sanguinity, posts by tag: sherlock holmes - LiveJournal

@acdholmesfest revealed today! Way back in January, @capt_facepalm saw that reveals were scheduled for April Fools, and so asked permission to be assigned to herself, as a prank on all the guessers. She succeeded.

My own contribution:

The Taste of Truth, for @colebaltblue
ACD Sherlock Holmes x The Lie Tree (Frances Hardinge)
Holmes/Watson, past Mary Morstan/John Watson
Reichenbach, Magical Realism, Lie Tree AU, Angst with a Happy Ending
25,500 words

Two and a half years after Reichenbach, John Watson discovers the magical tree that caused Holmes to fake his death.

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So. That's what I spent February doing: feverishly writing a story, and mumbling vaguely whenever anyone asked what I'd been up to lately. (One day over lunch my coworkers asked what I was writing, and I answered "A novel," not wanting to split hairs about novel/novella. They all thought I was kidding around, and eventually decided that I was actually pulling a Harriet the Spy on them: obviously I was writing down scathing commentary on all their doings. But they never tried to steal my notebook from me to find out, so I left them to their conspiracy theories and wrote the next 200 words of my novella. BECAUSE DAMNIT I HAD 24K WORDS TO WRITE.)

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I got my gift for ACD Holmesfest this morning -- it's a podfic of "So Keen a Sympathy", my very first ACD story, which features Mary Morstan/Kate Whitney, Mary Morstan/John Watson, and John Watson/Sherlock Holmes. (It was also one of my very first forays into romance, too: I remember I almost died of embarassment while writing the hair-brushing scene!)

The podficcer did a lovely job. I put it on my headphones and went for a walk, and it was such a pleasure to hear what they did with the story. My words on the page always seems a poor substitute for the story in my head, but getting to hear someone else's take on it... The story the podficcer told is so much realer than my words on the page ever were, and the story they told was very much the story I meant to tell.

(And it's so interesting to hear all the interpretive choices they made! Because a podfic is very much an adaptation, and there are a slew of artistic choices that a podficcer makes -- how do they choose to give a moment its due weight? And which moments do they think are worthy of that treatment?)

I am very pleased.

Anyway, @acdholmesfest has been posting a work or two a day, and will continue to do so for another week or so. If you're looking for some excellent ACD Canon stories, art, and podfic, do check it out.

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We're back from Left Coast Sherlock! (Admittedly, "back" is a a twenty minute drive, but seeing that I spent most of the last 48 hours at the convention hotel and without internet, I feel like I've been away.)

This was my first con of any kind, and it was a good experience. I made myself talk to strangers -- all of whom were perfectly willing to say hello, find common ground, and have a nice conversation, hardly like talking to strangers at all -- and colebaltblue introduced me to people, too (many of whom had been strangers to her until ten minutes before). The con was rather heavily weighted toward scion-style fandom (the kind where they have in-person clubs, pretend Holmes and Watson really lived, and write their headcanons as tongue-in-cheek scholarly articles), so there was a substantial contingent of people there who were deeply confused by the fact that I didn't belong to a scion. (They likewise didn't understand why my nametag was first-name-plus-pseud. colebaltblue did well to have the first part of our talk be an introduction to online fandom!) But there were also a minority of people who were dyed-in-the-wool members of online fandom, so there was a group of people there whom I shared language with, so it wasn't all awkward attempts at cultural translation.

And friends came, too! It wasn't all strangers! colebaltblue and grrlpup, obviously, but bendingthewillow and graycardinal were there, plus people whose pseuds I recognized from around, and also a Holmestice first-timer who came up and introduced himself.

(And I got to meet Lyndsay Faye! And to talk to her a little bit, even! She is charming and lovely and thinks Asylum is the best Holmes adaptation because it has a Kraken. That's not the kind of opinion that I can disagree with.)

Sadly, I had such a bad case of nerves about our talk that I did not sleep at all Friday night. (Not one wink, although I might have achieved the light doze where you believe you're still awake? Basically though: no sleep.) And unfortunately, I was still so high from caffeiene, adrenaline, and post-talk anxiety (WHAT IF IT HAD ACTUALLY GONE BADLY AND I DIDN'T REALIZE??) that I didn't sleep much Saturday night, either. (Maybe four hours?) In short, I am so freaking exhausted right now.

Our talk, I think, went pretty well. Unfortunately, we got a late start because the guy before us ran long by fifteen minutes, and then we ran long on our introductory piece explaining online fan culture, so I had to RACE through the slides about Holmestice. We had a lot of questions from scion-fandom people who legit had no framework for what we were talking about. ("How can a story be a gift for one person AND everyone gets to read it?" was one of the audience questions we got, while grrlpup heard one person near her ask another, "Are they talking about... stories?") There were questions that I wish I'd given better answers to, and some points I didn't get to make because of time -- and of course the thing where we were inadvertently talking over some people's heads and were slow to catch on to that fact -- but the scion-people got to hear about another group of dedicated Holmes fans and what we do, and the online-fandom people got to hear about Holmestice in particular and what we do, and both groups mostly seemed interested, so... I'm just gonna call it a success. We have a recording we'll post over at holmestice, as well as the slides and our planned comments, but it'll probably take a couple of days to get that up. (Especially since I still have to finish matching!) In the meanwhile, Sherlock Peoria liveblogged our talk here. (Second half of the post; I'm Elizabeth and colebaltblue is Haley).

The ball was super low-key -- well, except for people's Victorian finery, which was anything but! -- and grrlpup and I were in fact the dorkiest ones there. There are photos, but they're on colebaltblue's phone, and she had a longer drive home than we did, so I'll save that for a second post.

Oh! And I knew a trivia question that hardly anyone did! I don't remember the exact phrasing, but it basically asked what unites Sir Henry Baskerville, Mycroft Holmes, and Sherlock Holmes?</i> (rot13: Puevfgbcure Yrr -- which I knew because of making the vid, of course.) While grrlpup knew the trivia question about which Holmes character debuted in 1970 searching for half a chicken sandwich. (Fureybpx Urzybpx.) And I won two raffle prizes, so now I own a Watson teddy bear and a Sherlock Hemlock doll, along with a pair of Sound of the Baskervilles mugs (Sound is the Seattle-area scion, one of the sponsors of the con) and a few more gewgaws that came in the two prize-packs.


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In short, I had a good time! I wish I'd gotten more sleep, but I had a good time!

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So back in December, on a post about my history in Holmesiana, I made this comment:

No one has written Veggie Tales for Holmestice yet! Maybe I'll have to start requesting it, and see what happens. (Hee, nothing but Veggie Tales, Dinosaurs, and other weird-ass bullshit stuff, and see what someone does with it. I know for a fact that there are a handful of people in the exchange who would be up for it. :-D )

starfishstar dared me to do it, and when I ran the idea past colebaltblue to see if it was too obnoxious, she pointed out that I'm the matching mod who will have to deal with finding a match for myself, go ahead and do what I want.

And so I did. I requested the terrible dinosaurs, and the good John Cleese, and various puppets and muppets and cartoons, and Wishbone, and beloved children's books, and that weird-ass Holmes x Tarzan book with the naked mud-plastered waggle-dance, and various random things that I have a "I know it's terrible but I love it anyway" kind of wild affection for. And then I provided links to everything that I could find links for, just to make it as easy as possible for the unfortunate lucky sod who had to deal with it.

Anyway, a genius mystery vidder has taken that unholy mess in exactly the spirit that it was requested, and made a DELIGHT of a vid from it: Infinitely Stranger: an ode to Bonkers Holmesiana

To slightly misquote the vid: The more I see of it, the more I love it. A truly wonderful performance.

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Signal-boosting two new communities!

victorian221b:

All things Victorian Holmes: fics, recs, meta, discussions, etc. For any universe set in that time period such as ACD books, Granada, Ritchie, Howard!Holmes, Whitehead!Holmes, Lenfilm, New Russian Holmes, My Dearly Beloved Detective, BBC's The Abominable Bride.

hmsloop_hotspur (modded by yours truly):

A community where we can chit-chat about Hornblower things particularly (from the books to the miniseries, and all the media in between!) and Age of Sail more generally. All engagement is welcome: meta, fic, art, recs, whatever!

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starfishstar asked: How you became a Sherlock Holmes fan...and, if it's different, how you became a More Holmes fan in particular. :-)


Sherlock BBC was my gateway, back in 2012, right after Reichenbach. A man I used to date sent me both series on disc from England, saying that Sherlock reminded him of me, and that he thought I would like the show. (I resent the first; he was correct about the second.) I no longer know what grabbed me so hard about the show? The visual design, certainly — I was right on the cusp of becoming a vidder — but that couldn’t have been all of it. I’m sad to say that whatever-else-it-was, it didn’t last: nowadays I find the show, even the first two series, nearly unwatchable, boo. :-(

But that first summer, I watched and re-watched it several times, I mainlined fic, I read selected ACD novels (which didn’t really capture me in their own right, but were fascinating as source for the show)… It was all Sherlock, all the time. And even though ACD itself wasn’t yet something I enjoyed on its own terms, I was already discovering that I liked ACD fic — or I should say, the characterisations and relationships therein — much better than I liked the bulk of BBC fic.

Elementary began airing that fall, and I immediately recognized in Miller’s Sherlock the Holmes I knew from ACD canon and fic, the one that I liked so well. I also adored Liu’s Watson, and was much taken with S1 as a whole, which is beautifully constructed — even early in the season, that was apparent. (Sadly, the show would never again attain the beauty of that first season.) I kept on dipping into ACD canon for insight, and I started listening to the Bert Coules radio plays as a solution to my not enjoying canon much: Coules lives very close to canon, and thus was useful for discovering the shape of the original cases and a lot of the key interactions.

So there I was, about six months in to this thing and already conversant with four Holmesian universes. And honestly, it was probably the very multiverse-ness of it all that kept me engaged: there was always new material, there was always stuff to think about and analyze with how the new material related to the source and other adaptations… There was just a ton of stuff to chew on.

Becoming a Moreholmesian… That was possibly always going to happen, given that one of the things I most enjoyed about Holmesiana was the compare/contrast/interplay of multiple adaptations from the same source. But it was also 100% language_escapes’ fault.

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As I just said in chat to a friend: I got 221B Baker Towers for holmestice and it is fucking goddamned brilliant I have so many feelings and you will have so many feelings too:

Do You Observe?
221B Baker Towers
Holmes & Watson
Teen & Up; No Warnings Apply

Life with Holmes is non-stop.

For those unfamiliar, 221B Baker Towers is a fan-created universe, where Holmes is a young black man on a London council estate. There is no canon for this universe; just pick your fanon of choice -- or supply a headcanon of your own -- and run with it. The tumblr tag was pretty active back in 2012 but has died down to a trickle since then. There are a few tumblr-and-elsewhere works archived at AO3, but not nearly enough. I've been requesting 221BBT at holmestice for the last couple of years, ever since I first became aware of it.... oh, when making the vid, I guess.

(Did you know there's a vidder in the 221BBT fandom? There's no source in this 'verse, no source at all, and yet there's a vidder.)

Anyway, one of my major complaints about 221BBT is that there aren't enough works. So Anonymous Creator went and wrote me a collection of (mostly) one-sentence vignettes! Backstory, case fics, reinterpretations of ACD canon, character notes, moments in the Holmes-and-Watson relationship... This is someone who knows and loves their canon, and has many thoughts about what canon might look like in this specific time and place. Also, they have a ton of Holmes-and-Watson feelings, and infected me with a ton of feelings, too.

It's brilliant. And I love it. And maybe you'll like it, too.

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language_escapes and grrlpup are fiends who hate me: they both voted for the 1978 Peter Cook. (Yeah, well, the joke’s on grrlpup — I’m not gonna use headphones! If I have to listen to this, so does she.)



The Hound of the Baskervilles (1978)
Peter Cook and Dudley Moore.

Should I have alcohol for this? I feel like I should have alcohol for this. Would Grand Marnier go nicely in marmalade tea? *experiments* Okay, I can report that Grand Marnier is a palatable addition to marmalade tea. And it’s time to stop stalling.

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tl;dr One hour and twenty minutes of excruciating awfulness, but the five minutes near the end with the Hound in were watchable, offered a satisfying and doggie-positive alternative to the story's usual ending, and could have made a decent comic short. TOO BAD THEY RUINED IT BY MAKING A FEATURE-LENGTH FILM.

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I have come down with a cold, and so am resurrecting a tradition I began when I was making the Sherlock Holmes Vid of Doom: I'm gonna liveblog some HOUN adaptations! I still have maybe five sitting on my hard-drive that I haven't watched yet.

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The Hound of the Baskervilles (1972)
Universal Studios. Stewart Granger and Bernard Fox, feat. William Shatner.

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…aaaaaaand we’re done.

Huh. I have very little to say about that, and I can’t decide if that’s because I’m stupid from being sick, or if there’s just really very little to say. I liked Granger’s Holmes, even if he was more even-tempered than I think Holmes should be. I didn’t enjoy Watson all that much, although I did like that he got to make useful contributions to the case, several times over. The edits to the plot were mostly to tighten the case: more forensics, more deductions, more forethought to the plan to trap Stapleton, and so on. Where they really fell down was in making the villain at all interesting. (Which is not what I was expecting with Shatner as the villain!) I did enjoy that the exposition was less rapey, less domestic-violencey, and less cruel to dogs than usual, although they didn’t do a good job of replacing those narrative elements with anything, which is part of why it came off so blandly, I think. All told, my major take-away is merely gosh, but Victorian Dartmoor looks like the Californian Old West!

Which is rather a nothing thing to be thinking at the end of a version of Hound of the Baskervilles, but there you go.

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I seem to be writing fic again! Some things I published recently:

From Allegany
ACD Books
Holmes/Watson
Angst, Bees, Epistolary, Missing Scene, His Last Bow
1255 words

Undercover in America, Holmes indulges himself in a letter to Watson.

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Genuine Article
Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson (Whitehead and Pickering, 1979-80)
Holmes/Watson
First Time, Angst, Pining, Porn, Blow Jobs, Disguise, Episode Related
12K words

I realised the limited terms that were on offer, and my stomach sank. I did not want a common street tough, nor even the extraordinary one he might have been in another life.

I wanted Watson, my Watson, inasmuch as I had any right to call him mine.

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The Bells of Hell
The Last of August - Brittany Cavallaro (Charlotte Holmes series)
Lena Gupta/Charlotte Holmes
Crack, Angst, Pretty Much Everybody Dies (except our two heroines)
1700 words

In which August Moriarty is not a Danish prince (nor was meant to be). He is a Serbian archduke, and it is the last days of August.

Or it was, four long and bloody years ago.

Look, if you say "the last of August" to me, especially in a Holmesian context, my brain goes exactly one place. Consider this my own bid in the "where is Cavallaro going with this?" game, if you will. (I know it's an unlikely theory. BUT C'MON. IT SAYS LAST OF AUGUST RIGHT THERE ON THE COVER.) I expect readership for this will total exactly three by the time we're done -- it's femslash in a micro fandom, and the "major character death" and "graphic violence" tags will put off the rest -- but whatever, it makes me and language_escapes laugh. Also, it has Lena and Charlotte kissing and no Jamie at all, which makes it objectively the best kind of Charlotte Holmes fic there is. :-P

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And with that, my WIP Folder (Fic Edition) has officially dropped below thirty works! Woo-hoo me!

Next on the slate is probably a Strange Empire vid, as I try to shift gears for my FTH auction fill.

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