Prologue

This is the beginning. Beginnings are difficult, I think, because suddenly there is a blank slate in front of you and anything goes. Sometimes blank space is intimidating. I want to put this space to good use, filling it with ponderances and beautiful moments and scary things and wonderful things and run-on sentences.

The title. The name Crimson Mittens took a good deal of thought to come up with. I started with red and string, but someone had already used that for a comic. I tried variations with red and string and thing, but none of the permutations were quite what I wanted. I even started asking people what their favourite adjectives and nouns were. I was surprised at people who did not have favourite words. They were literary types, too. Amazing, I think.

At any rate, red mutated into crimson. The second bit, mittens, came a little later on. Mittens is a twist on a joke between my friends and I - when B was smitten with someone last year, we said "mitten with an s" instead of smitten, just because it's more fun. Yesterday, I was talking with D about his secret boyfriend and my secret girlfriend and how I am so smitten; I said something to the effect of being very mittens. [Another interesting, albeit geeky, part of it is that mittens is a Latin participle from the verb mitto, meaning "I send" ... the translation of this particular participial form is "sending," so if one is "sending mittens" then one is particularly smitten with someone.]

And that is the beginning.