Do you know if you’ll be able to make one of those free pantries around the city? Or like, bring people together to make a volunteer pantry?

I'll be honest, I have no idea.

I've lived in my city my whole life, but I'm also shy as hell. Working myself up to going door to door around my cul de sac and offering people tomatoes was an entire ordeal--and I had to have my dad with me to have even a modicum of confidence. (And he needed to hold two of the 3 bowls but still).

I also just. Don't know what all goes into setting up a little free pantry. I've seen some that are little wooden boxes like little free libraries are, and I've seen some that are a literal refrigerator. Which, I guess the refrigerated one would be able to hold more food, but also. Energy costs? Then there's the additional factor of 'where is this thing going to be hosted?' Because I know for damn sure that my parents aren't going to want it near the house, and the house at the end of the street literally has 'no tresspassing no solicitors we will call the cops or maybe grab a gun' signs in their yard. I could maybe see if a local library would be willing to host one--though that would, again, require I get the courage to. Go to a library. (I know, I'm just killing it in the solarpunk and community outreach aspects of life. Can't even muster the willpower to sit in a library.)

If I were in the more artsy part of the city (where the little free library is already set up), or maybe by the beach (where there is a food pantry that I don't think is tied to a church, but its a 40+ minute drive there), then a volunteer effort could maybe have some ground. But the part of the city I'm in... I dunno, I just don't get that vibe.

Maybe someday I'll muster the courage to like. Make some kind of ripple effect. but right now I am the equivalent of a scared little kid who still has to hold daddy's hand to ring a doorbell and reverse trick or treat the next door neighbors who've been there almost as long as I've been alive.

So, I'd love to know more about your 'orig fic project' that 'comes before all things'! (And yes, I am quoting one of your tags here XD).

okay. last of the old asks to answer today. Since the orig fic project is out now, I can talk about it more. none of you can stop me and yes that is a threat.

waaaaaaaay way back in 2014, I was getting my MA in the UK and I was on a train heading into London (iirc) and I was thinking about what to work on next. My MA was wrapping up and my thesis project was getting lots of good feedback but I really desperately wanted to work on literally anything else. I was also neck-deep into Sherlock (BBC), and had just been mild to moderately disappointed by the third series.

so i got thinking about what I would do differently. The first thing that came to me was the setting. I wanted to set it in the future. The thing I loved about Sherlock was how seamlessly they brought those characters into a modern world, and how relevant they still were. I thought a steampunk future at first, but I later shifted away from that and more towards solarpunk (i was VERY on Tumblr, and I saw The Solarpunk Post when it came around.)

but all that is aesthetics. What did I want to do with these characters?

I wanted to write Holmes and Watson as women, specifically because I wanted to show that you didn't have to change a goddamn thing about their personalities. They're still horrible bachelors: an injured vet and an antisocial bohemian weirdo, no matter what pronouns they're using.

I wanted it to be queer, but more specifically, I wanted to straightbait people. I wanted people to fall in love with these characters before I revealed that they were actually in love the whole time. this was before Obergefell v. Hodges. writing something queer was even more radical to do than it is now, we were still one year away from Simon Vs. The Homo Sapiens Agenda. There were a few queer books hitting shelves, but they were all coming-out stories. I wasn't interested in writing a coming-out story, so I started thinking about what a queernorm society would look like; a world where you didn't have to come out because nobody made unnecessary assumptions about your gender or your sexuality. Gradually, I started to change my own assumptions about gender and sexuality.

I knew I wanted to Say Things about society and social justice as well. I'm a pretty political person, so that undertone is always there. When I got down to writing, I went back to the stories and that was when I really started to realize how little Sherlock (BBC) had done to really update the canon. They were still pretty effing racist, arguably more sexist than ACD himself at times, and not remotely as interested in social issues as ACD had been. I was just thinking I'd done a pretty good job, getting ready to do final polishing and go for self-pub when George Floyd was killed and it really hit me that one of my beloved secondary characters was a cop, and one of the main characters was just casually carrying a gun around everywhere she went like it was no big deal. So, it was back to the worldbuilding and story drawing board again. I'm not interested in writing totally unproblematic characters, but I'm also not interested in leaving problematic things totally unaddressed.

This post got serious as I was writing it. Sorry. I swear it's actually a pretty fun book; i didn't want to write a political treatise or anything, it's just that I can't stop myself from Caring about Things. I think the story is stronger for the many, many changes I made over the years. I've talked about this before, with fic, but it's been a huge personal challenge to try to unpack my own racist, homophobic and colonialist programming; it's something I'm continuing to work on and will continue to work on as I keep writing this series. In the end, whether it's good or not, whether anyone reads it or not, writing this book has made me a marginally better person.