holmestice | Summer 2024 Guessing Post

Thank you so much for another wonderful round of Holmestice! The mods want to say THANK YOU to all the creators who joined us this round. 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. (If you haven't thanked your creator for your own gift yet, please do!) Creators, please do NOT respond to Dreamwidth comments with your name attached 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.

Meanwhile, stay tuned: treats are coming up! For anyone thinking of making a treat, we will accept treats 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.

4thelneyj0nes

a_candle_for_sherlock

aceredshirt13

beamkatanachronicles
Blistering_Typhoons
catlock_holmes

deelaundry

dryadinthegrove

gardnerhill

graycardinal

happyeverafter72

inkonice

lucygturpin

mundungus42

ratinavan

rudbeckiasunshine

seaweed_writes
Spaghettifriend/Oscar

tepidspongebath

vulgarweed

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

Threaded | Flat

From:

graycardinal

A number of our newer players may not know or remember this, but when I first signed up for Holmestice these many moons ago, I leapt headlong into the guessing posts by building a Spreadsheet of Doom™ in order to better work out who'd done what. Eventually, though, especially as the rounds got bigger and real life got busier, compiling the spreadsheets grew impractical - there was too much data and not enough time to type.

This time out, though - we're a somewhat smaller pool, there are fewer variables in play, and I happen to have a bit more spare time at the right moments this week. There is, therefore, a genuine spreadsheet here at the virtual Batcave, and I think I have some hope of matching up works and creators more accurately than has usually been the case. This will not, mind you, necessarily prevent me from playing the Comic Relief Guesser as has often been the case in the intervening rounds....

Before I start, I'll note a handful of interesting anomalies in the data. There's at least one work in the collection for a recipient not on the list of contributors, and there's one contributor listed for whom I can find neither a signup nor a gift. (Logically, that's the description of a pinch-hitter, but in the past we haven't usually seen pinch-hitters named openly in the guessing-post contributors' lists.)

Part the First: Art

So - let's begin with art. We have four art submissions this round in three fandoms plus one (The Hobbit being outside the Holmesian spectrum), and I counted five offers of art among the pool of contributors. A couple of these individuals offered both art and fic, and on that basis I dropped one of the five from the art-grid (I'm morally certain that person wrote fic for the current round).

That leaves four artists and four excellent works in a range of fandoms that seems to me to sort itself out neatly. My guesses are as follows:

# inkonice • "Yet Another Brain-Wave" (for ACD)
# ratinavan • "May the Fourth" (for Sherlock & Co.)
# 4thelneyj0nes • "Beloved Embrace" (for My Dearly Beloved Detective)
# lucygturpin • "A Present for Smaug" (for ACD and The Hobbit)

More to come....

From:

graycardinal

Very quickly, as work beckons...

I can't let the round pass without filing a guess as to the creator of my gift work, this one via instinct rather than spreadsheet.

Is it acorn_squash, who's written this 'verse before? No, they left a comment. Likewise disqualified is iwantthatcoat, resident chameleon.

Is it mundungus42? Doubtful, as I have an idea that their tale was turned in earlier.

No; this is pure guesswork, but I think this tale may be the work of gardnerhill.

Back tonight!

From:

graycardinal

I do still plan to revisit the Spreadsheet of Doom[TM] before the night is done...but in one more desperate bid to liven up the proceedings, herewith two truths and a lie:

I did not write a BBC/Sherlock story for this round.

There are multiple Holmeses and Watsons in my story for this round.

This round's story is the first Holmestice gift I've written for this recipient.

[exit, evil laughter echoing all the way, stage left]

From:

deelaundry

I was going to guess Iwantthatcoat for my genius triptych gift, then they didn't appear in the contributor list. So based on Graycardinal's 2/1 I was going to guess them, then Coat hit me with the "new username" idea and now I am confused.

Whoever wrote it, it's awesome and everyone should read and enjoy.

My contribution seems super obvious to me but not sure I'm well enough known to be obvious to anyone else.

Edited Date: 2024-06-20 02:50 pm (UTC)

From:

graycardinal

Spreadsheet of Doom™ time! (This is incomplete due to time constraints; I've focused on the more diverse/divergent canons.) And indeed, I am now flat out of time....

&Co. # "The Norbury Triptych" - gardnerhill (yes, this clashes with my prior guess for my gift)

Abdul-Jabbar
# "Mission: Improbable" - vulgarweed

Coules
# "Nie mehr fürchten" - Blistering_Typhoons

Granada
# "The Black Cat Conundrum - a_candle_for_sherlock

Private Life of Sherlock Holmes
# "Five Happy Years" - aceredshirt13

Rathbone
# "Graveyard Shift" - happyeverafter72

W&H
# "John and Watson, Watson and John" - deelaundry
# "Watson Ejaculated" - rudbeckiasunshine