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

[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

[luthienberen]

I couldn't possibly comment on your suggestion for Medical Mayhem, but I can support your "we happy few!"

[write_out]

But did I write "Hubble Bubble?" HMMMM!!! :) Angry!John is my jam these days, I will confess to that!

And YES, I agree that Dovahlock221 made my amazing vid!

[scfrankles]

Dear me, rachelindeed. Dear me...

[rachelindeed]

LOL! Even the greatest minds must occasionally be humbled :) This means that I haven't actually read your work this round, I must rectify that!

[scfrankles]

Anyway, I suppose this makes us even now ^__^

[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]

The Winds of Change, I can see that you're not really sure ;)

[scfrankles]

The winds have now changed direction again, and I've reassigned you to another fic ^___^ Thank you for the hint ^___^

[trobadora]

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

I can't comment on the guess, of course, but I wanted to thank you for saying such a nice thing about my writing. ♥

[scfrankles]

You always write something excellent for Holmestice ^___^

[graycardinal]

Technically, of course, you're half right; I can now admit that I am in fact responsible for the editorial intro and postscript to "Beekeeper". (Well, all right, the title is also mine; Holmes, being Holmes, didn't attach one to his portion of the manuscript.)

As for the body of the manuscript, we may have to have a discussion about how well or badly Holmes has managed to imitate my prose style. Which is, of course, a totally appropriate sort of meta discussion to have in the relevant context. :-)