Omgggggg! My fic Hell Hath No Fury just reached its 10,000 hits...

Omgggggg! My fic Hell Hath No Fury just reached its 10,000 hits milestone!! This is the 68th of my 90 currently-posted stories to have achieved this, and beyond just being a huge and exciting milestone point (I celebrate every 10K hit milestone for my fics, just to exclaim and wonder at it out loud and say thank you!), this one is particularly cool to me!

I’ll explain: there are basically two things I’m somewhat known for as a Johnlock writer. One is my Sherlock POV in general, and the other is my specific love for fixing the canon. I wrote SO many series 3 fix-its starting from 24 hours after HLV aired with Deductions of a Lesser Mind, right up to two weeks before TST aired, with Munich (interesting side note: I’ve been watching Munich and Hell Hath No Fury race each other to the 10K hits milestone for several weeks now and Munich only just won by three days!). 

When I write a fix-it fic, the point is always very specifically to address at least one thing that I wasn’t, personally, satisfied with in the canon - the most obvious being that Sherlock and John aren’t together, but lots of other things, too - and try to find new paths to achieving fixes that I would personally rather see. Series 4 was a LOT harder to fix than series 3, I’ll say. The levels of misunderstanding and hurt between Sherlock and John just heap on and on and on without resolving any of the previous layers and it’s just so much to address, fix, explain away, resolve, all of it. The first story I wrote after all three episodes of series 4 had aired took me a lot longer to write than 24 hours, because it was just so much to process and absorb before I could emerge onto the “okay, now I’m ready to address this stuff in the form of fiction”. That first story was A Case for Domestic Propinquity, which basically tackles the essentials: Sherlock and John not being together, Baker Street being a wreck, life with a baby underfoot, John not living there, and some - but not nearly all, or in any real depth - of the crap that happened between them in series 4, particularly on John’s side. The third story I wrote, From the Bottom of the Well, specifically tackles the straightwashing issue and the weirdness of how Irene Adler was shoehorned in there. And so forth. 

This story, this second-out-of-the-gate series 4 fix-it that I wrote, went into a much deeper and thornier depth than the first one. Hell Hath No Fury addresses the topics of Sherlock’s family history, how incredibly fake I personally found Mary’s death scene to be, and takes a hard, realistic look at the sort of danger a child would be in at Baker Street. This story gives that an even harder twist, with kidnappings and a very, very vengeful antagonist (no spoilers!), and resolves it in a way that probably a lot of people felt was painful. It was painful to write, and it’s the only time I’ve gone that particular route on a “fix” for that situation. But it’s a story that I’m quite proud of - especially, in fact, of the Holmes family history side. It’s a dual POV format, with John’s POV telling the John-Sherlock-Rosie parts of the story, and Vee Holmes (Sherlock’s mother)’s POV telling the side about the Holmes family, featuring a lot of Mycroft and long overdue conversations. It’s one of my more plot-dense stories - a parallel in many ways to my second series 3 fix-it fic, Act IV. I wrote it for and dedicated it to a fellow author, personal friend, and intellectual extraordinaire, @totallysilvergirl.

Many of the stories I’ve been proudest of just in terms of the writing quality, have not been fandom favourites, or even just favourites among my own collection. This story is one of those, and I’ve always understood why. It’s not a fluffy romance or porn with just enough plot to hang it on. It’s gritty and difficult, yet I’m personally quite proud of it. I never thought to see it read 10,000 times, and I’m humbled. If you’ve read this story, thank you. If you’ve read it and liked it, thank you even more!