The weather has been insane where I am. I’ve lost count of the number of ‘false springs’ we’ve had, and I’m desperately grateful for my studded tires as we cycle through getting a dump of snow, warm daytime temperatures melting that snow, and then cold nighttime temperatures turning that melted snow to ice all over the roads at the exact times when there are the most people on those roads. Over and over.  

Still more fallow than I want to be on the writing front. My new strategy to wake my writing muscles up is taking on a project for a fandom friend: a side story they asked for to accompany a very large, very exciting work they’ve been writing for a long time. We’ve brainstormed and outlined and I feel excited to revisit these characters, if not a little nervous. I’ve never yet had full success writing in a fandom after my hyperfixation dies, and in this fandom’s case I more or less deliberately starved my hyperfixation out on purpose. I was getting too invested in the canon and knew that the author’s plans for the next instalment ran counter to my own hopes, such that I felt it wise to pull away ahead of time. That was another factor that led me to focus on my original writing instead: giving myself something new to focus on, and giving myself, for the first time, a sandbox where I had full control – at the cost of doing all the work myself!  

But that doesn’t mean I can’t revisit the sandboxes of others, especially to make a gift for a friend.