Happy Thanksgiving! I hope you and your sister had a good one. Mine was good. My sister and her family drove down from Michigan; I haven't seen them since August, so it's been nice having them here.
I hope the snow stays south of you, so you can go see A Real Pain and the Home Alone event with Macaulay. It has gotten cold here but no real snow yet. I don't mind it around Christmas, but I'm not quite ready for the winter weather yet.
I was nervous about having my principal's kid, but it wasn't bad at all! First of all, his daughter is a model student - smart, inquisitive, hard-working, well-behaved, and kind. I never had to reach out to him or his wife about any issues with her, which helped. But he was a lot more "hands off" than I expected him to be and didn't hover around my classroom or ask me challenging questions at parent-teacher conferences or anything like that. I've had worse experiences having other teachers' kids, so that was a relief! It's hard having colleagues' kids, especially when they have behavior problems.
My worst experience was having the kid of a teacher in the same hall as me whom I considered a friend. He had ADHD, which is fine, but his impulsivity led to him making a lot of poor choices that he never seemed to learn from. He was allowed to use a fidget in class, but he was constantly bringing in little toys (Lego minifigures, action figures, and that sort of thing) and playing with them during lessons. After he'd been warned several times, I started confiscating them and keeping them in a Ziploc bag to give back to his mom. Well, one day, he decided to sneak into my desk during inside recess when I wasn't in the room and take his bag of toys back. I found out and went down to his mom's room at the end of the day to talk to both him and her about it together. She initially seemed supportive of me and agreed that it was inappropriate for him to get into my desk, etc., but the very next day, her son was caught shoplifting from our book fair. We had another conversation, and he missed out on the school-wide monthly reward we had to celebrate all the students who made good behavior choices during the month. I'm sure she was embarrassed that her kid didn't get to participate, but our relationship was never quite the same after that. She started making excuses for him anytime he got in trouble, blaming it on his ADHD and acting like I was expecting too much out of him or not being understanding enough of his disability by holding him accountable for following the same rules as everyone else. Ever since then, I've been wary of having friends' kids because it made things super awkward between us. As teachers, we've all dealt with those parents who believe their child can do no wrong, so it's crazy when teachers are those kind of parents themselves. I'm sure that was frustrating for you, dealing with that 7th grade teacher's kids.
That is exactly how I feel about religion. I'm not an atheist either; I would describe myself as more agnostic or spiritual. I believe in something, but I don't take the Bible literally and or think any religion got everything "right." I'm sure that did make it difficult to teach in a Catholic school. I could never do it. I wish people would focus more on the commonalities between most of the major religions instead of the differences. Organized religion has been the root of so many problems between groups of people throughout history. Why can't we just let people believe what they want to believe and leave each other alone?
I'm fine with writing another sequel if that's what my characters want. I always worry I'm going to start one and then run out of steam because that's what used to happen to me with most sequels in my early days of writing. But after over a thousand days of writing about these characters, I feel like I could continue indefinitely as long as I have ideas, which I have plenty of. My only other concern is that I'm completely alienating the readers who know me for my Nick stories and don't want to read longfics about Kevin. But what I want to write isn't always what's popular, and I have to be okay with that.
I'm not sure if the differences you're describing with readers have to do with the fandom or the platform (AO3). I think with AO3 being so much bigger than AC and not having a community feature like this forum, people are a lot less likely to form relationships with each other. Instead of loyally following authors whose writing they like, they use the tags to filter the kind of stories they want to read, regardless of who wrote them. And that's fine, but it's definitely a different vibe than we had here, where the regulars got to know each other and often read and interacted with each other's work. I miss that. I have like three regular readers for my current story, and two of the three came from here. The other one interacts with me on Twitter as well as AO3, so I'm not sure where she first started following me. Sometimes I'll get kudos on several stories from the same user, but I don't feel like I really have faithful readers that found me through AO3 first.
That definitely seems like one downside of writing for a fictional fandom instead of about real people, that the fandom dies down once the media is no longer being made and loses popularity. But there will always be those people who are loyal to it, like you, and if you keep writing for that fandom while others move on, it will make your work even more valuable to people who want to read Succession fics. The fanfic corner of the BSB fandom has shrunk significantly over the last ten years or so, but I figure as long as there's still someone who wants to read what I write, it's worth posting.
