Summer 2025 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 this round. Being in this community with you is a joy and an honour.

Reveals and the Master List go up on June 20 (Baker Island time). 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! We have a bumper crop this round! 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.



a_candle_for_sherlock
Alec
armchair_elvis
beamkatanachronicles
Blistering_Typhoons
bluebellofbakerstreet
CumberCurlyGirl
deelaundry
edosianorchids901
estelraca
flowing_river
gardnerhill
ghostbees
ghostofnuggetspast
graycardinal
happyeverafter72
iwantthatcoat
KameoDouglas
kingstoken
lxvenderjewel
mom2boys
oui_oui
paradiseandcola
penaltywaltz
randomquadballpun
ratinavan
rudbeckia
snycock
tepidspongebath
vulgarweed
write_out





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!

Comments

Re: Part 1: The Art

[starfishstar]

WOW, nice work, my friend and compatriot in guessing authorship based on absurdly small tells! You got all the main works right (I didn't check the treats) except for a very few that I don't think you actually got wrong, after all:

For "Rumour Has It" you put penaltywaltz, when really it was randomquadballpun – but we know you knew the authorship of "Rumor Has It," because the author thanks you as their beta, so this was obviously a necessary misdirect to avoid playing unfairly and using your inside knowledge.

And then for "Fic Covers for Four Fics" you put randomquadballpun, when really it was penaltywaltz – so that's clearly the other half of the same misdirection operation.

(Side note: I'm mildly annoyed at myself that I didn't hit on penaltywaltz immediately for these fic covers, since I know penaltywaltz has done manips and covers.)

And then the other guesses you got "wrong" were also a perfect 1-to-1 swap: You put mom2boys for "I Dream of Sherlock" when really it was snycock and you put snycock for "The Ballad of the Abbey Grange" when really it was mom2boys. Those could be mistakes, but with such a tidy, precise swap of two creators with two works, I'm inclined to think this is another case where you knew the authorship of at least one of these works and thus had to pretend to get it wrong.

Regardless, very, very impressive!

Re: Part 1: The Art

[acorn_squash]

*bows* Thank you, thank you!

I must admit to a mistake. Swapping randomquadballpun with penaltywaltz was intentional (by the way, I'm very pleased that my secret real guess that penaltywaltz made the fic covers was accurate; I was not at all sure of that one), but the mom2boys/snycock switch was a genuine accident! By the time I got to "I Dream of Sherlock" and "The Ballad of the Abbey Grange," I'd matched almost everyone with other fics, but those two had me stumped. "I Dream of Sherlock" was such a perfect fulfillment of the recipient's prompt that I didn't have anything to go off - everything just pointed me back to the recipient. And the amount of time I spent staring at "The Ballad of the Abbey Grange," trying to come up with something...

According to my notes, the only stylistic quirk I was able to identify in "The Ballad of the Abbey Grange" was the nine asterisks, centered, as a line break, which mom2boys has never done before. (Asterisks (three, centered) appear in "I Am a Camera" - although not in the first few chapters, and there's a limit to how much I'm willing to read for Holmestice guessing - but in not a single other fic.) I think that there are others that I didn't write down (the use of blockquotes, the way the letters were formatted, the italicized poetry), but some were common enough that they weren't useful, and others so uncommon that they were no help. Compounding the problem was the fact that mom2boys has never written Victorian-era fic before, so I couldn't compare the style.

tl;dr: mom2boys and snycock are excellent chameleons and should be applauded.