holmestice | Guessing Post

Entry tags:

Guessing Post

That's a wrap for the main round of gifts! 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 wonderful things.

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 comments on DW or post your fanwork elsewhere until reveals go up in the community. (You may of course post to our AO3 Winter 2017 Holmestice collection, which preserves your anonymity. You may reply to AO3 comments, as well.)

The main round of gifts are all posted, but we're not done yet -- we have several days of treats coming up! We'll continue to accept treats right through until reveals, so if there's a prompt out there that intrigues you and you want to whip something up for it, please do! Just send it to [email protected], using the regular submission guidelines.

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

a_different_equation

alexcat

amindamazed

ancientreader

angelqueen04

armchair_elvis

brilliantlyburning

clearinghouse

colebaltblue

discordantwords

dryadinthegrove

elareine

freebirdflying

gardnerhill

graycardinal

iwantthatcoat

jeremy_holmes

language_escapes

magnetic_pole

miss_violet_hunter

monkiainen

navaan

nottoolateforthegame

okapi1895

oldshrewsburyian

penaltywaltz

phoenixfalls

pip_pn_frodo

pipmer1

pocketbookangel

sanguinity

sanspatronymic

scfrankles

sjames_centre

smallhobbit

solrosan

starfishstar

tripleransom

trobadora
WhouffleLover24

write_out

wssh-watson

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

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

I'll update the list, of course. And of course, when all names are revealed with all the authors.

It's simply that the holidays are approaching, so I had not yet the time to update the four lists. But it's on my To Do-List.

that's great, thanks!

Seconding DW! It's great to see you're up and about!

Back to guess the author of my gift fic!

Police of Penzance: I was puzzled by who had written this one but there were some clues for me to go on. There is a little American English in it. The author is knowledgeable about ACD canon and is comfortable writing an ACD Holmes. But there are also at least three nods to the Sherlock ‘verse, which suggests to me that the author sees Sherlock as their main Sherlock Holmes fandom. And of course, they really, really know their way around a joke ^__^

So this led me to make the assumption that their sign-up would offer ‘ACD’, ‘Sherlock’ and ‘humor’ - and possibly ‘crossover’. This didn’t narrow creators down a great deal but it did narrow them down a bit. I looked at some people’s other fics but I wasn’t really making a match. In the end I did have someone pencilled in as my guess because we seemed a pretty good match in general, but it turned out they’d dropped out of the exchange. I had also previously made the assumption my gift fic was unlikely to be a pinch-hit. Doing a crossover would be adding an unnecessary layer of difficulty when time was tight, the fic was fairly long (though as the creator points out, parts were taken complete from Pirates), and the unrevealed fic appeared in my AO3 gift list pretty soon after the deadline.

However, I have now had reason to revise this assumption ^_^ nottoolateforthegame let me know that iwantthatcoat had let it slip they’d written two fics - which put them back onto my list of possible authors. I went back and looked at the formatting for ‘Police of Penzance’. And it has to be said it is far more idiosyncratic than the formatting for ‘Nanti Polari’ - there are em dashes as well as double hyphens, and there is a lot of variation in how ellipses are used. But there are a fair number of ellipses and the pattern ‘word, double hyphen, space, word’ does occur eight times.

So taking this information and going by the quality of the jokes and the quality of the fic in general, I’m going to say ‘Police of Penzance’ is a pinch-hit by

iwantthatcoat.

What an interesting hypothesis...

*passes you popcorn, plus your choice of toppings, to fuel your long hours in the archives*

Very scientific! I'm curious as to who you believe

iwantthatcoat was pinch-hitting for. Also, why did you decide that your gift was the pinch-hit, not the other? Because you had a candidate for who the initial match had been?

Sang has photographic evidence that I too am a keeper of the genus equus, specifically ferus caballus. :D

*doubles checks the tracking spreadsheet, nods in satisfaction, sits down next to Sang, takes the non-anchovy popcorn, settles in*

Do go on...

Edited 2017-12-19 17:00 (UTC)

True. I also possess the receipts on the copious beta advice she gave me concerning horses. A significant fraction of which,

scfrankles might be satisfied to know, was about colour names. Apparently looking at a photo of a horse, thinking "Pretty!" and looking up what that colour is called, just. isn't. good enough. :-P

Another wholly true yet potentially misleading fact:

Under my non-fannish persona, I once sent Elizabeth Peters - writer of the Amelia Peabody mysteries - a faux G&S lyric closely mimicking the rhyme scheme from "John Wellington Wells"...that she published in her fan newsletter. (I did not realize until I was halfway in just how evil that rhyme scheme is.)

Ah, yes, I see you made your guess about "Police of Penzance" below. :-) (I'd just wondered if you were guessing graycardinal for that since you mentioned both in the same paragraph... but I hadn't checked the comments and kudos on it so, right, never mind!) I wonder if graycardinal could have written the Professor Moriarty: The Hound of the D'Urbervilles fic, only because, who else would have written it? (Nobody offered that in their sign-up.)

The three who made clear that they can write in many more 'verses than what they offered are sanguinity, gardnerhill and graycardinal; gardnerhill seems to be clearly accounted for elsewhere, and sanguinity left a comment on the Professor Moriarty fic, leaving graycardinal as a contender...

Then again, anyone could theoretically have read up on the source material *after* receiving their recipient and seeing their requests. And graycardinal doesn't seem like an obvious writer to have been matched to pocketbookangel (recipient of that fic). The two of them only match on ACD canon, nothing else. Would seem more likely the mods would have put graycardinal with someone who requested Mary Russell, say – since they like to encourage diversity of works by matching people on small fandoms. ...Unless...ooh...unless the mods mistook graycardinal's offer of the Professor Moriarty series by Kurland as being the same thing as pocketbookangel's request for the Professor Moriarty book by Kim Newman and matched them on that?? I can't imagine that slip-up of our careful mods, but Sanguinity did say she was under the weather while doing the matching, right...?

Okay, seriously, I'll stop talking now.

I can't help it if the gene mutation that causes the particular color you want isn't present in the horse population your horses were from. Because we all know that fanfiction must be as historically accurate as possible. A dapple gray plains pony is just the kind of detail that will yank a reader right out of a story. *nods sagely*

Well, I hope

tripleransom appreciated that Unnamed Horse was whatever color you picked out for me, because I can't imagine who else cared. *throws popcorn*

This one also demands that I clip all the horses in all the adaptations, so that she can give me running commentary on their riders and behaviour and... hardware? Bits and reins and shit. For every twenty-second movie clip, she sends me back ten screenshots that she's drawn arrows and lines all over. *throws more popcorn*

Two observations:

You've deduced elsewhere that a handful of folks must have written multiple stories, which presumably means that

gardnerhill could in fact have written more than one. (Or I suppose I could have, come to that.)

OTOH, I agree with you that it's unlikely that the mod who actually requested Kurland!Moriarty last round (and got it) would have confused an offer of Kurland!Moriarty with an offer of Newman!Moriarty.

[counts on fingers]

Out of five stories written for prior rounds, I make the record:

# one high-concept fusion (Charlotte/22CEN)
# another high-concept fusion (TNG/Kurland)
# one mostly pure ACD (ACD/Poppins cameo)
# one pure ACD (Mycroft & Watson, post-FINA)
# one pure Russellverse

I leave the question of what this says about "type" as an exercise for the detectives in the room....

Indeed. I take it that

starfishstar isn't familiar with those two 'verses, but they are very different. Kurland's Moriarty is a well-mannered scientist and gentleman, his stories told in a sly, understated style, whereas Newman's Moriarty is grotesque to the point of being cartoonish, the stories themselves a farcical mirrorverse of canon.

That said, I've made worse errors than that while matching. And I did do the matching while hopped up on benadryl. Who knows what Alice-in-Wonderland match-ups I might have thought sensible?

Edited 2017-12-19 19:08 (UTC)

gardnerhill could have written 2 fics, certainly, but neither of the two in question here (big multi-verse crossover or very obscure verse) seem particularly likely to be pinch-hits, for whatever that's worth. And I'm guessing you didn't write a pinch-hit because you seem very busy with other things like Yuletide, but I admit that's getting onto flimsy logical ground. :-)

Ooh, no no, I realize they're completely different, I was just thinking that the *visual* similarity of the names might have caused an accidental match...I don't mean to impugn your matching skills, though, which are truly excellent!

Hm, hm, all of this is idle speculation anyway, since I haven't read everything; I might or might not have time tomorrow to actually look at all of the data and make real guesses. :-)

"Type": small-to-very-obscure 'verses, with occasional forays into pure ACD...but still with a high propensity for fusions (not always, but forecast: likely).

I mean, all this speculation is only because you said you wrote "something that did not immediately and unequivocally appear to have my byline stamped all over it" which leads me to ponder what you would think *does* have your byline stamped on it.

...So if your intention was to fuel a lot of speculation, it's working!

Now see, I would have said "very obscure 'verse" was more likely, on average, to be descriptive of a pinch hit. (There was one year in Yuletide when I went instantly to the pinch hit list, was claimed, then bounced back onto the pinch-hit list twice before reveals. And that was one of the years, if I recall correctly, when the eventual story matched one of my most obscure ongoing fandom requests.)

That said, Holmestice matching is very different than Yuletide matching....

[twirls mustache]

[goes back to baking cookies]

Supposing the author isn't okapi, you've just paid them an immense compliment!

Okay, ancientreader, now I'm SURE that you're the author of "You Are as Far as Invention..." ;-)

Ya know... this is my first time at this here rodeo, and I am finding myself grinning madly at being listed as a potential author alongside some truly brilliant folks.

Now, because to me "Okapi" kinda is a synonym for "seamless and poetic with an underlying hidden truth brought to the surface", I hope whoever it is appreciates the compliment of the confusion. Sadly, I have not read nearly enough authors here to be able to pick out and express the more subtle things about *why* I find them fantastic. ;)

But I'm working on it.
(Both life and pesky time-travel selfcest demanding to be written has been getting in the way of my reading time)

Yeah, I think the matching works very differently... I've never participated in Yuletide (I've tried a couple times to parse the labyrinthine instructions but failed!) but I get the sense that since Yuletide is for *very* obscure fandoms, you could end up with literally no one who matches your requested fandoms at all, and have to be put on a pinch-hit list for that reason?

Whereas here, almost everyone requests multiple Holmesian 'verses, at a range of obscurity levels, so any given participant will *almost* always match with someone. And the mods have said in that past that they match the smaller fandoms first (even if someone also requested, say, BBC, they'll match them on the basis of other, smaller fandoms if they offered them as well), in the hope of encouraging a wider range of gifts.

(And if I were assigned a pinch-hit, depending how late in the process it came up, I would probably go for whatever was easiest to write, which would probably not be the most obscure fandom – but I suppose that all depends on how early or late a pinch-hitter gets to start.)

I'm just intrigued by that Newman!Moriarty fic, because *no one* offered that in sign-ups. Which leads me to suspect someone who's known to be ultra-well-read in the smaller 'verses. Like...you. (Still not conclusive, though, because anyone could have matched on pocketbookangel for something else, and then decided to write in that 'verse instead.)

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

Page 3 of 6

Guessing Post

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

Re: Guess for Okapi

Re: Guess for Okapi

Re: Guess for Okapi

no subject