubt if it will happen unless I finish some original fiction and get it published and it's critically well received. A fair few conditions there—and all dependent on the first, i.e. writing it.

Saving that, I think I'll settle for having those few who do read my stories enjoying them, commenting on them, and maybe even reccing them.

"Fame" in fandom tends to end in infamy, anyway. Who wants that?

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11. What do you envy in other writers?

The ability to keep on going to the very end of some really long fic idea.

Novels are being written out there today: I've read several written by ardent Arrowverse authors. Mind you, I've also encountered more than a few bogged-down WIPs. But there are people who really do slog on to the very utter end of something that's 200+ K words long. And there's a fabulous comics-based Flash AU by enina that started in 2015, is already well over a million words, and still going.

Once upon a time, long long ago, I slogged my way all the way through a K/S pon farr novel which had, besides that, a main action plot and a subplot involving a set of junior crew members. I made myself write at least one page a day, every day. Longhand. It got written piecemeal; so there were big gaps between the scenes. If you can even call them scenes! Bitty wee bits. Eventually I typed the whole thing out, filled in the gaps, and revised it a few times. The first few months took a lot of determination; but, in the end, I got inspired to real speed and wrote several pages a day. I've never gone back to re-read it, and I dare say it isn't very good; but the point is that I did actually finish it.

Once upon a time, almost as long ago, I wrote an entire 22-episode virtual season. Initially, I was just doing "an episode" (and then another, and another); but I quite quickly got the idea of writing a full set. They, too, were written out of order. Eventually I had to decide how to organize the thing and fill in blanks. It took years.

Nowadays, I often find myself daunted approaching a gift exchange assignment that typically finishes up at a mere 3K or so. And it's not the fact that I'm writing to a prompt, either. What's depressing is the fact that I do still have a "big idea" or three; and I just can't get down to working on any of them really.

There is always something else to do. Witness the fact that I'm doing this instead of my worldbuildingex assignment!

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10. How would you describe your writing process?

Painful.

Well, not physically. But there are times when it feels like pulling teeth. Stories don't write themselves; and some of them are downright uncooperative. Yes, okay: drabbles and ficlets can be written very quickly. (Otherwise there's no point in bothering with something that short.) But the longer works! Aaargghhhhh!!!!

Oh, otherwise? Once upon a time I wrote longhand. Then I typed, and literally had to cut and paste alterations in using scissors and cellotape. Nowadays, I compose directly onto the computer.

Then I revise. The first revision is the one that really pulls things together. After that comes as much polishing as I have time for (given deadlines when I'm writing for a gift exchange). Even so, when I re-read my old stories, I often find typos that have eluded me. One advantage of posting on-line is the ability to correct them ... even years later. :)

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9. Are you more of a drabble or a longfic kind of writer? Pantser or plotter? Do you wish you were the other? Both, or neither?

I've not done much real longfic writing: novels and the like. However, I've written everything from drabbles to novellas. The shorter the fic, the more I pants it: inspiration goes straight to keyboard. Longer stories need plotting. This often takes place over weeks of thinking before I ever start writing.

Sometimes it happens through research: this is especially true for stories with a strong historical component. In such cases, I often wonder if I'm ever going to start to write; but actually what it means is that there's a period in which I'm taking in so much data that my brain needs time to synthesize it into worldbuilding before the plot can come.

Sometimes it happens through daydreaming: often I'll focus on critical scenes, going over and over them and working out what happens around them. At one time, I'd write those scenes first; but nowadays I usually go Humpty Dumpty style, i.e. start at the beginning and go on to the end and then stop. And then revise!

However, there are other times when the plotting is done section by section. This is especially true for the handful of longer things I've written. In that case, it's still done by thinking things out; but I only have a vague idea of how things are heading in the long run. The details of each section are worked out, it's written, and then I move on to the details of the next section. I do always know how it will end, though!

I don't write outlines. The planning is normally all done in my head. The only time I can recall ever working anything out on paper was the subplot flow for FK4; and that was done very near the end. Most of the virtual season was held entirely in my head over the years I took to write it. However, I should point out that each episode was written separately. It was only piecing it all together that needed a bit of pen and paper to make sure each subplot got ordered correctly across the episodes.

I'm basically pretty okay with how I plan (or don't plan) my stories. I just wish the actual writing came more easily.

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8. Is what you like to write the same as what you like to read?

Yes and no. I'd say that everything I like to write is included in the sorts of things I read. However, I read more widely than I write. When scanning the stories in a gift exchange collection, I'll take a look at fic for most fandoms where I'm familiar with the canon. I'll also take a quick look through the Original Fiction to see if anything tickles my fancy.

I read a lot more romance than I write, if only because such a high proportion of fan fiction includes at least some such scenes. I'm there for the plot, though—well, plot and characterization and worldbuilding. If I realize it's a PWP, I'll just back-button. Even with lovely plotty stories, I mostly skim fast over any smutty bits, because I find them boring.

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7. What do you think are the characteristics of your personal writing style? Would others agree?

Ooh, this is a tricky one. I've done a bit of an analysis of the first and last lines of some of my stories. (In 2019 it was just first lines; in 2019, it was both first and last lines.) I concluded that, in both cases, I had a tendency to write something short and snappy. As I put it, "They're designed to grab you fast and toss you on to the rest of the paragraph, wherein lies the real interest."

Beyond that, I would say that I tend to change my style depending on the story. For pastiche, of course, I try to simulate the style of the author. For historical fiction, I try for something with the sort of complex sentence structure of a Victorian novel. For casefic, I'm more likely to write choppy vivid sentences, such as one might find in a police procedural. But it's very much "horses for courses".

In this year's Snowflake Challenge, No. 12 was to do one of the old memes from LJ days. I picked the "I Write" meme, and applied it to some of my FK fic. This is what I reported:

There was a tendency for the stories with a cop-show feel to be compared to Stephen King, while the historical vampire ones got either Anne Rice or Arthur C. Clarke. Agatha Christie turned up a couple of times. However....

The story "En Vacances" is written from alternating perspectives in Paris and a hospital room in Toronto. It is supposed to have a certain enigmatic air about it. Even so, I was surprised when the Paris sections got ascribed variously to James Joyce, Margaret Atwood, Charles Dickens, Leo Tolstoy, and Cory Doctorow. And the hospital scenes were ascribed to James Fenimore Cooper, Vladimir Nabokov, Stephen King, Ian Fleming, Mark Twain, and Oscar Wilde.

Granted, some of the sections are fairly short. But the whole thing was written by just me; and it's all one story, too. (On my website and on AO3.)

I don't know about other people; but it would seem the "I Write" meme agrees that my style varies a lot.

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6. What character do you have the most fun writing?

In some ways I think I answered this already: as a Die-Hard, I don't play favourites. Of course, that applies particularly to my FK fic. However, a lot of what I write nowadays is giftfic in exchanges—and much of that is treats, which being motivated by intriguing prompts in rare fandoms that I've often never written in before, tend to be one-offs. So it's not so much specific characters that appeal to me as worldbuilding.

I'd have to say, though, that I am intrigued by the character of Leonard Snart. Not so much in the comics—though he was always one of my favourite Rogues in The Flash, especially in the early versions of the group. The iteration in the Arrowverse series, on the other hand, has a lot to offer a writer.

There's his "Captain Cold" persona, which is clearly a role he plays for effect. There's his backstory: how his childhood and youth shaped him into the man he becomes. There's the shift in characterization from the villain whom the Flash first fights, to the more complex man who decides to join the Legends, to the hero who sacrifices himself to save his friend, his crew, and time itself. And last, but far from least, if he is somehow saved and returned to the present day, there's the further evolution of his character going into the future.

A lot of potential for fic, in other words.

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4. Share a sentence or paragraph from your writing that you’re really proud of (explain why, if you like).

I found this one remarkably hard to do. It's not that there aren't things I've written that I'm proud of. However, they can't usually be pinned down a single line or so. They're more often longer passages that have a point to make, or sections of a story that took a lot of research. In the end, I picked this:

She cherished every memory. She had never wanted to move on. Yet still things slipped out of mind.

Photo albums had been her preserve. So a couple of the best pictures, blown up and framed, presided in the living room: one on the table by his armchair and the other on the mantelpiece. His face, never changing, never forgotten. Always dear. She had long since gone grey, but he never would.

And at first she could hear him in her head. With a dry comment, perhaps, as she watched the TV news. Or praising her cake, as he’d done so often (just before stealing a dollop of icing, and licking his finger with loud smacking appreciation). Now, though … now she woke, once in a while, from a dream that he was alive: amnesia for years perhaps, finally returned home. Yet, once her eyes were open, she could only remember that she had heard his voice and known it instantly.

It comes from "Festival of Festivals" (on AO3), which I wrote for fkficfest in 2016. It was a remarkably difficult passage to write. I think I spent at least an hour over just those few words. Maybe more. My mother had died less than a year earlier; and it evoked all the loss I was still feeling.

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3. What is that one scene that you’ve always wanted to write but can’t be arsed to write all of the set-up and context it would need? (consider this permission to write it and/or share it anyway).

It's not so much single scenes as it is humungously huge plot bunnies. If it's a single scene, it will be for a fandom I write in regularly; and any readers will know the basic background already. In that case, I'll knock it out—for a treat, if I'm in the throes of a gift exchange and there's a relevant prompt—and post it. And that will shut it up!

No, it's the fat bunnies. They made fantastic eating once they're cooked, mind you. But, as Mrs Beeton said, first you have to catch them.

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2. Tell us about what you’re most looking forward to writing – in your current project, or a future project.

I'm not sure I ever "look forward" to writing! It would be more accurate to say that I look forward to having written. Still, one thing I would like to do this year is finish a series of Arrowverse stories that I started a couple of years ago.

Most fic writers who tackle the story of Leonard Snart's childhood depict it as almost entirely negative, particularly his relationship with his father. However, if he were routinely thrashed within an inch of his life with untended broken bones, not to mention being chronically half starved, then there is no way he could possibly have grown up to look like Wentworth Miller. That Lewis Snart was a dysfunctional father—a career criminal who taught his young son to assist him in his thieving—is canon; but that doesn't necessarily mean that he was a hundred per cent a bad dad in other respects. At least, not when his son was a child. Why would Leonard be so stricken when he finally kills his father if there were not more going on underneath, way back when, long before the events of "A Family of Rogues"?

Anyway, I wrote the first three installments for the Worldbuilding Exchange in 2019; and fearbuddies helped me write two more installments last summer. I would like to get the story finished: probably another three parts.

Whether it's rightly a series is another matter. On AO3 it is posted as such; but that's because each part was completed separately. However, if I'd been able to get down to it betimes, I'd have done them as chapters. I've not posted the completed stories on my website yet: I want to finish the lot. I've done their webpage, though; and, yes, they're all on one page. There's also an index page; but the presentation is chaptered. I'm quite pleased with the layout and graphics, and rather looking forward to the day when I can unveil them.

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I've been so intrigued by lightbird's responses to this, that I've decided to try it myself.

1. Tell us about your current project(s) – what’s it about, how’s progress, what do you love most about it?

At the moment, I'm working on my assignment for the Worldbuilding Exchange (worldbuildingex). Obviously, since it's a gift exchange with an anon period, I can't talk much about it. I can say that it's an idea that I've had for a long time.

It's going to be quite a long, plotty story. The frustrating thing is that, while I know where I want it to head, actually getting the scenes down can be tricky. Sometimes they play themselves out in my head when I'm lying in bed; but then, when I actually get down to writing, they decide to come out differently—and painfully slowly. But I've been here before. Anything besides a tiny ficlet (if I dash off immediately and write the whole thing in less than an hour) always seems to need prying out word by word.

The easiest thing to write is dialogue. There's a reason I wrote a virtual season in a script format! It's getting all the in-between bits down that's painful; yet action requires description, and one must set the scene. Still, taking it all in all, though at times it feels as though I'm pulling teeth, when I reread what I've already got down I realize that some parts of the story are going great guns.

It should all come together in the end. At the moment, though, I'm far off getting there.

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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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It seems a bit weird to tout one's own virtues—or rec one's own fic, for that matter. I notice others have said the same thing. Basically, we're told not to when we're little kids; and that's pretty well reinforced as we get older, too.

Anyway, I see most people have given a few of their own stories. So here are five of mine, each in a different fandom. The main links are to my website, since I have to admit I am proud of the webpages I make for my stories.

• "A Different Shade of Gold" - S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders

  I first read this book when it was bought by our public library some months after publication, when I was Ponyboy's age. Each time I have read it since, I'm a bit older and my perspectives have shifted. Here I translate that into fiction: Ponyboy as he might be today, a guy around my own age rereading that old "class assignment" after so many years. (Written for luciferinasundaysuit in waybackexchange 2019. On AO3 here.)

  
  
  
• "Exiles of the Sunless Sea" - C.S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia

  I wrote this after a mad post-sign-up scramble through the tagset to find a request that I felt I could offer. In The Silver Chair, Lewis created the deep underground realm of Bism; but, although Jill and Eustace meet its exiled inhabitants, they had long since been bespelled into minions of evil. My story turns the tale round, to show the Bismian perspective on their situation. (Written for deepdarkwaters in worldbuildingex 2017. On AO3 here.)

  
  
  
• "Hobbiton Farm" - BBC Historical Farms series X The Lord of the Rings

  This was actually an extra prompt in a Yuletide letter. A crackfic notion, of course; but I decided to treat it seriously. What if, in a modern Middle-earth, the BBC did a series in which Ruth, Alex, and Peter spent a year living the life of the hobbits of Hobbiton? (Written for halotolerant in Yuletide 2015. On AO3 here.)

  
  
  
• "Stopped Cold" - The Flash (CW TV)

  When TPTB decided to write Leonard Snart and Mick Rory out of The Flash and into Legends of Tomorrow, they drew a line under any chance of a TV version of the Rogues from the Flash comics. Most fans at the time wrote AUs in which the group were recruited shortly after Season One; but, coming into the fandom some years later, I wondered what it would be like if Cold were instead rescued from the Oculus explosion after a significant time gap; found the differences in the Waverider crew too disconcerting; and only then decided to return to Central City to start the Rogues. I've never essayed the whole story. I did, however, snip out this part of the tale: the newly formed Rogues' first heist, and its aftermath. (Written for rivulet027 in worldbuildingex 2018. On AO3 here.)

  
  
  
• "A Winchester Always" - M*A*S*H (TV)

  This is nominally a remix of my sister's story, "Secrets and Lies"; but, to my way of thinking, it would be better described as a co-writing project, even though my involvement was pretty ex post facto. She picked up the assignment and came up with the basic plot, and the notion of alternating between the "today" of 1968 and flashbacks to the Korean War. I heavily reorganized it and doubled its length. (Written in remixrevival 2019. On AO3 here.)

  
  

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.

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.