#my fav fire reference is in 'the cage kills more than lions' when tommy has a meltdown insisting he needs to light the fire in ada's house

[divinekangaroo]

I always feel like I'm missing so much in your fics! Tell me something secrete about them!

Oh I nearly missed this! Sorry!

Let me tell you about FIRE:

I was gonna write a giant essay about how I use fire/Tommy lighting a fire repetitively in my fics, quoting the multiple times, meaning of each, how they interlock with his capability, capacity, libido (life drive not just sex drive), etc...but that's probably overkill XD.

Here's the short version: I do use references to fire or the act of lighting fires (not lighting fires) very deliberately. This was motivated by, and ties into, Tommy also doing the same in the show - and I pay special attention to when he can and can't light those fires, and who he might choose to ask to light a fire. For example, in series, there are times when it's John and Arthur, or even Jeremiah (as it comes to Ruby's pyre, which I'll elaborate on because it was such a powerful scene - from what I've been able to find re European Romani funereal tradition, albeit I coudln't *specifically* find period-references to Angloromani or Irish Traveller ritual, that *should* have been Tommy lighting it. Research does have an interesting split between whether it's necessary to stay to watch a funeral pyre burn til the end (as the fam did with Polly) or whether it's actually more respectful/acceptable to walk away early (turn your back on death to face instead to life)).

Then, to add another layer to this symbolic importance of Fire, when I started researching narrowboats and what daily life was like on narrowboats pre-electricity, I also then discovered how important maintaining the stove/fire in the living quarters was. The stoves were Aga or Aga-style, and they take forever to heat up. Basically, you get them going over hours, and *keep* them going, because if they go out you have ages before you can build the heat up again to something useable. And given you could reasonably freeze to death on the water, in an uninsulated boat, in the north, in the night, in winter, the fire/stove seemed very important.

I don't know how much the Shelbys would have been in the worst case northern-style winter conditions in the midlands, but irrespective, England is cold and living on water is freezing: the idea of the kids needing to permanently tend this dangerous and all-consuming, hungry thing dwelling on the boat really appealed to me for multiple reasons - especially because there's no modulation. Either they'd be freezing in those living quarters, or they'd be walking into a hotter-than-hell situation (not possible to temperature-modulate all that well), and they'd have to consciously *keep that fire burning* in a hotter than hell situation, because the heat of hell, at least, was being alive.

So yeah, a secret: if there's a reference to fire or lighting fires in my fics, there's a weight of thinking behind it even if it seems random.