Mortal Love

The Nick and NatPack faction site. With the permission of the faction leader, now moved to https://www.foreverknight.ca/MortalLove/index.html

NOTE: archived within this site is Forever Knight - Canon & Trivia, now at https://www.foreverknight.ca/MortalLove/canon.htm


War V

Since Amparo Bertram's site has gone, the War V site (which she archived) has been moved to https://www.foreverknight.ca/WarFive/war5.html

As well as all posts, there is a drinking game and a page of quotations from the war.


Judith Freudenthal's Episode Guides

Now moved to https://www.foreverknight.ca/JudithFreudenthal/EpGuide/index.html

Before the deletion of the danaknight.com site, Judith's stories were uploaded to AO3; but the episode guides don't qualify for archiving there.

In checking which sites are no longer on the web so I can stick them in the archive, I have (obviously!) also found which ones are STILL out there. And yes, there are more of them than I'd thought.

So I've decided to add a good old-fashioned links page to the archive.

You can find it here: https://www.foreverknight.ca/links.htm

Happy scrolling!

 

For many years, one of the most recommended FK sites was one of the—if not the—very first fan sites devoted to the show. It was started by Jasmine when she was at Michigan Tech, and variously hosted on their servers until she left, at which point Dorothy Elggren gave it space on her website at http://www.loftworks.com.

Sadly, this recently disappeared. Along with the First Unofficial Forever Knight Page (which is a lot bigger than a mere page), we also lost Dorothy's archive for her own fanfic as well as some pages about her art, not all of which was FK.

Fortunately, Desiree had saved the whole site back at the beginning of the century (along with quite a few others, several of which have been in the Forever Knight Website Archive for a number of years). So I am very pleased to be able to put the Loftworks site back on the web.

You can find Dorothy's "Writing About the Knight" here.
The First Unofficial FK Page is here.
And (taken off the Wayback Machine, since neither of us had it saved), the OK Reviews are here, off a new index page so you can access them directly.

Now you may be wondering what those "OK Reviews" are. They were written by Lee Record for Season Three, and seem to have been posted shortly after each episode aired.

The First Unofficial FK Page has an "Episodes" section where each episode has its own page with basic info about it; and, for the Season Three eps, these pages have links to the OK Reviews, which were archived on the Loftworks site. All the episode pages also link to Marc Wallace's Forever Knight Critiques.

Like the First Unofficial, Marc Wallace's site has pages for each episode; and those pages link back to the First Unofficial FK Page. In fact the two sites are cross-linked all over the place. The FK Website Archive already has Marc's site. So I've gone in and changed every bloody one of those links so that the original effect is preserved. You can find the Forever Knight Critiques site here.

Enjoy!

In the later Forever Knight mailing-list Wars—at least, up till the "six-year gap" between Wars 12 and 13—a lot of factions put up their own war pages.

Some are just lists of participants, often with their permission statements (for every participant had to e-mail the the listowner, McLisa, explicitly giving permission to be written into the War). These often include short descriptions of players' war personae to aid the warscribes, especially those from other factions who might be writing crossovers. The bigger sites also archive the faction's war posts.

They vary a lot in size! Short ones are often found within the faction's own site; but sometimes (especially if the person who'd made it had gafiated), the war site would have to be a page in a member's personal site. Alternatively, they might make a tiny site just for purposes of war—something that was relatively easy back in the day of free sites like GeoCities.

A few still exist in the wild, so to speak. Others have been lost in the mists of time, which come up perilously fast on the internet. It was not uncommon for the old page to be simply taken down and replaced with the one for the latest war—at least while there were "latest wars".

These links lead to the faction war sites in the archive:

WAR 8:  Unnamed Faction

WAR 10:  NatPack, Ravenettes

WAR 11:  Cousins, Die-Hards, FoDs, Knighties, NatPack, Nick & NatPack, Ravenettes, UF

WAR 12:  Cousins, Nunkies Anonymous, UF, Vaqueras

"Factions" were (are?) a big thing in the Forever Knight mailing list fandom. The first were associated with major characters, and motivated the big round-robin RPGs known as "wars". These—and the others that followed—initially were by way of being teams playing in the wars; but, with the advent of easy mailing lists, became groups of friends with similar interests. From there, Yahoo!Groups of other kinds also became "factions", if only by courtesy (though some of them did play in a few of the largest wars).

For some factions, a website was basically a single page that advertised their existence. For others, it became an archive for fan fiction, jokes, top ten lists, screen- and sound-capture archives, and trivia/FAQ pages. Back at the beginning of the century, i.e. in the fandom's heyday, there were a lot of them. Some were formally associated with the faction's e-group; others were produced by a single member, with love and care. Some were elaborate, large, and regularly updated; others can only be called embryonic—barely started and left incomplete, with myriad "under construction" notices.

Most were uploaded to free sites—free to users, that is, because the webhost sold ad space above (or, in the case of GeoCities, to the side) of each page of the site.

Some of the faction sites do still exist out on the Web—either on the surviving free sites, Tripod and Angelfire, or paid for by someone still active in the fandom. Most, though, have long since vanished. Indeed, some disappeared so many years ago that even the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine has, at best, a handful of shadowy pages missing most of their graphics and stories. A few of these, though, were preserved years ago by fans who supplied Steph and me with them when we started the Forever Knight Website Archive. Current faction leaders and/or other members helped us restore others. Fortunately, GeoCities and FortuneCity did provide a little warning that they intended to quit hosting free sites; so many I was able to collect just before their disappearance.

I think I've now uploaded to the new site all of the faction sites that we held. ( Here's the list of what is currently in the archive. )

Once upon a time, the Forever Knight mailing list fandom had a small zine, Crusader, associated with the Kickstart the Knight campaign. This was a print edition, scans of which were archived on the Kickstart the Knight site.

Crusader was later resurrected as an on-line zine on LittleBlackaPony's website. However, being on-line meant that each old issue was wiped whenever a new one was posted. The Wayback Machine has various back issues, but these are in quite imperfect condition, with a lot of missing pictures, buttons, headers etc.

Fortunately, as it turned out, although LittleBlackaPony didn't have the pages themselves anymore, she located a folder with most of the graphics. There are still a few things gone (esp. for the issue of Spring 2006). Still, I've been able to reassemble most of the on-line editions.

You can find them indexed here.

Once it was announced that FK was going to be cancelled, which happened in late 1995, there were repeated attempts by the mailing-list fandom to save the show.

The first—the Save Forever Knight campaign—began before the final episode aired. It was eventually designated "War 6", though that's really just a courtesy title. A prominent part of the campaign involved seven fans going to the National Association of Television Program Executives (NATPE) in order to lobby in person. When (as we all know!) the show was cancelled anyway, a new effort—dubbed Kickstart the Knight—tried to persuade TPTB to bring the show back. This eventually segued into a campaign to have it released on videotape, and eventually on DVD.

Some of this appeared on the web. I figured I should prioritize getting these sites up, since they're a big part of our history.

The old Save Forever Knight campaign site was eventually moved to Mel's fanfic archive: https://www.foreverknight.ca/www.fkfanfic.com/sosfk/index.htm

Various versions of the Kickstart the Knight site can be found here:
https://www.foreverknight.ca/KtK/

As for the NATPE Seven: at the time, they reported their the exploits in posts to FORKNI-L. Eventually Diane Echelbarger put an expanded version on her website, The Pewter Gryphon's Lair. You can find the NATPE Seven report here:
https://www.foreverknight.ca/PewterGryphon/NATPE7/index.html

And finally, here's an on-line petition to put FK out on video:
https://www.foreverknight.ca/FKVideoPetition/index.html

Now that the three main archives are up in the Forever Knight Website Archive, I've started adding the War sites—and, if you weren't on list back in those days of yore, you can read about the wars here. In brief, call them a sort of RPG, with posts made to the FKFIC-L mailing list.

In the heyday of the mailing list fandom, a few hundred people might play. Not all were warscribes; but the old wars could be BIG. The Wars were, at one time, a big thing for the fandom. Quite a lot of people didn't play, of course; but those who did took war quite seriously. Hilariously so. A good time was had by all (etcetera, etcetera). I played in the last three wars, as scribe for the Die-Hard faction; and I made the website for War 15.

The first four wars are available on the main archive, indexed here; and War 8 is also there, but indexed separately.

Amparo Bertram archives War 5 on her own site.

And Jarvinia archives War 7 on her site.

(For those wondering what happened to War 6, it's a courtesy number given to the campaign back in 1996 when FK fans tried to persuade TPTB not to cancel the show.)

Here are the ones now in the Website Archive:

• War 9 site
  
• War 9 posts
  
• War 10 site
  
• War 10 posts
  
• War 11 site
  
• War 11 posts
  
• War 12 site (incl. posts)
  
• War 14 posts
  
• War 15 site (incl. posts)
  

Webspace was at a premium twenty-odd years ago; and early sites tended either to zip up the e-mailed story posts or leave them out altogether. So, for those wars, I've unzipped the stories and linked them to an index page for easy (or, at least, easier) reading.

Wars 12 and 15 have more familiar-looking websites, with a lot of ancillary material as well as the posts.

Alas, the site for War 13—quite a nice one—disappeared from the web before I'd tucked it away in its entirety. I have the ancillary pages, as well as the posts to FKFIC-L; but I must have quit for the day before collecting the webpages that were made for the stories. The Wayback Machine has hardly anything of the site; so I have quite a bit of editing to do to turn the e-mail into the site style. I should be able to recreate the War 13 site; but it's not up yet.

Also not up are the various faction war sites. Yet.

The main FK fic archive (Mel's archive) has now been uploaded to the Forever Knight Website Archive. You can find it here:

https://www.foreverknight.ca/www.fkfanfic.com/

This also means that V4S (the virtual season that was group-written after FK was cancelled) is back up. And the Forever Knight Bookcover Contest, FK font, 1999 FK fanfic awards, and episode transcripts.

Including five wars. One to Four are accessed from the "wars" link, and War Eight can be found here.

More to come!

Now that my own website is back up on the web (and I've checked through it and made edits where necessary so it reads properly), I've started uploading some of the archived sites that Steph and I had in the Forever Knight Website Archive.

The first to be uploaded was the site with the List Gardener's Tips, since it seemed important to get that back on the web. I know there aren't a lot of new people joining the list; but we do sometimes have fans-of-yore return to the fold.

You can find it here: https://www.foreverknight.ca/ListGardener/fk-lists.html

I've also got two of our fanfic archives up. Not Mel's yet: I've got some edits to make to it. However, both JADFE and the FTP site are now back on line.

You can find JADFE here: https://www.foreverknight.ca/JADFE/index.htm

And the FTP site is here: https://www.foreverknight.ca/FTP/index.htm

My focus next is going to be on War and faction sites.

Finally, finally ... I've bought webspace and a domain name and uploaded my website. You can find it at:


http://www.foreverknight.ca/FK4/


And, if that looks kind of familiar, it's because its almost the same as before. I couldn't use the same domain name that Steph had because it's paid up for another three years. However, the .ca version was available—and eminently reasonable for a Canadian TV show. (Being Canadian, I'm allowed to end my website with .ca if I want.)

No, this doesn't mean that the whole Forever Knight Website Archive is up. Yet. (Give me time!)

About a month ago, my website mysteriously disappeared. Along with all the rest of the Forever Knight Website Archive, including three main FK fic archives, most War archives and faction sites, sundry personal sites saved from GeoCities and Fortune City, and so on and so forth.

My first reaction was to e-mail Stephanie Kellerman, who had been hosting the Website Archive on her site, www.foreverknight.org. The e-mail bounced. I posted to the FORKNI-L mailing list (on which Steph had been active last fall). No response—well, except for concern and sympathy from other FK fans. I then googled and found an obituary.

Whether the Stephanie Kellerman who died is our Steph Kellerman from FK fandom is something I have no way of knowing. That's one of the difficulties with fannish friendships. You may not actually know the person's RL name; and, even if you do, you probably don't have a street address for them. However, the obituary included the usual little bio, which said the deceased knew computers and had four grandchildren—and, although my correspondence with Steph had been mainly about the Website Archive, things did occasionally get mentioned round the edges (so to speak); and it fits.

Anyway, I do plan to put my website up somewhere in the near future on some webhosting service yet to be decided. At the moment, I'm doing some revisions here and there; so it will probably be a few weeks.

When I do, I want to get a large enough site to be able to rehost the other things that have gone. As I did a lot of the collecting and editing of the old GeoCities sites, I have back-ups. I even, in a fit of concern, went page by page through the big fanfic archive copying absolutely everything (I hope!); so that's not lost either.

It'll take time to put everything back up; and, when I do, there'll be a new domain name since Steph's "www.foreverknight.org" has apparently been paid for until 2026, and I'm certainly not going to wait until then! It will all mean an appalling lot of editing in various wikis; but c'est la vie, I suppose, if one finds oneself called to be an archivist.

I've been pretty remiss over the past few years in writing about the new pages on my website. However, I recently added the page for "Limner", the story I wrote for this year's fkficfest. We got nine stories, all of them good'uns. Check them out!

"Limner" is set in a monastery in the thirteenth century; and I wanted the design to reflect this.

For the main background, I decided to use a graphic of ceramic tiles somewhat resembling those one might find in a medieval building. I found that I had to tweak the original, since it didn't display properly: the edges mated up all right, but the shading on the red-brown areas hadn't been blended properly and left lines where the graphic repeated across and down the page. I fixed that by flipping it multiple times and joining the whole thing together: the result is four times the size of the original, but "tiles" properly.

Then, instead of my usual central panel with a fancy border, I decided to use a sort of triptych design with panels of coloured church-style windows on either side of the story. This meant that I had to be careful when specifying the size of all the sections (and I haven't tried it out on different browsers); but I hope it works okay.

At the top, I added a picture of partly ground pigment. I got it from Wikimedia Commons, and then wiped out the background in the photo. I think I got it pretty well, especially since it's been scaled down quite a bit. The protagonist is a monk illuminating a manuscript; and the process is sketched in as the story progresses. I was lucky enough to find a picture in which the heap of pigment is red (like the demon the monk is painting). Almost the entire pile is in the photo; so I only had to shift a few grains around to get it to look right.

The monk is never named in the story. In fact, brightknightie contacted me to check if this was an accidental omission. However, I assured her it was deliberate: I wanted readers to figure it out as they read. She was very careful not to let the secret out!   :)   Comments on AO3 suggest that the stratagem was effective.

If you like superheroes (and especially if you like hero/villain relationships) let me recommend the gift I got for this year's Chocolate Box Gift Exchange. "Villainous Tendencies", by MagicaDraconia16, is a delightful conversation between a retired hero and a reformed villain who, however attached they may be to one another, still cannot quite throw off the past. Short but very cute.

The story i wrote, "The Doctors Pierce", is a M*A*S*H story. My recipient, tjs_whatnot, is a big Hawkeye fan, and requested any of several gen pairings, including Hawkeye and his father.

I angled a bit to be assigned to them so that I could write a sequel to "Crabapple Cove", which I wrote for last year's retrotvexchange. However, the connection between the two stories is more a matter of head canon. "Crabapple Cove" covered the first days of Hawkeye's return; "The Doctors Pierce" takes place in the New Year, when Hawkeye has more or less settled in to working with his father in the family practice. It can certainly be read as a stand-alone.

Winter features largely in the story; so, for the webpage, I picked a main background of snowy branches, with only a touch of gilded green in the frame around the text.

With this year's authors now revealed, I can say unreservedly that trickortreatex was fantastic this year. My bag was full. Not only did I got a delightful gift but three treats, all of which were very tasty morsels indeed.

From the date, my official gift must be "It's Not Easy Being a Superhero on Halloween" by Silex. It's an Original Work written to the character/prompt, "Superpowered Character on Halloween Annoyed at Passersby Insisting Their Costume is Inaccurate". As Crimson Charger discovers, trying to stake out a convention full of cosplayers presents unexpected difficulties.

Until the last minute, I thought that this would be my only gift. However, when the collection opened, it turned out that I had three last-minute treats:

• "What's Possible" by wherewolf is another Original Work, written for the character/prompt "Protective Sidekick to Superhero Losing his Powers".
• "Acid Test" by entwashian is a story about the Arrowverse Leonard Snart cheering up his sister, Lisa, when no one recognizes her costume.
• "Trick or Treating" by ChokolatteJedi is a M*A*S*H Halloween story.

All are short and sweet, and I recommend them heartily!

As for my own assignment: I wrote "Zari on Zari" for cicerothecat, who had requested a story about Zari Tomaz & Zari Tarazi from Legends of Tomorrow. As these are two versions of the same character from different time lines, they can only appear alternately on board the Waverider, the other one being bound inside the jointly-owned air totem that gives them their powers. Rather than contrive a meeting in the totem!world, I decided to have each of them alternately spill opinions about the other. They are very different people—as one ought to expect, given their radically different life experiences.

The webpage for the story is now up on my site here. I went with the green background that I've been using for most of my Legends stories, and decided to snip out the air totem from a screencap to use as the divider between each character's comments. As it's red, I added some red tones to the frame around the story.

I don't always do the everywoman exchange. In the last couple of years I've felt a lack of possible recipients to write for. This year, however, was different: I actually had multiple possible matches, and wound up writing two stories.

My gift, "For the Living", was written by brightknightie. Despite the usual anon period, I had no doubt of my author. Her footnoting style is very distinctive. (Not that I said anything, of course.) It's a marvellous slice-of-life fic about Natalie and Grace, set at work in the Coroner Building. Multiple cases are described, each different and demanding a different response. Although there isn't a lot of medical detail, Amy did a lot of research into the daily routine of a pathologist's duties and the way a lab like that is run. She also tied her story into canon, picking up on Natalie's comment in "Cherry Blossoms" about staff cuts and applying that to Eddie, the morgue attendant from "Only the Lonely", who also appears in the story.

If you haven't read it already, I strongly recommend it. As always, Amy's done a crackerjack job.

My own assigned recipient was my sister, fawatson. To put her off the trail, I told her I was writing for Amy. Which I was; but, of course, as a treat. I don't think Flo guessed the truth until the collection opened, at which point she discovered that there were two FK stories and only one gift for her. "A Day in the Life" is based on Mary Renault's The Charioteer. Among other things, she'd asked for a story about the hero's mother's housekeeper (a very minor off-scene character in the book) and her relationship with her employer (who is a very sweet, decidedly manipulative woman). As I put it in the story summary, "No man is a hero to his valet. Nor woman to her housekeeper." Mrs Timmings has few illusions. The background is World War II, of course; but it becomes clear that I've set the story during one particular period shortly before the main action of the book, making it backstory of a sort.

As for the treat for brightknightie (which was actually written first), "Sunny Days, Sunny Ways" is about Tracy—both her relationship with her (numerous!) family and her friendship with Vachon. Amy had said, "I think that the series started out trying to make her contrast with Nick, as Schanke did, but ended up paralleling them instead, and never fully grappled with what that change offered to the larger story." As the third season progressed, TPTB shifted from really using the full group of new characters to just sticking Tracy in the position of "Nick's new partner". I suppose her relationship with her father, her mother, and the apparently enormous Vetter clan substitutes for Schanke's family; but her friendship with Vachon was almost dropped for a while, and could have been profitably elaborated in contrast with Nick's work romance with Natalie. In the story, Tracy bitches to him about her mother's insistence she spend the Labour Day holiday with her instead of attending the usual big Vetter bash.

Both stories are now uploaded to my website. "Sunny Days, Sunny Ways" has a yellow-themed design, with a turbulent background reflecting Tracy's annoyance with her family, and a gold & white gradient carefully positioned to give a "sun" within the border round the story itself. "A Day in the Life" has a sort of old-fashioned wallpaper design (from Ambographics Art) in lavender and tan, with a rather demure border round the story. As the story takes place on the home front during the Dunkirk evacuation, I included a picture of one of the actual "little ships" involved, taken from Wikimedia Commons.

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.

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.

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.