Eeeee! My story Sine Nomine just attained its first 10,000...

Eeeee! My story Sine Nomine just attained its first 10,000 hits!!! This is so exciting! This is one of those stories that I wrote at a time when I was going through a lot of things and worked some of it out through this specific story, so it’s one that means more to me than some. 

This is my main pandemic story, frankly. During the first phase of Covid, I found myself very suddenly working from home with under 24 hours’ warning. My workplace closed for 2 weeks initially, then they added 2 more weeks, then an additional month, and then another month after that. By the time we re-opened, Covid was still on, George Floyd had been murdered, the BLM movement had taken off enormously, and my workplace went through an enormous, very public scandal around racism and homophobia. During those three months, I was told to find myself something to do to justify still getting paid. I spent it on research, which is adjacent to my job, but not exactly my job. I researched Syria, a topic I already had close to my heart for a lot of reasons (the main one is that I spent a chunk of time there back in 2000) and had wanted to learn more about their attempt at an Arab Spring revolution and the refugee crisis that came out of it. It was grim research, but has stayed very close to my heart and I’m now my workplace’s resident expert on Syria, have made connections with the local Syrian refugee community, and continue giving presentations on what’s happened there in the last 11-12 years now through the illegal revolutionary art that Syrians have made about all of it. 

Sine Nomine is set, officially, in an unnamed village in Serbia. The vibe is meant to resonate more with the Srebrenica Genocide in Bosnia than anything in the Middle East, but the nameless ghost town I created in this story is, for me, Syria. 

Beyond that, this story was meant to ask the question of why Mycroft didn’t do something when he saw the footage of John beating Sherlock to a bloody pulp in the morgue that day. It opens with him rewatching the footage for the umpteenth time and revisiting his original question about John: Will he be the making of my brother? Or make him worse than ever? He’s basically made his decision, and decides to give John one last chance: a test. 

It’s truly a chiaroscuro story, with the scuro parts being pretty grim, but then the chiaro comes through, I promise! If you’ve read this one, you have my heartfelt thanks. If you haven’t and you decide to give it a try, I thank you in advance! <333333333333333333