silentauror's Blog, page 76
December 28, 2020
helloliriels:tisnotmydivison:bi-accident:every time i see bbc sherlock i get war...
every time i see bbc sherlock i get war flashbacks
shell-shock from all the canons.
^reblogging specifically for that pun
sufficientlylargen:
elethgreenleaf:
penny-anna:
If you find yourself in times of trouble, ask...
If you find yourself in times of trouble, ask yourself, ‘what would Gandalf do’, and remember, ‘beat a man unconscious with a big stick’ is a valid answer
When I find myself in times of trouble,
Gandalf Greyhame comes to me,
Wailing on those assholes,
With a tree (with a tree)
WWGD
2020 fic year in review
I was tagged by my lovely @khorazir! Thanks, you!
Total number of completed stories: Three, but two of them were fairly long? I wrote:
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: John/Sherlock, 50,689 words, explicit, John POV. Set in New York, because I was itching to go there and couldn’t, and setting a fic somewhere is the next best thing. Probably my most political fic to date, this one was a deliberate reversal of the fake-couple-for-a-case trope, aka I wanted to create a setting wherein John and Sherlock become a couple during a case but need to keep it a secret for the sake of the case. So I set it at a massive, anti-gay conference in the US. Naturally. :P
Sine Nomine: John/Sherlock, 45,626 words, explicit, mostly John POV with sections of Mycroft and Sherlock POV as well. In fact, though the sections aren’t equal in length, it’s symmetrical: it goes Mycroft POV/John POV/Sherlock POV/John POV/Mycroft POV. This story has a dark premise and a particularly dark setting for one section. It’s based on the concept of Mycroft rewatching the footage of John beating Sherlock in the morgue for the hundredth time or so and revisiting the question of whether John had been the making of his brother, or made him worse than ever. He’s definitely come to the latter conclusion, but decides to give John one final chance in the form of a test. John, for his own reasons, makes what Mycroft deems the incorrect choice, and Mycroft basically sends him into a death trap. The setting of this place is officially set in Serbia with indirect hints at events similar to the Srebrenica Genocide in Bosnia, but the actual setting is Syria, which I’ve just spent the past year studying intensely. Putting a slice of that into the dark core of this story, albeit disguised as another place, was strangely cathartic for me. The title, which is Latin for “no name”, is a double reference to the village here, which Sherlock and Mycroft never name, ominously referring to it only as “the village”, both to each other and to John, as well as John’s never-named or owned feelings for Sherlock. This one is close to my heart for a lot of reasons, but most of all because of Syria. Also, the vast majority of the time in my writing, I choose a singular POV and stick to it very closely for the entire story. Choosing to rotate between these three men essentially allowed me to show how they’re all justified in their own decisions here, and to examine the relationships between all three of them. It’s a story about reckonings and eventual, hard-won reconciliations.
The Secret of Hazel Grange. Sherlock/John, 18,181 words, explicit, Sherlock POV. I’m going to claim that the reason I only managed to swing three fics this entire year is partly that I put another project on hold in order to write this one, lol. This is the third Christmas fic I’ve written and I’m happy with how it came out. It’s also the only story I’ve written that’s explicitly set during this pandemic, and during the second London lockdown, which is eerily similar to the code red lockdown my own city is in, so it just felt right. It’s been a somewhat miserable holiday season for me (so many reasons, including unhappiness at work and an illegally high rent increase that my apartment building is putting through, on top of the pandemic and all of that isolation and all of those cancellations), so writing some happy endings for someone else was pure escapism for me. Hopeful for others, too!
Total word count: 114,496 words of posted fic. 130,796 if we’re counting my work-in-progress that got interrupted for the Christmas fic. :)
Fandoms written in: BBC Sherlock.
Looking back, did you write more fic than you thought you would this year, less, or about what you’d expected? I wrote about what I thought I expected to be able to write. Right now, I have a full-time job, a part-time job, and then freelance work, all to attempt to make ends meet, so I have very little spare time to write in, unfortunately. So getting over 100k words in is actually somewhat miraculous to me. It feels like not very much when it’s just three stories, but I guess it still amounts to a fair number of words?
What’s your own favourite story of the year? Picking favourites is always tough, but for the Syria connection, I’d have to go with Sine Nomine.
Did you take any writing risks this year? I suppose that going so hard on the whole Republican anti-gay groups thing could be considered “risky” in some circles, but not really hereabouts! LGBTQ+ rights is one of my areas of advocacy (in fact, I’m a founding member of the Rainbow Equity Council at my workplace and spent a crap ton of time this month drafting governance documentation for it), but genocides are the issue that are really closer to my heart, so the Syria connection, even if it wasn’t named outright, could also be seen as a “dangerously” political stance, I suppose. But compared to other writing choices (like Scars, which features actual rape, or any of my Freebatch stuff, or any of the stories where Mary is an overt terrorist (rather than “just” a freelance assassin, lol)), I don’t really think I was terribly risky this year.
Do you have any fanfic or profic goals for the new year? The first item on the agenda is to get back to work on Nocturne, my WIP. After that, we’ll see. That said, I STILL would like to get back to searching for an agent for my novel, which is strongly based on Against the Rest of the World. I would also like to write that Johnlock cookbook I keep vaguely promising (it would feature recipes from my fics), and in a quirky “other” sort of project, I also wrote a heap of haikus about Republicans this fall that I’d like to see about getting published. Want a taste? Sure you do. I give you:
Brett Kavanaugh
Brett has a face like
a snarly little hedgehog.
He likes beer, okay?!
Mitch McConnell
Moscow Mitch is a
corrupt turtle who keeps his
balls in his neck pouch
Most popular story of the year? Well, the longer a story is posted, the more time it has to collect hits, kudos, bookmarks, and comments, obviously, so that makes The Four Horsemen the clear winner here.
Story of mine most under-appreciated by the universe, in my opinion: From this year or in general? :P I often find that my plottiest, most detailed, most researched stories that I personally think contain some of my most thoughtful writing are the ones that get the least attention. For instance, after series 3 aired, I wrote three back-to-back intensely-detailed series 3 fix-it fics (which all, to their credit, do get plenty of attention, though none so much as Vena Cava, the third of the three). Then I wrote a light-hearted, almost-crack porn fic, more as mental relaxation than any sort of literary genius, and that fic - Best of Three - remains my most wildly-popular story of anything I’ve ever written. It used to frustrate me, but now I’m just grateful to have anyone read anything of mine. But along that theme, yeah: the most complex of this year’s stories (Sine Nomine) is probably the one I feel is the least appreciated, but that’s also fine. No complaints here - I’m very lucky to have the readership I have!!
Most fun story to write: Sine Nomine, for all the reasons I talked about above, though I’d also call this the most emotionally-invested story of mine from this past year. That said, setting any story in Manhattan is always going to be fun, and I loved researching approximately 500 holiday rental properties in various parts of England in order to finally just create my own, aka Hazel Grange, lol.
Most unintentionally telling story: Ha, well, if you weren’t sure about my stance on gay rights, marriage equality, or Republicans in general, The Four Horsemen should clear that up pretty distinctly, lol!
Biggest disappointment: Just that I haven’t had more time to write.
Biggest surprise: Possibly that I felt so able to represent all three POVs in Sine Nomine as equally as I did. By that, I don’t mean being able to write in their perspectives, but rather in presenting their arguments with (I hope) equal persuasion: Mycroft thinks that John’s entire presence in Sherlock’s life has spelled nothing but disaster for Sherlock. He’s arguably not wrong. He decides that John is out of chances, and that he’s justified in being the one to make that call. Sherlock disagrees, hard, and he’s not wrong. John makes the choice he makes for his daughter, not for the choice Mycroft gives him between choosing either Mary or Sherlock once and for all, and he’s not wrong to have done that, or unjustified in wanting to go and demand some answers from Mary, who isn’t dead after all, here. But then I think that their various reasons for reconciliation are all equally justified, too. I hope! Usually when you stick to one perspective, the story naturally gears itself to persuade the reader to identify with that one character and to take their side. Here, I hope I manage to juggle the balance fairly equally.
I don’t know who’s been tagged in this already, but I’ll tag: @totallysilvergirl, @blogstandbygo, @nade2308, @weneedtotalkaboutsherlock, @hubblegleeflower, and anyone else who writes.
pavlovsdaughter:
Johnlock according to tv tropes
Sherlock...
5,900 followers!So! I’ve been on tumblr since about August 2013 now. I had been away from fandom in...
So! I’ve been on tumblr since about August 2013 now. I had been away from fandom in general for a solid 3-4 years by that point, having left the Harry Potter fandom after a good deal of waning interest, which was definitely accelerated by basically everything about JKR (and this was before she outed herself as a major TERF) - adding to the canon with random shit she would say in interviews, etc, the whole “Dumbledore is gay” - but not in actual canon, including not making it canon in the movies that came after, etc. When I left the HP fandom, fandom in general was still very much on livejournal, though due to endless issues with LJ, people had already started drifting off to other platforms, which led to a widespread sensation of the fandom breaking up. My offline life got busy, I started my masters, and just didn’t have either the time or the interest in writing HP fanfic anymore. I had written 1.5 million words of fic and figured I was about out of words, anyway. My longtime friend, @moonflower-rose, had designed me an icon with the Latin phrase cacoethes scribendi, which basically means an endless mania for writing. I had started to feel that I wasn’t living up to that anymore, too, so I just quietly disappeared.
Fast forward to 2013 and my encountering the ridiculous talents of Benedict Cumberbatch via Star Trek Into Darkness (still think that title needs a colon, but what can you do) and immediately needing to see everything else he’d ever done. I’d heard of Sherlock in my last, lingering days on LJ, but hadn’t decided to delve into it at all. At this point, only series 1 and 2 were out, though setlock photos for series 3 started emerging just after I plunged wholeheartedly into the Sherlock fandom. I was hooked immediately by Ben and Martin’s acting, by the interesting stories (though I was irked from the beginning of the treatment of Irene Adler and the imposition of a hetero-ized romance of two obviously (one canonically!) gay characters). I was irked by the lazy writing and easy outs that Moffat and Gatiss always seem to prefer. Nevertheless, I was only about halfway through The Reichenbach Fall when I was seized with a feeling that was half sinking and half elated: that I needed to write about these two people. The old urge had come back, and it came back hard.
Now, a little over six years later, I’m over 2.3 million words deep into this fandom, with 88 posted stories and another that’s over 16,000 words in at this point. And the place where I re-found fandom and all of the community that comes with it, was here. It’s still astounding to me that anyone reads my stories. It’s astounding to me that 5,900 of you follow me. It’s really, really cool. :)
I used to make a post like this about every 100 new followers, but I’ve sort of slacked off it lately. If you’ve been following me for a long time, this will be repetitive and I’m sorry! But here goes:
-I generally follow everyone back, with the rider that, if the blog posts too much untagged content that I’m not interested in and can’t filter out because of the lack of tags, I’ll unfollow, just because that’s a lot of blogs. Sometimes tumblr doesn’t show me who followed me. If you’re following me and I’m not following you back and you wish I were, please, please, please just drop me a line and say so and I’ll fix it!
-I post my stories at ao3. I have not imported my HP stuff and have no desire to do so. You can still find it at skyehawke.com. As long as skyehawke is still up and running, I will leave my HP stories there. Meanwhile, my Sherlock stuff is all posted here at ao3.
-if you’re someone who has the means to support writers and artists in the fandom and that’s something you’re interested in doing, I do have a Patreon account. It’s over here. I always feel intensely squirmy about promoting this and only have it because @ravenmorganleigh made me get it (bless, lol). As a person who is perpetually struggling to make ends meet, I feel badly because I can never afford to support anyone else financially (every month that I make the rent is a win, basically). The donations people make through my Patreon have often meant the difference between being able to buy groceries or not. I don’t mean to be dramatic about this, but that’s literally the case, and I’m endlessly, endlessly grateful to every single dollar anyone has ever donated. But please don’t ever feel that you need to do this and please don’t if it isn’t something you can afford! I mean that. Also, my Patreon is set up for monthly contributions, and if you’re just dying to make a donation but want it to be a one-time thing, I also use PayPal, via my fandom email account, which is silentauror@yahoo.com.
I’ve met some of the most amazing people here in this place and I’m very glad that I chose to come back to fandom, to find my own creative voice again, to have this chance to discuss and share excitement or rage or humour, and to be a part of so many of your lives, in whatever small way. I always get introspective at this time of the year, since it’s not only about to be a new year, but my birthday is also right at the end of the year (it’s December 30th), so I always end up having Big Thoughts About Life in this window between Christmas at the end of the year. Today, this is my Big Thought: how grateful I am to have all of you, in whatever large or small way, in my life. <3333333333333333333333
December 27, 2020
HIHIHI!! First of all THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR EVERYTHING YOU DO FOR THIS FANDOM!!!! WE ALL LOVE YOU! I've been looking for this one fic for a little while now,, basically Sherlock, John, and the NSY are in a cabin because of a case and Sherlock and John g
Hi Nonny!!!
OH GOSH I THINK I KNOW THIS ONE!!!!!
I THINK you might actually be looking for this fic:
Out of the Woods by SilentAuror (E, 20,471 w., 1 Ch. || Post S4, Romance, Slow Burn, Flirting, Drunk Sex, Practical Jokes, POV Sherlock, Bottomlock, Possessive John, Pining Sherlock, Frustrated Wanking, Frottage, Hand Jobs, Blow Jobs, First Kiss/Time, Virgin Sherlock, Love Confessions, Soft Sherlock, Dancing, Bum Appreciation, Hanging out with the Yard) – Sherlock is fairly certain that John has taken to flirting with him of late, but can’t be entirely certain of it. At least, not until a case takes them into a forest, along with Lestrade’s team and something happens that will change everything about their lives…
Great fic if it’s not, so check it out anyway, but I’m certain it’s the one you’re looking for.
December 26, 2020
Oh goodness! This belated Christmas gift to me is that my...
Oh goodness! This belated Christmas gift to me is that my difficult, painful, thorny story Rebuilding Rome reached its first 10,000 hits as of today! This is the 60th of my current 88 posted fics to have achieved this milestone and whenever a story does that (or any future 10k hit milestones), I just like to take the chance to say thank you!
This one took a lot to write, but was one of those stories that rather insisted on being written regardless. It takes a pretty unflinching look at John’s abusive behaviour in series 4, how that related to his marriage to Mary, and then comes to a head as he realizes all of it at once. There’s some child neglect and more ugly behaviour on his part as he wrestles with it all, and it’s a messy beginning of his relationship with Sherlock, who wades in and tries to pull John out of the pit. This one is told from both of their perspectives, but also has a slice of Ella’s POV and a smaller one of Molly’s, too. It’s one of those stories that you write and dubiously wonder if anyone will a) read, or b) like, yet you write it anyway, because that’s just what you do when a story has presented itself at your doorstep and demanded to be written. I’m incredibly, profoundly grateful to all of you who did take a chance on this one, given all of those warnings and tags, and even more that any of you liked it at all! Thank you so much!! <333333333333333333
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