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, our twentieth round -- especially given how tumultuous these last months have been. Being in this community with you is a joy and an honour.

Reveals and the Master List go up on June 20th. 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.

In the meanwhile, stay tuned: treats are coming up! 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 send your headers to holmesticemods@gmail.com.

If you'd like to guess who created what in this round, here's a list of all the contributors for the main gifts. (You'll have to put in some extra work to guess the treat-makers!) Go ahead and take a guess! It's all in good fun.



alexcat
apprenticeofdoyle
bakerstmel / Callie4180
cam_elot (used to be thefrenchweirdone)
discordantwords
dryadinthegrove
evilinsanemonkey
fleetsparrow
fridaythegowerstreetcat / gowerstreet
gardnerhill
graycardinal
iwantthatcoat
Keenir/Rodlox/Anthony
language_escapes
mafief
milverton
monkiainen
natrix_natrix
oldshrewsburyian
pipmer1
rachelindeed
saki101
sanguinity
sanspatronymic
scfrankles
simplyclockwork
smallhobbit
starfishstar
strampunch
tepidspongebath
trobadora
twicecurvedspine / eyes-on-stilts
urbanhymnal
write_out



Go forth and leave love for your fellow Holmestice authors, artists, podficcers, and vidders! See you again on the 20th, when we reveal who made what!

Comments

[trobadora]

A single hyphen between blanks gets converted into an ndash, though!

[rachelindeed]

Interesting! I wish they would just put an em-dash key on the board and make it easier for all of us, but apparently my writing quirks have somehow managed to dodge Word's conversion triggers for all these years. I could not get an em-dash for love or money, LOL!

[sanguinity]

Word and Gdocs both have a panel where you can turn the -- to em-dash replacement on or off. So if you want it to auto-covert some keysequence to em-dashes for you, you can turn that on (and I think even customize what the key-sequence is).

I'll have to ask grrlpup to be sure, but I think there is a Brit/American difference between how/where/when hyphens, en-dashes, and em-dashes are supposed to be used, and also whether you're supposed to put spaces around them or not. That said, that's also a level of formal copyediting that many people don't perceive/internalize/apply, so it'd surprise me if you could successfully spot US-vs-UK on that alone.

[rachelindeed]

Neat! I will go look for that panel! :)

Yeah, I was wrong in my earlier assumption about a UK/US dividing line. I thought different keyboards might explain why some writers found it easier to use em-dashes than others, but it seems that the writers who use em-dashes more easily are ones whose habits trigger automatic conversions in their writing software, or who take the extra step of re-setting or customizing their keystrokes. As you say, there's probably a lot of variance in who does that, nothing so simple as American vs British! So the old "--" isn't a clue to much about the writer's general background, though that hasn't stopped SCFrankles from recognizing individual writers' "--"s! :)

[sanguinity]

But as long as someone's software settings + personal choices or method is consistent, it should result in a consistent typographical result. Perhaps not a unique one, but still sufficient to be one piece of evidence among many.

Which is why I've considered twiddling those very software settings before embarking on a Holmestice story...

[rachelindeed]

A masterfully subtle strategy!

[starfishstar]

Yes, there are heaps of minute usage differences between the two systems! I have some notes on that somewhere, but I don't think I retained any of it my brain. grrlpup surely knows magnitudes more about it than me. :-) (I just think it's neat – if a bit wearying – how there is *always* more for me to learn about US/UK usage differences, no matter how much I study the matter.)

[(Anonymous)]

One big difference is US puts a period after titles (Mr. Holmes) whereas UK does not. That has helped me guess on a few occasions. And spelling. I’ve changed my iPad to UK keyboard so it now tells me when I spell in a different manner than UK standard.

[iwantthatcoat]

Oops that was me above. I didn’t intend to be anon!

[rachelindeed]

The period-after-a-title quirk is complicated in this particular exchange, though, because although in modern British spelling it's common to write "Mr Holmes and Dr Watson," in 19th century British spelling the periods were commonly used. In the original stories, Arthur Conan Doyle always wrote "Mr. Sherlock Holmes" and "Dr. Watson," so a British writer trying to write like Doyle might well put the periods back in!

Wheels within wheels!!!!

[sanguinity]

That's true in the original UK editions, too? I always figured that any hard copy I've gotten my hands on here in the States have been gone over by a US copyeditor.

[rachelindeed]

It is true in the original UK editions, I just double-checked. I'm lucky enough to own some copies of The Strand published in London in the 1890s, and Doyle did indeed write "Dr. Watson" and "Mr. Sherlock Holmes." Even "Dr. John H. Watson, M.D." at the beginning of A Study in Scarlet. A quick glance at the other stories in The Strand not written by Doyle indicate similar punctuation patterns. In 19th century British spelling, the periods after titles were in.

[sanguinity]

Good to know, thank you!

[rachelindeed]

Always glad to add to everyone's potential for punctuation disguise a little more, LOL!

[starfishstar]

You own original copies of The Strand??

That's all, I'm just impressed!

[rachelindeed]

I do :) They were gifts from my mom, who is an inveterate eBay collector! It's amazing the stuff you can find out there.

[iwantthatcoat]

Cool! Always learning! We had a similar debate over Holmes’ vs Holmes’s. Apparently the original manuscript uses Holmes’ which I always thought to be the “modern” way.

[starfishstar]

OH REALLY? I am very interested to hear this about Doyle, because a while ago I was trying to pin down (in Harry Potter fandom) whether British English required me to write e.g. Holmes's, even though my natural (American?) instinct always takes me to Holmes'. Opinion was *just* split enough that I decided I could keep on with my Holmes', even though British opinion clearly leaned towards Holmes's. So I'm extremely interested to hear there may be a basis for British-usage Holmes' after all! :D

[iwantthatcoat]

We were debating this on Twitter. I know it included Elinor Grey and possibly Robert Perret and Brad Keefler (sorry, I am sure I am getting names wrong here) ? Someone else joined the convo and showed me the original manuscript for a few stories. I can’t remember which one. Perhaps Hound? It was in Doyle’s handwriting and had Holmes’ in script. I was rather shocked.

[starfishstar]

Neat! I'll have to look into the history of that more sometime. I wonder if it's another thing (like the Mr./Mr discussion above) where UK and US usage used to be more similar, and then diverged, and as Americans we assume that the current British usage must of course be the original one, and our usage the one that diverged, when often it's the other way around! (As with got/gotten. And oh, probably lots of other things I can't think of right now!)

[graycardinal]

That will have been Brad Keefauver, I expect; you've been keeping good company. (As I recall, all three of that trio - Elinor, Robert, & Brad - were at Left Coast Sherlock this past fall.)

[scfrankles]

Just butting in here to say, as a British child in 1980, I was taught that both -s' and -s's was correct. And I seem to remember my teacher leaning towards the former...

To me, Holmes' looks more elegant but Holmes's better reflects the pronunciation so I would be happy with both. But Frankles's (for example :P) doesn't reflect the pronunciation - the possessive is just said the same way - so I would personally never use it. It just looks awkward to me.

[starfishstar]

I don't know how it is for other types of computers, but on my Mac keyboard, an em-dash is option key (a.k.a. alt key) + shift key + the hyphen key (the one just to the right of the row of numbers at the top of the keyboard). In fact, for reference:

hyphen key = hyphen (-)
hyphen key + shift = underscore (_)
hyphen key + option = en-dash (–)
hyphen key + shift + option = em-dash (—)

(I realize in what I just wrote, the en-dash and em-dash look the same, at least in my browser, but I promise they look extremely distinct in Word! Also in GoogleDocs, I just checked.)

So hopefully non-Mac keyboards have something similar?

ALSO, I can't decide how devious I think you would choose to be here in the comments, because the fic I think is yours this round is chock full of em-dashes. So either you are a master of misdirection...or I am wrong. ;-)

(ETA: Oh, wait! Now the various dashes I wrote above do look correct, now that I've posted this. I dunno what was going on there.)

[rachelindeed]

Oooh, keyboard shortcuts, that's very nice to see! Unfortunately, the Mac shortcuts don't work on PCs like mine. But according to Google, I could keyboard code an em-dash by holding down the Alt key and typing 0151 on the numeric keyboard to the right of my letter keyboard (typing 0151 on the number keys ABOVE the letter keyboard won't work, because reasons.) I swear, it's like there's a secret em-dash society into whose arcane rituals I was never initiated!

Also, I would not wish to mislead you. It's not that I never use em-dashes in my writing, it's just always a toss up whether they will look like this "--" or whether I will go to the trouble of copy-pasting in proper em-dashes as the final irritating step in my editing process. You may guess for yourself which route I took this round :)

[starfishstar]

AHA! So your writing sometimes uses em-dashes, even if you don't. :D

(But also, you are entirely too nice; you're definitely allowed to mislead me!)