I put up the 2025 fkficfest prompt nominations post just before I went to sleep last night. Check it out. Many thanks to celli and senmut for nominating so quickly! We have one week to nominate.

As always, all FK community members -- readers, writers, well-wishers -- are invited to nominate, and nominating is not a promise to play. What scenario, concept, trope, question, scene, or otherwise a single word or set of words might inspire an FK creation that you would like to read or write?

Back in FKFic-L days, some challenge prompts included, if I remember correctly, "What if the asteroid danger in AMPH were real?" (Asteroid Challenge), "How should the series end?" (Forever Not Challenge), "Use all the lyrics of a song inside a story" (Song Challenge), "From a minor character's perspective" (Center Stage Challenge), "What did Nick write inside the MBIAV card?" (Card Challenge), "Vampires dealing with the modern world" (Vampires Anonymous Challenge), and many more.

In the US, it's "National Poetry Month." celli is generously sharing a community experience of the event by posting one poem per day. Read Celli's recommended poems.

I'm enjoying reading each as it arrives and wanted to share. I appreciate these gentle invitations to pause and think and feel in the different way that poetry fits, sometimes much like prose, but more often a wholly divergent mode, somewhere between words and sound, between words and light, with the emotions and meanings floating almost, but never quite, loose at all levels, not only waiting at the end of a precisely charted and paved path.

(I'm lucky that I was academically taught how to ready poetry, because I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have been able to teach myself this much wholly on my own, in the culture we share today and the incentives I've personally had. But many others can and do, by instinct, talent, observation, research, or practice!)

Additionally, as some of you know, as a fiction writer, I personally find that I really do much beter with a moral, theme, or interpretive contention to work toward. We have fkficfest coming up, and this year's elected prompts seem to me to lean more toward plot than theme. I haven't yet found my angle on them. I'm hoping that perhaps I'll discover it in one of these poems. We shall see!

I don't think I'm going to manage to submit my fkficfest prompt nominations tonight after all, but we have through Thursday, and I've managed to pare my Notepad file down to 14 possibilities: ( list )

We each get up to 5 nominations this year...

BTW, I looked up all the prompts we've used in the game since we started doing challenge-style in 2019. We've had 13, because the first year we had only one prompt, last year we had 4, and all the other years 3. These are not eligible for re-nominating (only those that didn't make it into their years' pools). ( list )

I've been brainstorming some possible prompts for fkficfest (nominations open through April 15; any community member may nominate). Some of these are wholly my own imagining; others are based on Google-searching "great short story prompts."

If any happen to appeal to you, please do feel free to take or modify and use or submit them! If you've already got yours set, and you see how some of these could be better, please let me know.

Some personal favorites so far:

• a minor or original character must step up and fill in for a major character
• the first thing that happens is that a canonical character dies
• didn't expect to run into that person at the party
• unexpectedly wakes up in the trunk of a car
• forced to stay home
• keeps coming across the same stranger
• two characters switch bodies [a la Freaky Friday]
• a character is aware that he/she/they are in a story and/or have an audience [a la She-Hulk]

( Assorted others )

If you haven't yet, please consider helping out fkficfest '21 by sharing up to 3 prompt ideas by the end of the day today (Sunday, 21 February). Phrases, lyrics, stanzas, tropes, plot twists, writing exercises... what might possibly ignite a good new FK story? (The prompts need not be new! Only the stories.)

We have 16 total prompt possibilities so far. See the nominations or reply on the post with your suggestion.

As before, sharing a prompt idea is not a promise to play. :-)

This week, I'll start posting to the various communities about this year's fkficfest game. (I didn't happen to see anyone post about it on personal journals during its first week. Did I miss any...?)

The prompts the community chose are, as you know, two phrases and a paraphrase. Interested in chatting through them for general brainstorming, maybe...? I wonder which were picked as most desired to write, and which as most desired to read!

For starters, at the surface level, "cold case" could be a straightforward order for an unresolved police case that has been shelved for lack of developments, or for a police case in cold temperatures (winter, freezer, etc.). Slightly spicier picks might include a cold as in the common illness, or emotional coldness, or a case that is a briefcase, suitcase, gun-case, display case, or musical instrument case ... or a medical case. There have been several high-profile TV series in the US, Canada, and the UK that have focused on law enforcement working on cold cases; someone might want a crossover. FK's police procedural premise is very friendly to the customary "cold case" meaning. Its vampires and flashbacks have a certain angle on "cold," and its Toronto setting, perhaps, another.

"Do over" could bring to mind, say, the movie Groundhog Day, which makes the protagonist do over a single day until he gets it right, or It's a Wonderful Life, where events are seen done over in a distressing way. There could be time travel to change events already unfolded, or perhaps efforts to change a prediction of something yet to happen but thought set in stone. Taken very literally, it might not allow room for themes of regret, repentance, reparations, because doing something over could wipe away the first instance, but taken more loosely, the fact of a do-over is the recognition of something done poorly or gone wrong. An attempt to start over could be a kind of do over. The dictionary reminded me that there's also the decorating sense of the phrase, as in to do over an apartment, and a British slang usage meaning to beat up and/or rob someone. And then there's perhaps simply practice: to do something again and again, as in a musical instrument or athletics. Or something that never stops needing to be done again, as in a self-help practice or pulling weeds or making a bed. A do-over appeals perhaps to the sense of many FK fans that something went terribly wrong at the storytelling level at some point, whether at the LK finale, or when third season diverged from second, or second from first. A do-over could easily appeal to Nick, if offered on the wings of magic, and how far and how wide could determine whether it's a miracle or a monkey's-paw wish: one night only, his years in Toronto, his years as a vampire...

The paraphrase of a famous line from Bujold's novel Memory has a "the girl or the cup" ring to it. What is each character's heart versus heart's desire? Is Nick's heart's desire to achieve mortality but his heart to achieve salvation? Is either of Natalie's to cure Nick, to love Nick, to have not lost her brother or her parents, to make a scientific discovery no other could, to live a happy life and a good death...? Lacroix wants companionship, and he wants loyalty verging on fealty, and he wants to live; which is which? Janette wants revenge when due, perhaps a kind of balance as she sees it. Urs comes to want to change, but has long wanted approval; which could be which? Vachon wants freedom; the Inca wants justice. In Bujold's novel, the original line recaps a powerful scene; in retrospect, the character describes his choice to do the right thing, at immediate and immense personal cost, as an inability, finally, to do the wrong thing: "the one thing you can't trade for your heart's desire is your heart."

What do you think...?

FKFicFest sign-ups will open Wednesday, the 20th LK anniversary. I'll post the rules and the contingency challenge. I haven't yet picked the prompt; if you'd like to share your insights on what would make a good one, please do.

(Review: In the event of <9 players, we'd switch from one-to-one matching to one shared prompt with diverse renderings.)

It might be nice to revisit a classic, like FKFic-L's Asteroid Challenge (from "A More Permanent Hell"), but, fairly, "reruns" didn't go over well when mentioned last year. Neither did canonical "What if?"s. I've been advised to phrase the prompt like a novel blurb, and I'd love to! But leaving authors free to pick the characters and angle dead-ends that: "Somebody does something for some reason, and there's some twist!" If I describe a crime in Toronto in the '90s, the writer may thereby feel constrained from placing her story wholly in Pompeii or Paris, wholly in the past or the future, etc.

If the community had chosen a challenge game, we all would have nominated and elected a prompt! As it is, we're stuck with my feeble best. (I recommend that you get 9+ friends to sign up: problem solved!)

( Possible word/phrase prompts )

( Possible setting cues )

( Possible scenario starters )

It's been almost a week since all the players received their fkficfest/fkficfest prompt match slates. I hope that all the players have found their matches sufficiently compatible, and that as many players as possible find them really inspiring! Fingers crossed and all the lucky gestures for new FK twists, turns and insights!

For myself, while I have no objections at all to the prompt slate that I received, I'm actually in the unusual position — for the first time in a very long time! — of being actively dogged by a new FK story idea that I'd love to write, independently, for no fest or prompt, but just because it seems right and exciting to me, myself. It's a Les Miserables (Nick/Urs) idea that I almost included on my own sign-up, but replaced with something else so as to give as wide a variety of prompts as I could to the eventual writer. I didn't withdraw the idea from my sign-up draft with the thought of writing it myself! But once I did withdraw it and submit other prompts, the idea began asserting itself in my imagination in a way I haven't experienced in quite some time. It's really very nice! Just not optimal timing. :-)

This particular idea is incompatible with the prompt slate that I received. Nick/Urs is not my recipient's goblet o' Ribena. I can't spend time on this idea until after the ficathon (like you, I've got only just so much hobby time to go around). I hope that the idea will still insist on itself this firmly when its time comes! This post shall be my reminder, in case I forget...

Speaking of inspiration for new FK stories to wish and write for this year's fkficfest/fkficfest, the quirky (and excellent) public radio program RadioLab coincidentally reran its classic "Blood" episode this weekend! This episode actually has many segments, but the website specifically calls out three:

• "Bloody Real Blood" (about Hollywood special effects for blood)
• "If You Prick Us" (what certain Renaissance men thought about blood)
• "Clear Eyes, Full Veins, Can't Lose" (the economics and logistics of today's blood banks)

This episode is full of interesting little details that cry out to be explored through FK's characters! And their website supplies links to the works cited in the interviews plus "bonus tracks" of an interactive timeline of public attitudes about giving blood and two blood-themed songs performed by a band called "Lucius" (seriously!).

I posted the 2015 fkficfest/fkficfest pre-game poll results yesterday. I'm grateful for every answer we received! Hopefully, we can play in a fun way available to everyone interested.

However, we're in the peculiar position that exchange-style and challenge-style tied. On the one hand, the tie-breaker goes to exchange, because 3 of the 4 people who said they would "definitely" write voted for exchange. On the other hand, 4 people are nowhere near enough for a happy exchange game in a fandom as factional as FK. If you have insights into this dilemma, please share them! (Community conversation is underway on the DW edition of the results.)

---
Just for fun, let's toss around some more FK "What if?"s! :-)

• What if Nick or Schanke had gotten promoted to Captain?
• What if they hadn't neutralized Vudu's bombs in time?
• What if Natalie and Richard's parents had lived?
• What if the asteroid hadn't been a hoax and had hit as expected?
• What if Frank wasn't Francesca's first (or last) reincarnation/haunting to seek revenge?
• What if Janette has more freedom than Nick because of something she knows about Lacroix?
• What if Natalie discovered the cure and decided to withhold it from Nick?