Guessing Post

[holmesticemods]

Thank you so much for another wonderful round of Holmestice! The mods want to say THANK YOU to all the creators who joined us for this round. You put in a lot of hard work and made some really great fanworks.

Reveals and the Master List go up on December 21st. Until then, please enjoy and comment on all the lovely fanworks. Creators, please do NOT respond to Dreamwidth comments or post your works elsewhere on the Internet until reveals go up in the community. You may of course reply to comments on AO3, which preserves your anonymity.

For anyone thinking of making a treat, we will accept treats right through until reveals, so if there's a prompt that inspires you, please have at it! Just use the regular submission guidelines and notify us at holmesticemods@gmail.com.

If you'd like to guess at who created what in this round, a list of all the contributors is below the cut. Go ahead and take a guess! It's all in good fun.



a_candle_for_sherlock
a_different_equation
alexcat
amindamazed
armchair_elvis
colebaltblue
Dovahlock221
dryadinthegrove
fridaythegowerstreetcat
gardnerhill
graycardinal
ireallyshouldbedrawing
iwantthatcoat
Keenir
luthienberen
Lyricoloratura
mercuryandmoonlight
mightymads
monkiainen
nahirholmes
natrix_natrix
Nobody / 0archangel0
nottoolateforthegame
oldshrewsburyian
penaltywaltz
rachelindeed
redpenrevolution
Reveling_in_mayhem
Robert / writemore
sanguinity
sanspatronymic
scfrankles
strampunch
tgarnsl
thefrenchweirdone
thesadchicken
trobadora
VTsuion
write_out



Go forth and leave love for your fellow Holmestice authors, artists, and vidders! See you again on the 21st, when we reveal who made what!

Comments

[write_out]

So many great works this round! I'm slowly catching up and enjoying everything very much.

I'm terrible at guessing, but I feel fairly confident about these two:

Underwater- this fanvid is most excellent and I've watched it A LOT. I'm going with rachelindeed as the creator.

A Rare Occurrence- I think ireallyshouldbedrawing made this beautiful piece of fanart.

I'm pondering who made my own fantastic fanvid and might venture some more guesses once I go back and read everything.

OH, and I have to give a shout out to mystery commenter T. Rhymer, who has been leaving the most delightful limericks. For some reason I'm thinking this might be iwantthatcoat, but we'll see!

[pipmer1]

I only have two guesses on this round:

I believe that write_out wrote "over our spoken words the words unspoken". They always write such warm and comforting BBC Sherlock/John, and I think this one is in their style.

I also think that iwantthatcoat wrote "The Apprentice’s Beekeeper". I'm not sure why I think this; I do know that coat likes to stretch out into various 'verses besides the common ones. It just reminds me of *them*: the unique flavor and meta-aspect to it, I suppose.

Then again, I could be wrong!!!

[write_out]

I can't possibly comment on this particular story, but I will give happy thanks for your lovely comment!

[write_out]

And you were right! :) Thanks again for the kind words!

My wild and unfounded guesses

[796116311389]

Ok so I for the most part have no idea who wrote what, but my wild stabs in the dark are Coat wrote A Slight Fabrication (the puppet one) because Idk I feel like Coat always ends up writing the really different verses and VTsuion wrote Designation S I think because of a couple different clues in their writing.
As for my gift I have zero clue who wrote it, though based on previous years I assume it's the person whom I wrote my story for lol.
Can't wait to see if anyone can guess mine!
:D

Re: My wild and unfounded guesses

[iwantthatcoat]

I *wish* I’d written “A Slight Fabrication”, but in all honesty, I didn’t even know Puppet Holmes existed until reading this story. There is something in the language that makes me suspect scfrankles. And the deliberate underlining seems just the sort of stylistic red herring I’d expect from said writer.

[scfrankles]

OK, still catching up on reading and commenting but some to start off:

The Adventure of the Quiet Tenants: This is my wonderful gift fic. Coming up with a possible creator was pretty easy, as this author apparently hasn’t obscured their identity in any way. Must admit I was off investigating their named beta’s Tumblr even before I settled down to read the fic. So, looking at who is apparently a close friend of the beta, the very fact the beta has been named in the first place, the tags on the fic - specifically “Literary References & Allusions”, and the writer’s excellent semi-colon game... Also, I’m not a H/W shipper, I’m primarily interested in female characters, and I asked for gen, which all goes to make me hard to match - this person’s sign-up fits my requests pretty well. Putting it all together, I think the fic is by oldshrewsburyian.

The vid, Underwater: Who could this possibly be by…? Of course it is by rachelindeed. Rachel herself has mentioned she prefers to have a close connection between lyrics and images in vids, which fits here. And there is the ending to the vid - she has mentioned on a couple of occasions how much she approves of the fact that in the Ritchie!verse, Holmes lets Watson know as quickly as possible that he’s still alive, instead of letting him mourn for years.

The Apprentice's Beekeeper: This is so on the nose somebody’s style, that for a long while I genuinely believed it was someone else pretending to be this particular writer. The writer I’m thinking of has an online persona that always makes me think of an erudite professor who has learned English as a foreign language - that is, they always use a fairly formal tone, and when selecting a synonym, go for the one that has me discreetly reaching for a dictionary. I got caught up on the word “scarier” in their notes, which I felt didn’t sound like them. I honestly thought the fic might be by sanguinity - that little aside that the mods might be behind the piece, the fact that sanguinity has commented on it but not actually praised it, “and it's not the story you were originally going to get, either” - sanguinity had mentioned having another go at her Holmestice piece. But in the end, I think sanguinity has written something else, and sometimes the simple answer is the correct one. I think this is by graycardinal.

No Price Too High to Pay (For Freedom or for Love): I think this is by armchair_elvis. Their sign-up is a good match for their recipient’s requests. And taking a look at their work on AO3, I could see in at least one of their fics they use ellipses to separate the sections, as this fic does.

A Lesson in Love: I think this has to be by mercuryandmoonlight. Apart from their recipient, I think they are the only participant to explicitly mention Miss Sherlock. As back up evidence, the fic is locked on AO3. I can’t see any compelling reason why this specific fic should be locked, so I think this must be something the writer does by default. And indeed mercuryandmoonlight does seem to lock all their fics.

Seeking High-Energy Self-Starter, Flexible Schedule: I think this is by sanguinity. The fic has a very similar tone to another MDBD fic - “Mr Green and the Adventure of the Ten Gallon Hat”, which sanguinity is very definitely the author of.

The Finality Problem: I think looking at that pairing, and the quality of the writing, that has to be by trobadora.

The Winds of Change: I think this is by mightymads - I must admit purely because they’ve made the name of their recipient bold in their notes, as mightymads as done for their beta’s name in their WAdvent fic notes.

Reminiscence: I think the writer gives themself very clearly away in their own notes. A native Spanish speaker, who likes the original Star Trek? A look at DW and Tumblr confirms this fic is by nahirholmes.

Hubble Bubble: Going by the punctuation, I think that’s by dryadinthegrove.

[rachelindeed]

Hee hee, I am positively delighted to be able to contradict you, since your guesses are always so impressive it often seems like there's no more to be said! But, having just caught up with it, I would say Hubble Bubble is write_out's work. That particular flavor of subtly angry S1 John is one she's been drawn to lately, as one can see from her WAdvent offering. Also, the title is the name of a '70s band, always a good clue for write_out!

As to your guess about which work is my own offering, it's already a popular guess this round and of course I couldn't possibly comment :) But I do find it rather fascinating that your detective antennae are so attuned to Sanguinity and so suspicious of her attempting to mimic another author's style, but you seem never to have considered the possibility of her mimicking the only other more!holmes vidder in this exchange. Not that long ago, she even mentioned on tumblr that a vidding goal of hers was to incorporate still images into her work, and still not even a breath of suspicion from you! I say this seeking neither to confirm nor deny; I shall merely observe that this blind spot of yours seems like a weapon for my arsenal in our guessing campaigns and I have made note of it :)

And speaking of vidders, I will add a guess that Dovahlock221 made the wonderful BBC vid "Human."

Additionally, I suspect luthienberen of penning the delightful fic "Medical Mayhem." I kept an eye out for people offering or requesting Whitehead!Holmes fic this round, and she was one of the few (we happy few!)

Editing to add: oops, I forgot to add my guess for your own work this round! I think scfrankles gave us the DELIGHTFUL puppet!fic A Slight Fabrication. The play-on-words title and the prominence of a no-nonsense BAMF Mrs. Hudson were my main clues :P

[graycardinal]

The writer I’m thinking of has an online persona that always makes me think of an erudite professor who has learned English as a foreign language - that is, they always use a fairly formal tone, and when selecting a synonym, go for the one that has me discreetly reaching for a dictionary.

My real-life English professors (and various of my English teachers from junior high on up) would be smiling and nodding at this, if not laughing aloud...but I promise, English is my first and foremost language. (I took several years' worth of French, and accumulated enough overall word-sense that I actually spent several years in a prior career formatting computer manuals in a variety of European languages, but I don't seriously speak or write anything other than good old American English.)

[mightymads]

I don’t have many guesses, and at least one of them is obvious:

A rare occurrence is definitely by ireallyshouldbedrawing

My greatest joy and privilege, I think, is by Strampunch.

Underwater is most likely by rachelindeed

Souviens-toi de Lausanne is probably by thesadchicken

[thesadchicken]

I can't comment on your last guess of course, but I agree with you that Underwater is probably by rachelindeed!

[strampunch]

I finally created a Dreamwidth account, so if you want to add my profile to the list feel free to do so :)

[holmesticemods]

Done! Thank you for letting us know!

[luthienberen]

I'm terrible at guessing, but I will attempt to put forward a guess for the author of my narvellous gift: The Werewolves of the Baskervilles.

A few offered Livanov/Solomin Russian Holmes, but iwantthatcoat is leaping to my mind. =^_^=

[796116311389]

Since coat shot down my guess that they wrote the puppet one, I'm going to second that The Werewolves of the Baskervilles is also a strong contender.

[rachelindeed]

Oh, I almost forgot! Like many here, I've so enjoyed the witty work of anonymous commenter 'T. Rhymer' this round! I seem to recall from my sherlock60 days that gardnerhill specialized in making limericks for all the canon Holmes stories, so perhaps I see her hand at work there? :)

[sanguinity]

I can't decide who I think T. Rhymer is. I immediately suspected graycardinal when I first saw them popping up, but I'm rather more leaning toward Robert.

[strampunch]

I'm awful at guessing, specially since I'm a newcomer and I barely know any of your writing styles, but at least in the art department I can say with confidence that "A rare occurrence" is by ireallyshouldbedrawing and the gift I received, "A Precarious Sort of Balance" was drawn by natrix_natrix :)

[write_out]

I'm cracking up at how many times Coat has come up so far.

[iwantthatcoat]

As am I!

[graycardinal]

Between Yuletide BEARS, holiday gift logistics (UPS has been sitting on one package for five days, and the truck on which the driver couldn't find it five hours ago hasn't come back yet), and work, it is very possible that there will be no Spreadsheet of Doom this round.

Also, while I am delighted with my gift-as-received, I am for once confident that none of my usual suspects are responsible for it -- it seems very likely that my writer is one of the many first-timers joining us this time out, and that makes the guesswork...challenging.

Anyhow, there WILL be guessing, but it will come later in the week.

[luthienberen]

I have enjoyed you SPREADSHEET OF DOOM the last two rounds, but even without it I look forward to your guesses. Always fascinating to read your reasoning (maybe one day I'll manage to catch a few pertinent guesses lol).

Guesses: Lightning Round #1

[graycardinal]

These are going to come in bursts over the next couple of days, as I find a moment or two between other things, and are going to be very much off the cuff.

Russian Holmes

I'm going to line up in the rachelindeed camp for "Underwater"; much as I always get guessed for certain kinds of stories, she has become the go-to provider of certain sorts of vids (well, along with sanguinity, but this one feels more like a rachelindeed production).

For "Werewolves of the Baskervilles"? Absent the spreadsheet, this is tricky. But I have a thought: a_candle_for_sherlock offered Russian Holmes, they have been among the most active posters here in the comment phase...and the creator of "Werewolves" has been among those taking advantage of AO3's anonymous-reply feature. And although this story is certainly sufficiently off-the-wall to be in the iwantthatcoat wheelhouse, the flavor of those comment responses isn't theirs. So my vote goes to a_candle_for_sherlock.

Elementary

"Many ways to meet a man": Interesting, cleverly textured story -- my vote here is for armchair_elvis. Not much logic to this, except that I'm inclined to eliminate some of the other offer-ers for Elementary as "not quite their style".

More later!

Re: Guesses: Lightning Round #1

[a_candle_for_sherlock]

The werewolves weren’t mine, but I was happy to be suspected of such a fantastic story!

[scfrankles]

A few more:

The Spring, Clad All in Gladness: I had the impression this was by someone who was new to Holmestice. So I had a look at a particular participant’s Hornblower fic, and I noticed the author had a liking for colons, and that they used em dashes but put a space fore and aft. This matches the punctuation in the Holmestice fic so I feel fairly confident saying this is by tgarnsl.

The Adventure of the Missing Moriarty: I was a little puzzled by another new participant. They’d signed up offering gen, and apparently stated they weren’t on AO3. But then nothing posted on DW seemed to match them as a creator. However, it now says in the list of participants they do have an AO3 account, which makes things a great deal simpler. Purely going by a process of elimination, I think this fic is by Robert / writemore.

Luck Or Something Like It: There is a participant who has done a lot of commenting and kudosing but not on this fic. And it reads like something they might like. Also, the tags are rather “chatty” which makes me think of this particular creator, and the notes have a similar tone to a Holmestice fic from the last round. I think this is by a_candle_for_sherlock.

The Adventure of the Vengeful Clockmaker: Re my earlier guess for the author of “The Winds of Change” - mightymads kindly pointed out to me that they were unlikely to be the creator. And indeed when I went back to look, they had been one of the very first to leave kudos on the fic. So, I don’t know who wrote that one… But I am reassigning mightymads to this fic. I thought the enthusiastic thanks to their beta and the tone of the anonymous creator replies sounded very like them.

over our spoken words the words unspoken: First a quotation from Rachel: But, having just caught up with it, I would say Hubble Bubble is write_out's work. That particular flavor of subtly angry S1 John is one she's been drawn to lately, as one can see from her WAdvent offering. Also, the title is the name of a '70s band, always a good clue for write_out!

Re my “Hubble Bubble” guess and write_out’s liking for “‘70s bands”, I would point out to young whippersnapper, rachelindeed, that though Echo and the Bunnymen are technically a ‘70s band, they came to prominence in the ‘80s and most people of my age would think of them that way. Calling them a ‘70s band just feels… odd. And there is no reason someone can’t be a fan of both, but Hubble Bubble and Echo and the Bunnymen are just not two bands you would automatically put in the same category. What I do think is more significant in write_out’s fic is that they quote lyrics from an Echo and the Bunnymen song. And in another fic they quote from a carol, Good King Wenceslas. So it doesn’t seem too far-fetched to think they might also quote from a poem… As the author does in this Holmestice fic. I think write_out is the author of “over our spoken words the words unspoken”.

[rachelindeed]

LOL, this young whippersnapper should clarify that I didn't mean to imply that write_out liked only '70s bands. Only that she likes a lot of bands ('80s certainly included, ask her about Duran Duran!), and often incorporates music references in her stories and/or titles. So when I entered the fic's unfamiliar title phrase into my search engine and the first result I got back was a '70s punk band, I took it as a clue! However, I have since learned upon a more thorough googling that 'hubble bubble' is also a type of hookah, and thus the title was probably more literal than I'd previously realized :)

However, I unrepentantly stand by my guess. We shall see who laughs last! :P

A photograph of the Moor

[(Anonymous)]

A photograph of “the moor”, which should clinch it for at least one person guessing on Werewolves:
https://ourwholebohemiansoul.tumblr.com/post/189772413703

Re: A photograph of the Moor

[iwantthatcoat]

Now, the question is does Write_Out recognize the “moor”?

Guesses: Lightning Round #2

[graycardinal]

Mary Russell

"Untold Stories" is a pretty direct answer to armchair_elvis' request...but a distinctly non-standard entry for most of our known resident Russell fans, in its open portrayal of a prior Holmes/Watson relationship (although it's a very interesting take on that relationship). Nor does the prose, for me, quite match any of the usual suspects. I think this is probably written by mercuryandmoonlight.

As to "The Apprentice's Beekeeper":

With scfrankles having laid this one at my own doorstep, I'm going to get in trouble no matter what I say here...and yet I can't leave a Russell story on the table without any sort of comment. Very well, then: The Supreme Commander is actually not wrong about the prose style - and therefore, very possibly not wrong that someone deliberately sought to mimic it. But like scfrankles, I hesitate to tag sanguinity for the piece. I have two reasons for this: (1) I am almost always wrong when I tag her for a story, no matter who's actually written it, and more importantly (2), the excuse given in the editor's notes is simply not believable if applied to sanguinity. I don't think there's a blackmailer alive who could force her to yield if challenged, and if she were the author, she wouldn't have suggested that there was. The next most logical suspect would be [someone who didn't actually sign up this round - oops], and I've already tagged armchair_elvis for a different work.

On balance -- and in part because of the interesting exchange between the mods in the comment-stream for this story -- I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that no matter whose account was used to submit "The Apprentice's Beekeeper", its author is exactly who the manuscript says it is: Sherlock Holmes himself. (Which leaves us, of course, with the potential reserve problem of which one of us might in fact be Holmes in electronic disguise. But that's a whole different guessing round....)

Miss Sherlock

On one hand, as scfrankles points out, mercuryinmoonlight is our only other formal volunteer for Miss Sherlock aside from its recipient. But we do have two or three folks among us (myself included) who like to stretch their muscles and work in fandoms for which they haven't necessarily tagged themselves in signups. (Also, as with a previous instance, I've already put in a different guess for mercuryinmoonlight.)

I think both iwantthatcoat and sanguinity are skillful enough to be plausible candidates for this one...and both of them are likewise devious enough to have mimicked the AO3 user-lock practice. (Come to that, scfrankles is also both clever enough and versatile enough to be a candidate, but I think they're also smart enough to have seen how much trouble I get into when I try to tag other people for my own stories, so that attribution won't work here.) The argument against sanguinity is that she normally uses a different dodge when posting stories whose authorship she wants to fog; the one against iwantthatcoat is that versatility notwithstanding, this particular sort of intimate character study isn't typical of their work.

On balance, and after much dithering, my guess for "A Lesson in Love" is sanguinity, because this is the sort of character piece that she does very well.

Re: Guesses: Lightning Round #2

[sanguinity]

You say the nicest things.

Guesses: Lightning Round #3

[graycardinal]

Muppets, Puppets, etc.

It seems that scfrankles and I are chasing each other across the game board this round, but I am going back to that well for "A Slight Fabrication" because it seems to me that what the Supreme Commander asserts about my style in connection with "Beekeeper" is equally on-the-nose with respect to their style and the tale of two old felts and their inimitable landlady. "Fabrication" is laced with puns and wordplay throughout, and is warm and fuzzy and wise in very much the same way as a certain tale spun off from Without a Clue some rounds back. And I am struck by the Commander's reticence with regard to this story, which has been one of the most-discussed in the current guessing phase. If "A Slight Fabrication" is not an scfrankles story, I will be very surprised indeed.

My Dearly Beloved Detective

"Seeking High-Energy Self-Starter, Flexible Schedule" is a warm and clever story, though not an especially flashy one. And what occurred to me as I started looking around for prospective authors was this: over the last several rounds, more often than not there's been one very flashy, very envelope-pushing story that at least half of the guessing pool ascribes to one particular author. Sometimes we're right, and sometimes we're wrong, but we always expect fireworks from that quarter.

There isn't really one of those stories this round -- except possibly, I suppose, for "The Apprentice's Beekeeper", but in this case that's not a deal-breaker, because the author in question avoids the Russellverse even more diligently than they avoid BBC Sherlock. But "High Energy Self-Starter" homes in on something else in which this author is known to specialize: warm, wise, and deeply clever female characters. Which is why my guess for this one is gardnerhill.

Re: Guesses: Lightning Round #3

[sanguinity]

And thus continues the grand tradition of you confusing me with gardnerhill...! I laugh with delight every time you do it. :-D

[scfrankles]

Still haven’t caught up on reading and commenting but one last go before the reveal:

A Bonny Thing: It says on AO3 that this was inspired by “I Am the Girl for Her” by sans_patronymic. So my initial reaction was that this fic was by anyone but sans_patronymic. But thinking about it… I don’t think there’s any technical reason to stop someone from linking one of their creations to another of their creations - the “inspired by” link is simply a hyperlink that AO3 formats for you. And it’s an unusual choice perhaps - in a gift exchange, writing a fic for someone that’s been inspired by a fic by a third party? I think the more straightforward answer is that this is another fic by sanspatronymic - they had to acknowledge their previous fic but they couldn’t put it into a series yet without immediately giving away their identity.

It's always Christmas in your arms: I’ve been doing a little sleuthing and I think this is by redpenrevolution / 796116311389. Using a sequence of lines with the same beginning (No one else got to…), almost like a poem, is very distinctive and I think I found another couple of sequences like that in another of their fics.

The Werewolves of the Baskervilles: That is a heckload of ellipses - not all of which keep to that stuffy and boring old convention of containing only three full stops. I think this fic might be by iwantthatcoat.

The Adventure of the Mazarine Steen: This is a pretty obscure ‘verse. It’s not really her style but could this possibly be by the queen of versatility, gardnerhill...? Maybe I've got some things confused.

And finally, for my biannual wild stab at guessing colebaltblue’s creation - I’m going with Many ways to meet a man.


Also, the question none of us has addressed yet - 40 creations and 39 creators: who was the internal pinch-hitter?

[sanspatronymic]

[(Anonymous)]

Here's a riddle for all who've admired
These small verses in which I've conspired.
Shall I tell you my name
And step back from the game,
Or stay hidden, and thus un-retired?

T. Rhymer

[a_candle_for_sherlock]

Oh dear! I adore your rhymes and very much want you to go unretired, but I am awfully curious who you are!

[graycardinal]

Scattershot, barely under the wire, and terse (phone keypad)....

"The Missing Moriarty": scfrankles and I reach different conclusions from the same clues: show me a Spanish Star Trek fan, and I see an answer -- nahirholmes for the win here.

"The Finality Problem": OTOH, here I agree; this one is most likely trobadora. (And I may have more to say about the "Emerald" stories after reveals.)

Having resisted the temptation to assign iwantthatcoat to one of the obvious prospects, I will venture that they may have written "Sherlock Holmes and the Season of Secrets".

And on that note I'm out of time...

[scfrankles]

"The Missing Moriarty": scfrankles and I reach different conclusions from the same clues: show me a Spanish Star Trek fan, and I see an answer -- nahirholmes for the win here.

Must admit I was thinking along the same lines at first, but nahirholmes had specified on their profile that it was the original Star Trek they were interested in, and had made no mention of The Next Generation.

[iwantthatcoat]

I am so behind in reading that I didn’t dare guess this go-round. I feel a bit cheated by life. Well, there’s always spring.