Marta's Mathoms

I'm looking for someone to read over a "Sherlock Holmes" story I've written. Doyle verse (and style, incidentally), not BBC, though there are some references to ideas the BBC series makes explicit. It's also non-slash, Holmes and Watson friendship. My biggest concern is the time period. I've researched it as thoroughly as I can, but it's hard to know if it feels convincing to the time period, and I'd love a second pair of eyes to look over it for that. I also wouldn't mind a canon checker. I've taken some ideas from the BBC series but have worked very hard to only do that when the Doyle-verse is silent on that point and where it feels like it fits. So if there's someone who's particularly well-read in the original stories who has the time, I'd appreciate your help particularly. If you're British or trained in UK-style English that would be an added bonus, but isn't the most important thing I'm concerned about. Knowledge of French and/or ballet wouldn't be a bad thing, though that's even less important than the British English.

Length: I'm still writing the final scene so I can't give a precise figure. I'd be extremely surprised if it goes over 5,000 and may be a good bit shorter. I hope to send it out by tomorrow early afternoon (US East Coast Time).

Timing: Here's the trickiest part. If at all possible I'd like to get this sent off to a challenge by Sunday night. I'm fully aware that's a tight timeframe, so if you think you can help but need a few days more let me know. But if possible I'd love someone who can get me feedback by around noon Sunday (US East Coast Time).

Please do let me know if you can help. Would really appreciate it.

Emily Forsyth over at YouTube has put together a truly astounding fan-video of clips from "The Sign of Three"... repurposed, for lack of a better word. Treat it as AU if that helps; at an emotional level, it feels thoroughly right to me, and it's been a long, hard day so this makes me happy.

I've been following along with the sherlock60 community, which invites people to write sixty-word ficlets based on a particular Doyle story. I've not been writing the stories or even reading many of them (to my shame - I need to participate more), but I have enjoyed reading the story alongside them. I think when I read "The Greek Interpreter" it was inspired by seeing people post about it. Now I've read "The Adventure of the Dancing Men" along side them.

The story's one of the more interesting ones I've reread as I get back into Doyle. I mean simply on the level of mystery. It's involved enough that I couldn't work out the riddle until the very end, which I really enjoyed. It kept me guessing. Basically, a man approaches Holmes with some messages he's found scrawled around his property in secret code. They're not even clearly messages; they look like doodles of dancing men, and Watson at first thinks they're just that. But the man's wife is terrified by them. The most obvious answer would to be to ask the wife why she's so scared of them, but when they were married the wife made her husband promise never to pry into her past. He thinks asking about the doodles would be breaking that promise so (while he wishes Elsie would confide in him) he feels duty-bound not to ask her directly. And so Holmes and Watson set out to decipher the messages and work out just why they upset Elsie so much.

To a modern reader, that beginning can seem a bit contrived. I don't know that I wouldn't press my wife about it, particularly if it was upsetting her to this point. But that point aside, it's actually a very engaging story. More than that, it's a very idealistic story: it's driven by honor and duty to keep your word, and even Holmes is much more concerned with getting justice for the man and his wife (to go into that would be revealing too much) than with being clever. He's utterly focused on solving the case, but, having worked it out, he's almost apologetic on leaving Watson and the inspector in the dark for so long. The point here isn't the thrill of the chase or the recognition of his genius, so much as getting their man and making sure he sits in prison for a long, long time. I love so much about the BBC series, but this lack of a moral center, a similar commitment to justice in the cases he solves (at least on its surface; I do think Sherlock is more concerned than he seems) is something I've really been missing.

Besides, as I said, it's a really interesting mystery, full of just those elements that would most interest Sherlock Holmes. It kept me stumped through the end, and I loved trying to work that out.

I also really enjoyed the bits of Watson's and Holmes's interactions. Watson doesn't really add anything in practical terms here except a record of the events. His medical services aren't ever called upon, and he isn't able to work out any important clues. In fact, while Holmes is rolling the facts over in his head on their drive out to Norfolk at the end of the case, Watson is taking in the scenery! But there's still a respect here from Holmes to Watson, because while Watson isn't working out clues, he is intellectually curious in the case. It's fascinating, really, why Holmes felt the need to bring Watson along (aside from the obvious fact that the story needs a narrator). He just seems to want him there at some level, and I found myself smiling at that.

Really, this was a nice read and I recommend it to anyone looking for more Sherlock Holmes. Doyle's in the public domain now so you can find cheap eBooks of his work on Amazon and other places that are probably more navigable. If you're interested in going that route, it's in "The Return of Sherlock Holmes" and will probably have better formatting and editing if you buy the book. But if you don't want to do that you can also read it free online here.

I've been grading student essays and papers pretty much non-stop this week, and while some of them are decent, many of them are prompting my best Sherlock imitations (Ummm... no.) As a way of coping, I've also been rewatching the Eleven episodes I had seen before getting diverted by... something. Most likely Sherlock series three (which is growing on me the more I watch and analyze it) and my deep and abiding love of Chris Eccleston's Doctor. Probably also by the Cabin Pressure radio drama, whcih I've been enjoying quite thoroughly latel.

Anyway. Doctor Who. Eleven. Halfway through my third re-rewatching of "The Eleventh Hour," it struck me how thoroughly like faery-story it is. You have the importance of childhood innocence, the belief in the impossible, the sort of almost naive belief that this can possibly be made to work - that is, naive until it actually does work. IN fact, there's one word that's been flowing through my head as I watch it: eucatastrophe.

If you're not familiar, the term is from Tolkien's "On Fairy Stories." Using the version of the quote that showed up at MPTT earlier today:

Fantasy can thus be explained as a sudden glimpse of the underlying reality or truth. It is not only a "consolation" for the sorrow of this world, but a satisfaction, and an answer to that question, "Is it true?" The answer to this question that I gave at first was (quite rightly): "If you have built your little world well, yes: it is true in that world." That is enough for the artist (or the artist part of the artist). But in the "eucatastrophe" we see in a brief vision that the answer may be greater—it may be a far-off gleam or echo of evangelium in the real world.

To my great shame, I've never actually read this essay (I know, I know), but whatever else Tolkien is driving at here, I think I get the bare meaning of the term: that it is the happily-ever-after, and more than that, it's tragedy turned into joy. It's just this once, everybody living. It's Luke's impossible shot down the ventillation shaft blowing up the Death Star. It's that moment of Sherlock being a girl's name on the Tarmac, the moment of joy in the midst of that final scene, and more than that of Sherlock standing by his grave at the tail end of Reichenbach. Which, granted, isn't quite the joy beyond all hope of things turning out well, but it's a glimpse of it, an impossible glimpse in the midst of a story that's not fully told yet. And it's the Eagles swooping in in "Out of the Frying Pan, Into the Fire" with the wargs bouncing around; or Gwaihir rescuing Gandalf from Orthanc; or perhaps most of all, of Frodo's and Sam's impossible rescue from Mount Doom. You get the idea.

And I'm seeing it time and time again in the latest incarnation of Doctor Who. It's just so impossible that things would turn out as well as they did. I saw this flat-out joy more than once in "The Eleventh Hour," but also in the climax of "The Beast Below" and even more so in River Song's impossible rescue of (spoilers...) (and admit it, you just said that in her voice) in "Flesh and Blood." The sheer horror, the can't-quite-look-away-from-the-screen revulsion and compulsion simultaneously... turned on a dime when you realize what Eleven is driving at with his "Hang on." I quite literally squealed.

And it will be fascinating to see how this turns out. I've got one more episode I've seen and then it's in to new waters. This may be me imposing something that's not there. But really, there's something I can't call anything other than eucatastrophe at work here, and it's helping me to hope like I haven't in over a decade. It makes me feel young and reminds me that sometimes what religious folk are prone to call the miraculous just happens. Sometmes life sucks... but sometimes it's wilder, more wonderful than what we'd expect.

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On a slightly less happy note, I read Doyle's "The Greek Interpreter" (free etext here). I won't lie: this was driven by that wonderful scene at the beginning of BBC's Belgravia. I am trying to make my way through the stories once again, as a way of reconnecting with the originals. (Because, you know, I need something to do during the hiatus...) But I must say, I was more than a bit disappointed.

First, the good. There's a rather interesting description of Mycroft Holmes toward the beginning of the story that I quoted over at Tumblr. I found it fascinating, actually - probably the highlight of the story for me. (To be fair, it is a short one.) I also liked the fact that John was able to work out the situation on his own, and a lot of the details did have a nice taste of the exotic about them, or I'm sure they would have at the time.

There also were several parts of it I really didn't like - issues I found more than a bit insulting to my modern sensibilities. The way women were treated in it, for instance, as silly little things when they appeared at all. The fat-shaming and its connection with laziness were even worse, and the thoroughly Anglo-centric nature of it all was just a bit for this proud German-American (southern German; I look a bit like the description we get of Mr. Melas) to bear up under. In a longer piece this wouldn't have been such a hard thing, perhaps, but as I'm also a woman and a bit overweight, this really didn't sit well with me at all.

I think the biggest problem for me, though, was that I simply found the story boring. Watson more or less solved it, but it was using "deductions" absolutely on par with Doyle's Watson. That essentially meant that I'd worked out the answer about halfway through Mr. Melas's recounting of events, and the final piece of the puzzle was supplied through the highly suspenseful method of waiting for someone to reply to a newspaper advertisement. The delay only seemed to exist to make Mycroft look bad (granted, I'm a bit of a Mycroft fangirl with the BBC, so my standards are probably high). It set up what I'm sure was an exciting final scene at the time, but these days I guess we're spoiled for that kind of thing.

Anyway. I do quite like Doyle fiction, and I'm sorry this one didn't quite work for me for a variety of reasons. Any recommendations for which I should read next? I've done Bohemia + Scarlet, but as for the others I'm open to suggestions.

I'm not a natural romantic, but something about all the Valentine's Day fic I've seen produced by my friends made me want to join in a bit. I thought I could write up a few hundred words of Mummy Holmes remembering a Valentine's Day traditions with her young sons. Three days later, I had 2,700 words of Mummy Holmes sharing tea with Anthea, making deductions, and working out the truth post-Reichenbach. Rounded out by childhood memories and generally Mummy Holmes being the awesome woman she would have to be, to accomplish everything she did both in the domestic and professional spheres.

I do believe I left my short!fic muse in the Shire, but as long as the 221B voices keep yammering away in my head, I'm not complaining.

Title: Hearth-Fires
Length: 2,708 + Notes
Rating: General; no warnings
Beta: kayleelupin, lindahoyland

Summary: John spent two years believing Sherlock Holmes was really and truly dead. It's entirely possible not everyone was so easily fooled. (ft. Mummy Holmes and Anthea)

Read at AO3

I've mentioned a few times that I was working on a BBC Sherlock fic for the come_at_once challenge. It's posted now. At 5,425 words it's probably the longest piece of fic I've written in quite a while, and I flatter myself that it's pretty good.

I started writing this fic because I wanted to see if I could write actual, unambiguous John/Sherlock slash in a way that seemed to work for me. Watching the BBC Sherlock show I've always thought there was subtext so loud it seemed to cross into regular canon at some point, and I've certainly found the fanfic other people wrote plausible, but I struggled to imagine writing fanfic that did more than toe that line. I'm still not sure I've actually managed that, for all that this is sexually explicit in the middle section. Leave it to my rather unique muses to write what began as a sort of PWP (though I think it acquired entirely too much plot to warrant that term by the end) without quite managing to to establish the relationship in my mind.

Outside of that, though, I think the first and third sections can be read on their own and are quite interesting, and while there's a certain amount of suggestion, it's really not at all explicit if you prefer to avoid that - PG at most. I also flatter myself that it gives an interesting look at the John-Sherlock and Sherlock-Mrs. Hudson friendships in HLV. Writing Mrs. Hudson was particularly fun - that's such a warm relationship, so uncharacteristic for Sherlock, and it's really nice to sink into it a bit.

Anyway, if you're interested in BBC Sherlock, I do hope you'll give it a try.

Title: Gasping [Explicit for middle section; 5,434 words]
Spoilers: Series Three through "His Last Vow"
Challenge: come_at_once [see notes at AO3 for precise prompts]
Warnings: consent issues, sort of. Technical infidelity, again sort of. This is Sherlock's headspace so nothing is all that straightforward. Also, questionable medical ethics and references to drug use (past tense).

Summary: "John must have made some answer. Certainly, his lips were moving and Sherlock was vaguely aware of sounds reaching his ears. His brain, however, thoroughly refused to cooperate, to focus on anything other than the sight laid out before him. John, his coat collar turned up against the rain, taking a long pull on the cigarette that had so recently been in Sherlock's mouth. The way his lips curled tightly around the cigarette, his cheeks hollowed ever so slightly, his eyes half-closed in an expression reminiscent of, well, other pleasures.

This was potentially problematic."

Read at AO3.