john silver enthusiast

A whole year! Unbelievable!

Now, an anecdote, if you will...

I remember when I first watched Black Sails. I was writing for Versailles (2015) at the time, and that fandom was so tiny and so dead that I’d somehow gotten it into my head that all costume drama fandoms were tiny and dead.

Then the season two finale changed my brain chemistry so completely that, before I had even finished the show, I went straight to AO3 and started reading Silverflint fics from oldest to newest. I saw that there weren’t that many, and because the lion’s share of them were dated pre-covid, I decided, for some reason, that the fandom must be dead. It had been ten years, after all. Surely there wouldn’t be anyone left reading except the odd passerby, or someone drawn back by nostalgia.

Oh, I didn’t yet realize how wrong I was.

A little while passed, and after reading one too many incredible Silverflint fics (and realizing there was a concerning lack of Silverflint sick/whump fics specifically!), I was inspired to write something of my own. A short thing. A sickfic set God knows when during season one, written for me and me alone. I had no intention of ever publishing it. It had been a good two years since I’d posted anything, and I’d been perfectly content to keep all my weird stuff to myself.

But then I kept writing. It grew. I told myself I would finish it when they found the Urca. Funny, that.

So it grew some more. And more.

Then I gave it a title, because who doesn’t love coming up with a title? I’d given awesome titles to plenty of other unpublished fics that never, ever saw the light of day, so where was the harm, really? And so here it was: Come, Let Us Reason Together.

Then it reached a word count beyond anything I had ever written before.

And the rest? The rest, as they say, is history.

I’ve been writing fanfiction for almost ten years now, but no fic has ever taught me as much as clurt did. I have never loved a fandom the way I love Black Sails.

And maybe clurt isn’t anywhere near the best Silverflint fic out there. Maybe it starts a little slow. There’s head-hopping. There are plenty of author's thinly veiled kinks just... there. There are many, many moments where I wander into details no one strictly needed. But sharing clurt with all of you, imperfect as it is, has made a special place for it in my heart beyond all reason.

So thank you to everyone who has decided to come and reason together and accompanied me on this journey over the past year. Thank you to those who found clurt recently and binged it in a concerningly short span of time. To those who commented when no one else did. To those, too, who were there at the beginning but have since moved on. And to those who have simply been there – silent, perhaps, but there all the same.