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chase820I’m still cooking the next set of chapters, which means it’s time for another scrapbook post! Think of this as a tantalizing appetizer before the hearty main course.
Another Beatles song checked off the list. Originally, Neville’s ring tone was “Paperback Writer” for obvious reasons. But the lyrics to “Yesterday” were just too perfect. Poor John! Sex doesn’t solve anything, even if your lover is a rich, gorgeous genius with a great big cock.
The mention in Chapter 39 of fans making Neville-faun manips was a sly Narnia reference. Here, it’s an excuse for me to post another James McAvoy pic. He’s adorable, with or without fuzzy ears.
A word about John and Sherlock’s fans. I’ve had a lot of fun imagining how John and Sherlock would react if they could actually read what fans were posting about them. With hysterical laughter and barely contained horror, probably, and I say this as a fangirl myself. I’ve never seen John/Sherlock Avatar manips, as Neville sees in Miracle Year, but I’m sure somebody somewhere has made them. While manips are tons of fun, I’m more amazed by all the fanfic scenarios people insert John and Sherlock into. I have a fairly vivid imagination, but I occasionally see summaries at AO3 that stun me. For discretion’s sake I won’t name any names, but damn, people: Y’all have some dirty minds.
And though I totally respect the right of people to write and read it, I will never understand the Omegaverse.
While we’re on the subject of kinky sex, I must give a shout-out to The Joy of Gay Sex, which is probably the best $12 I’ve ever spent, research-wise. Sherlock’s simultaneous fucking-and-sucking of John in Chapter 39 is straight out of TJoGS, and is something I never would have thought of on my own.
Sex scenes are so much work to write, aren’t they? Especially when you have the same two characters doing it repeatedly. You have to consider where both people are emotionally at that point in the story, as well as where you want them to be later on. You don’t want to repeat yourself, so you must work out new positions or at least new reactions to the positions. Then you have to choreograph, making sure that you don’t forget whose hands-and-other-parts are where at any given time. You can't forget to account for cultural differences, like the fact that both John and Sherlock would not be circumcised. Also gender differences, trying to imagine what it would be like to have a penis and testicles, even if you weren’t born with those parts. Most importantly, you have to make the scene hot.
To make a long story short (too late), writing fucking is fucking hard. It’s easy to embarrass yourself. No wonder so many writers, even the pros, resort to some version of cut-away-to-waves-crashing-on-a-beach. I won’t do that, though. There are times I will imply sex rather than show it, usually when it would throw off the rhythms of a scene or be gratuitous. Otherwise, I show everything. I’d feel like a coward if I cut away just because it requires time, patience, and research to get sex right.
One of my sadly jettisoned subplots was Danica’s gangster brother Vlad coming to London and causing trouble. I had his arc all plotted out, and had even gone so far as to cast the part. Simon Woods does bear a rather freaky resemblance to Amanda Seyfriend, doesn’t he? He also has the coldness I was looking for in the character.
But other subplots took over, and Vlad’s trip to London had to be canceled. In case you were curious, this is Danica’s brother. He’s a pimp and a pirate and a pretty terrible human being, though he does have a twisted affection for his sister. He’s deadly charming and charmingly deadly, and I’m so sad you won’t be meeting him.
Michael is the reason we don’t have Vlad in the story. After Michael and Gabriel started acting like characters rather than plot conveniences, I had to find things for them to do. I’d wanted to give Danica a love interest for some time, and one of the angels seemed like a logical choice. There’s a moment in the Christmas Day scene where Michael takes notice of Danica, and I decided to build on that split-second where his mask slipped.
Michael’s coldness is a holdover from Vlad, Danica’s original primary scene partner, and facially he looks more like Simon Woods than Alexander Skarsgard. He’s built like Skarsgard, though, and he has Skarsgard’s ability to look totally ordinary in some lights, and movie-star handsome in others. Also, I’m really amused by the fact that Skarsgard is about two feet taller than Amanda Seyfried, as you can see in the picture above. Michael could pick Danica up and put her in his pocket, if she didn’t kick him in the balls first.
The sequence of chapters from 38-45 confronts John’s sexuality head-on. So what the hell is he, anyway? His orientation shifts from scene to scene throughout the fic, and that is deliberate on my part. I think most people's sexuality is grey and weird; the black-and-white heterosexual/homosexual split is a societal construct. Everybody is a little bit queer, which is why so many of my fictional characters have a somewhat fluid sexuality. I’ve taken criticism for the rampant bisexuality in my stories, but whatever. People who don’t like queerness—and I mean that term in the academic sense—aren’t going to read my fics for long, anyway.
I do have a few characters who are all-straight or all-gay: Mycroft and Ford would be a Kinsey 0 and Kinsey 6, respectively. It’s just one of the many ways the brothers mirror-image each other.
However, Ford is known as a woman’s director. The stories he tells all contain at least one strong female character. He sincerely loves the female body as an aesthetic object, and his films are chock full of tits. In college he was that really dangerous sort of gay man, who acts so straight and so sweet and will even make out with you when he’s drunk, but he'll never go all the way. He will never, ever be your boyfriend. I can’t imagine how many straight-girl hearts Ford broke before his 30th birthday. Thousands.
Mycroft has never kissed a boy in his life, which is quite a feat considering that he went to Eton. Aside from his courtly relationship with Julia, however, Mycroft’s personal life is devoid of women. Mrs. Thompson is lovely but she is, after all, the help. Call girls don’t count, which is the whole point of call girls. Bess the Cat does, and that's rather sad, really.
I imagine on several occasions that various foreign powers have tried to honey-trap Mycroft, and failed miserably. He isn’t known as the Iceman for nothing. The only non-Julia exception to the no-girls-allowed rule is a recent one. I never expected Harry Watson and Mycroft to have such great chemistry, but boy-howdy, do they ever. It’s a neat play on the same dynamic that John and Sherlock have: smart-and-spunky chav meets posh, neurotic intellectual. Harry likes Mycroft because he never condescends, and Mycroft likes Harry because she always speaks her mind. He really likes the fact that she’s a married lesbian, so he can be warm to her without worry. Let’s not forget, the little sister Mycroft was supposed to have was also named Harriet.
Anyway, to return to the original subject. If you put a gun to my head, I would say that John is a Kinsey 2 who happened to fall in love with a man. But the truth is more complicated than that. John is more complicated, which is why Sherlock has been so fascinated with him from the beginning. There’s an awful lot going on beneath the stalwart gaze and fuzzy jumpers: an entire unknown continent’s worth of secrets.
This is how a Holmes looks when he's about to be a total pain in the ass.
Though John’s sexuality is fluid, his self-identification has always been as a straight bloke who occasionally has it off with men. John associates homosexuality with weakness and domesticity with entrapment; this unfortunate attitude is a product of his childhood. John is reacting against his father, a man who wasn’t gay but was weak, and John wants to be strong in all possible ways. If John’s mother hadn’t died and his father fallen apart, would John have been a Kinsey 4? Maybe even a 5? I honestly don’t know. You can’t always quantify sexuality like that. John does enjoy sex with women, even if he doesn’t fall in love with them. Except for one time with Lucy Ferrier, whom Sherlock strongly resembles in looks and temperament. See? Complicated.
Chapters 39 and 40 continually hammer away at John’s sense of his strong heterosexual self. First Neville tells him the fangirls have turned him into a (blue) woman, then Sherlock tops the hell out of him. Downstairs, Danica calls him gay and treats him like a non-threatening boy—going so far as to show him her breasts. Finally, she leaves him with the baby. No wonder John is losing it even before Sherlock mentions marriage.
Despite his fears, John is a natural spouse and parent. His deft handling of a cranky, Cheerio-flinging Nero in this chapter is evidence of this. But he’s fighting his instincts, as he has his entire life, which is why he flees in horror at Sherlock’s proposal.
There are two issues at work here: 1) John doesn’t want to be gay and 2) if he must be gay and in love with Sherlock, then Sherlock must love him back. His doubt and fear is why he freaks out in public, and it’s only after Sherlock assures him of his love that John calms down.
That doesn’t mean his masculinity issues are gone at the end of Chapter 45, however. The fact that he’s accepted love and marriage to Sherlock will mean John is more determined than ever to show he's still a man. But how is he defining manhood? John’s a healer but he’s also a killer. Quite a ruthless one, who can act without remorse. How does he reconcile the warring halves of his personality? That’s going to be his big conflict in Chapters 53-60, and his frantic need to prove his strength is going to have grave consequences.
The public outing at the very end of Chapter 40 is bringing the issues from the beginning of Chapter 39 full circle. Sherlock and John are being forced to sort out very private pain in a very public arena. The fans are going to keep encroaching on their lives for the rest of the fic. The blog may have started as a lark, but once you open that Pandora’s box of publicity, it’s damned hard to get it closed again. As many people have learned, fame is a double-edged sword. It’s going to be interesting to see if Sherlock and John can learn to wield it successfully. At least they have Ford and Neville to give them advice, assuming they’ll listen.
The only detective who rivals Sherlock Holmes in my personal pantheon is Nero Wolfe. I read the Wolfe books a couple of years after I burned through Conan Doyle’s canon, when I was just a wee-Chase. As an adult I still read Wolfe, and enjoy him more than the original Holmes stories. Rex Stout is a better writer than Doyle, and he created one of the most unforgettable sidekicks ever: Wolfe’s assistant Archie Goodwin, a narrator who is half Philip Marlowe and half Huckleberry Finn, but way sexier than both. Seriously, Archie rocks. He was one of my first fictional crushes, and even now I’d place him top five in my narrative bucket list.
I included a screencap from the Nero Wolfe series that aired on A&E a few years ago, to give you a look at Wolfe’s famous office. It also captures the Wolfe/Goodwin dynamic fairly well. However, Timothy Hutton doesn’t come anywhere close to my own picture of Archie Goodwin: too old, too skinny. I always saw a young Harrison Ford. Yummy, right?
Sigh. He can detect me any old time.
Um, where was I? Yes. It’s very old Wolfe/Holmes fanon that Nero Wolfe is the illegitimate offspring of Sherlock Holmes and Irene Adler, who had an affair in Montenegro. Now you know where all the Budva chapters came from! It’s not fanon that Irene was horribly murdered, but one does take a certain poetic license.
Baby Nero has many of canon Wolfe's qualities: prodigious appetite, grumpy temper, perspicacity beyond normal human faculties. Like canon Wolfe, my Nero likes orchids (a Siviter family trait) as well as the color yellow. He doesn’t distrust women yet, but give him time.
My Nero doesn’t grow up to be a detective in New York City, though I’ll address his fate in the final chapters. I can tell you that he does end up with a two very good friends named Archie and Marko, just like canon Wolfe. Where do these friends come from? There will be a huge clue to my Archie’s origins in the next update. Pay attention during the wedding party scene, and you’ll see it. (This probably only interests about three people, since Wolfe fandom isn’t what it used to be. But it pleases me.)
My final comment before I move on from Wolfe is that the scene in Chapter 41 where Mycroft and Harry confront the Police Commissioner is a total Wolfian rip-off. In Stout’s books, Wolfe dresses down dozens of law enforcement officials in a similarly snooty and polysyllabic manner, with Archie’s total disrespect for authority adding spice to the dialogue. Mycroft is slightly more polite than Wolfe, and Archie never swore as much as Harry, but otherwise their attitudes are the same.
What’s really funny about the scene is that I didn’t realize until a few days after I wrote it that I had cribbed from Stout. It was entirely subconscious, motivated by dozens of re-readings in Wolfe canon that I accomplished before the age of 20. The mind is a monkey, isn’t it?
The other notable thing about Chapter 41 is the return of Lestrade. Two years later, I’m still pissed at Lestrade’s behavior in "Reichenbach." Only the pleas of Mustangsally kept me from killing him off, and I still haven't totally abandoned that idea. It’s best that I don’t include many scenes with him in the story, lest my bloodlust be awakened again.
As for Sally Donovan—don’t get me started. I'm not going to kill a woman of color who is also a police officer, I’m too PC. But what a horrible character she is! I place the blame squarely on Moffat and Gatiss, for never giving Donovan the least bit of three-dimensionality in the series. Why does she hate Sherlock so much? Who knows? At this point, who cares? In my universe, she can stay in fucking Manchester and rot there.
You tell him, Girl.
I love the internet. Where else can you find out how to call somebody a pigfucker in Serbian? Most of Danica’s dialogue in the lounge scene comes from a great website called My Insults.com, which will teach you to swear in a number of languages.
I guess profanity in all languages is fun, but Serbian is especially awesome. To save you some scrolling at the website, I’ll translate everything Danica said to Michael in Chapter 42. Obviously, the first two are my favorites:
”Da Bog da ti zena rodila stonogu pa ceo zivot radio za cipele.”
May your wife give birth to a centipede so you have to work for shoes all your life.
“Jebo ti konj sa krvavim kurcem sestru na majcinom grobu a ti to kao invalid gledao, dabog dao!”
May a horse with a bloody dick fuck your sister on your mother's grave and you watch it as an invalid, and God make it so!
“Samo da te pogledam, odma mi se povraca.”
Just looking at you makes me want to vomit.
“Jedi govna, majmune!”
Eat shit, you ape!
Men are so funny. If anything male said that stuff to Michael, the sayer would be eating his own testicles. But let a big-eyed blonde with great breasts say it, and Michael falls in love.
I have to confess something: I can’t stand Mrs. Hudson. I don’t hate her the way I hate Sally Donovan, but the interpretation of the character for the modern BBC series gets on my last nerve. That fussy flibbertigibbet thing is so dated: Mrs. Hudson would have been a young woman in London in the swinging ‘60s, running around Carnaby Street in go-go boots and going to the Marquee Club to get high with the Stones. The calico dresses and pastel sweaters and general attitude of dewy cluelessness makes no fucking sense at all.
My ideal housekeeper character is Helen Fucking Mirren in Gosford Park. Who doesn't love a character capable of serving her rotten old employer arsenic-laced tea before calmly heading downstairs to plan the linen rotation for the week?
Mrs. Thompson is Dame Helen: slim, acerbic, whip-smart and brooking absolutely no nonsense. When Mycroft and Sherrinford were boys, they were both terrified of her, with good reason. She tanned their bottoms more than once, and they deserved it every single time. Mikey and Sherry were awful children; it was like having dueling Draco Malfoys on your hands. That Mrs. T survived without a serious drinking problem is a credit to her constitution.
She was softer with Sherlock, who was alone and so tragic, with his sticky-uppy hair and sad eyes. She was also older by then, and melancholy over what the family had come to. I have absolutely no idea how old Mrs. Thompson is now, but if one posits that she went to work for Siger and Violet when the couple first married in 1968, and that Mrs. Thompson was young herself, she’d be around 65 or so. She has easily saved enough for retirement, but she doesn’t want to leave Mycroft alone. If he ever marries and settles down, she’ll be gone within a year, just as soon as she’s taught her replacement that phenomenal shepherd’s pie recipe.
Vanilla Black: small, exclusive, vegetarian, expensive. Ford would absolutely take a date here, even if he didn’t plan to eat anything but the cucumber water and mint appetizer. (Which is actually served at the real Vanilla Black, and sounds like a great big mouthful of nothing.)
There are contrasting cuisines in this chapter: Mrs. Thompson’s shepherd’s pie vs. the goat's cheese and toasted cauliflower mille feuille. The latter is served at Vanilla Black, the tony vegetarian restaurant where Ford wants to take Neville. Would Ford even like a toasted cauliflower mille feuille? Probably not. (Also, it would be a disastrous order if you were planning to have sex later in the evening.) Ford does love shepherd’s pie, but he feels monstrously guilty for eating it. He probably worked out for two hours in penance after having half a plateful in Chapter 42. Shepherd’s pie is what Sherrinford Holmes comes from, cauliflower mille feuille is what he thinks he's due as Ford Huxley, five-time Oscar winner. Whether he likes it, whether he even plans to eat it, is not the point. It’s what he deserves, dammit.
Hello Darkness, my old friend . . . a very Fordian picture of Jack Davenport.
Chapter 42 begins to further define the Ford and Neville relationship. Ford is finding that the notoriously easy Neville is not such low-hanging fruit, after all. Despite the instantaneous sexual attraction, their interactions don’t really start to take off until Ford begins spinning the tale about Nero’s “true” origins in this chapter. Ford seduces his prey with a story, which isn’t at all surprising, given that he is a master storyteller and Neville is a ravenous consumer of narrative. Nev is a storyteller too, but more than that he is a journalist and a critic. He can separate the real from the false like few people can, and Ford has been pinging his bullshit detector since he shook his hand in Speedy’s. But Neville also senses something real in Ford, and something special, and also something very lonely. He doesn’t trust Ford but he is fascinated by him, and he’s confident enough in his own cynicism that he thinks he can dance on the edge of that glittering abyss without falling over.
Nev is very good, but those Holmes boys have a way of sucking you in. Neville has been seduced already, but the consummation which actually happens is going to surprise him. Oh, those Holmeses! They are twisted little crullers. I can’t wait to tell you all about Neville and Ford’s first date, a story you'll hear somewhere around Chapters 53-54.
Well, darlings, I’m out of inspiration for tonight. I will return ASAP, as I’d like to have the last three chapters of the next-to-last update (43-45) annotated before I begin the new set of chapters (52-58). Writing all of this meta has been helpful in working out a very critical sequence coming up in the story. I hope the next scrapbook post proves just as inspirational.
Another Beatles song checked off the list. Originally, Neville’s ring tone was “Paperback Writer” for obvious reasons. But the lyrics to “Yesterday” were just too perfect. Poor John! Sex doesn’t solve anything, even if your lover is a rich, gorgeous genius with a great big cock.
The mention in Chapter 39 of fans making Neville-faun manips was a sly Narnia reference. Here, it’s an excuse for me to post another James McAvoy pic. He’s adorable, with or without fuzzy ears.
A word about John and Sherlock’s fans. I’ve had a lot of fun imagining how John and Sherlock would react if they could actually read what fans were posting about them. With hysterical laughter and barely contained horror, probably, and I say this as a fangirl myself. I’ve never seen John/Sherlock Avatar manips, as Neville sees in Miracle Year, but I’m sure somebody somewhere has made them. While manips are tons of fun, I’m more amazed by all the fanfic scenarios people insert John and Sherlock into. I have a fairly vivid imagination, but I occasionally see summaries at AO3 that stun me. For discretion’s sake I won’t name any names, but damn, people: Y’all have some dirty minds.
And though I totally respect the right of people to write and read it, I will never understand the Omegaverse.
While we’re on the subject of kinky sex, I must give a shout-out to The Joy of Gay Sex, which is probably the best $12 I’ve ever spent, research-wise. Sherlock’s simultaneous fucking-and-sucking of John in Chapter 39 is straight out of TJoGS, and is something I never would have thought of on my own.
Sex scenes are so much work to write, aren’t they? Especially when you have the same two characters doing it repeatedly. You have to consider where both people are emotionally at that point in the story, as well as where you want them to be later on. You don’t want to repeat yourself, so you must work out new positions or at least new reactions to the positions. Then you have to choreograph, making sure that you don’t forget whose hands-and-other-parts are where at any given time. You can't forget to account for cultural differences, like the fact that both John and Sherlock would not be circumcised. Also gender differences, trying to imagine what it would be like to have a penis and testicles, even if you weren’t born with those parts. Most importantly, you have to make the scene hot.
To make a long story short (too late), writing fucking is fucking hard. It’s easy to embarrass yourself. No wonder so many writers, even the pros, resort to some version of cut-away-to-waves-crashing-on-a-beach. I won’t do that, though. There are times I will imply sex rather than show it, usually when it would throw off the rhythms of a scene or be gratuitous. Otherwise, I show everything. I’d feel like a coward if I cut away just because it requires time, patience, and research to get sex right.
One of my sadly jettisoned subplots was Danica’s gangster brother Vlad coming to London and causing trouble. I had his arc all plotted out, and had even gone so far as to cast the part. Simon Woods does bear a rather freaky resemblance to Amanda Seyfriend, doesn’t he? He also has the coldness I was looking for in the character.
But other subplots took over, and Vlad’s trip to London had to be canceled. In case you were curious, this is Danica’s brother. He’s a pimp and a pirate and a pretty terrible human being, though he does have a twisted affection for his sister. He’s deadly charming and charmingly deadly, and I’m so sad you won’t be meeting him.
Michael is the reason we don’t have Vlad in the story. After Michael and Gabriel started acting like characters rather than plot conveniences, I had to find things for them to do. I’d wanted to give Danica a love interest for some time, and one of the angels seemed like a logical choice. There’s a moment in the Christmas Day scene where Michael takes notice of Danica, and I decided to build on that split-second where his mask slipped.
Michael’s coldness is a holdover from Vlad, Danica’s original primary scene partner, and facially he looks more like Simon Woods than Alexander Skarsgard. He’s built like Skarsgard, though, and he has Skarsgard’s ability to look totally ordinary in some lights, and movie-star handsome in others. Also, I’m really amused by the fact that Skarsgard is about two feet taller than Amanda Seyfried, as you can see in the picture above. Michael could pick Danica up and put her in his pocket, if she didn’t kick him in the balls first.
The sequence of chapters from 38-45 confronts John’s sexuality head-on. So what the hell is he, anyway? His orientation shifts from scene to scene throughout the fic, and that is deliberate on my part. I think most people's sexuality is grey and weird; the black-and-white heterosexual/homosexual split is a societal construct. Everybody is a little bit queer, which is why so many of my fictional characters have a somewhat fluid sexuality. I’ve taken criticism for the rampant bisexuality in my stories, but whatever. People who don’t like queerness—and I mean that term in the academic sense—aren’t going to read my fics for long, anyway.
I do have a few characters who are all-straight or all-gay: Mycroft and Ford would be a Kinsey 0 and Kinsey 6, respectively. It’s just one of the many ways the brothers mirror-image each other.
However, Ford is known as a woman’s director. The stories he tells all contain at least one strong female character. He sincerely loves the female body as an aesthetic object, and his films are chock full of tits. In college he was that really dangerous sort of gay man, who acts so straight and so sweet and will even make out with you when he’s drunk, but he'll never go all the way. He will never, ever be your boyfriend. I can’t imagine how many straight-girl hearts Ford broke before his 30th birthday. Thousands.
Mycroft has never kissed a boy in his life, which is quite a feat considering that he went to Eton. Aside from his courtly relationship with Julia, however, Mycroft’s personal life is devoid of women. Mrs. Thompson is lovely but she is, after all, the help. Call girls don’t count, which is the whole point of call girls. Bess the Cat does, and that's rather sad, really.
I imagine on several occasions that various foreign powers have tried to honey-trap Mycroft, and failed miserably. He isn’t known as the Iceman for nothing. The only non-Julia exception to the no-girls-allowed rule is a recent one. I never expected Harry Watson and Mycroft to have such great chemistry, but boy-howdy, do they ever. It’s a neat play on the same dynamic that John and Sherlock have: smart-and-spunky chav meets posh, neurotic intellectual. Harry likes Mycroft because he never condescends, and Mycroft likes Harry because she always speaks her mind. He really likes the fact that she’s a married lesbian, so he can be warm to her without worry. Let’s not forget, the little sister Mycroft was supposed to have was also named Harriet.
Anyway, to return to the original subject. If you put a gun to my head, I would say that John is a Kinsey 2 who happened to fall in love with a man. But the truth is more complicated than that. John is more complicated, which is why Sherlock has been so fascinated with him from the beginning. There’s an awful lot going on beneath the stalwart gaze and fuzzy jumpers: an entire unknown continent’s worth of secrets.
This is how a Holmes looks when he's about to be a total pain in the ass.
Though John’s sexuality is fluid, his self-identification has always been as a straight bloke who occasionally has it off with men. John associates homosexuality with weakness and domesticity with entrapment; this unfortunate attitude is a product of his childhood. John is reacting against his father, a man who wasn’t gay but was weak, and John wants to be strong in all possible ways. If John’s mother hadn’t died and his father fallen apart, would John have been a Kinsey 4? Maybe even a 5? I honestly don’t know. You can’t always quantify sexuality like that. John does enjoy sex with women, even if he doesn’t fall in love with them. Except for one time with Lucy Ferrier, whom Sherlock strongly resembles in looks and temperament. See? Complicated.
Chapters 39 and 40 continually hammer away at John’s sense of his strong heterosexual self. First Neville tells him the fangirls have turned him into a (blue) woman, then Sherlock tops the hell out of him. Downstairs, Danica calls him gay and treats him like a non-threatening boy—going so far as to show him her breasts. Finally, she leaves him with the baby. No wonder John is losing it even before Sherlock mentions marriage.
Despite his fears, John is a natural spouse and parent. His deft handling of a cranky, Cheerio-flinging Nero in this chapter is evidence of this. But he’s fighting his instincts, as he has his entire life, which is why he flees in horror at Sherlock’s proposal.
There are two issues at work here: 1) John doesn’t want to be gay and 2) if he must be gay and in love with Sherlock, then Sherlock must love him back. His doubt and fear is why he freaks out in public, and it’s only after Sherlock assures him of his love that John calms down.
That doesn’t mean his masculinity issues are gone at the end of Chapter 45, however. The fact that he’s accepted love and marriage to Sherlock will mean John is more determined than ever to show he's still a man. But how is he defining manhood? John’s a healer but he’s also a killer. Quite a ruthless one, who can act without remorse. How does he reconcile the warring halves of his personality? That’s going to be his big conflict in Chapters 53-60, and his frantic need to prove his strength is going to have grave consequences.
The public outing at the very end of Chapter 40 is bringing the issues from the beginning of Chapter 39 full circle. Sherlock and John are being forced to sort out very private pain in a very public arena. The fans are going to keep encroaching on their lives for the rest of the fic. The blog may have started as a lark, but once you open that Pandora’s box of publicity, it’s damned hard to get it closed again. As many people have learned, fame is a double-edged sword. It’s going to be interesting to see if Sherlock and John can learn to wield it successfully. At least they have Ford and Neville to give them advice, assuming they’ll listen.
The only detective who rivals Sherlock Holmes in my personal pantheon is Nero Wolfe. I read the Wolfe books a couple of years after I burned through Conan Doyle’s canon, when I was just a wee-Chase. As an adult I still read Wolfe, and enjoy him more than the original Holmes stories. Rex Stout is a better writer than Doyle, and he created one of the most unforgettable sidekicks ever: Wolfe’s assistant Archie Goodwin, a narrator who is half Philip Marlowe and half Huckleberry Finn, but way sexier than both. Seriously, Archie rocks. He was one of my first fictional crushes, and even now I’d place him top five in my narrative bucket list.
I included a screencap from the Nero Wolfe series that aired on A&E a few years ago, to give you a look at Wolfe’s famous office. It also captures the Wolfe/Goodwin dynamic fairly well. However, Timothy Hutton doesn’t come anywhere close to my own picture of Archie Goodwin: too old, too skinny. I always saw a young Harrison Ford. Yummy, right?
Sigh. He can detect me any old time.
Um, where was I? Yes. It’s very old Wolfe/Holmes fanon that Nero Wolfe is the illegitimate offspring of Sherlock Holmes and Irene Adler, who had an affair in Montenegro. Now you know where all the Budva chapters came from! It’s not fanon that Irene was horribly murdered, but one does take a certain poetic license.
Baby Nero has many of canon Wolfe's qualities: prodigious appetite, grumpy temper, perspicacity beyond normal human faculties. Like canon Wolfe, my Nero likes orchids (a Siviter family trait) as well as the color yellow. He doesn’t distrust women yet, but give him time.
My Nero doesn’t grow up to be a detective in New York City, though I’ll address his fate in the final chapters. I can tell you that he does end up with a two very good friends named Archie and Marko, just like canon Wolfe. Where do these friends come from? There will be a huge clue to my Archie’s origins in the next update. Pay attention during the wedding party scene, and you’ll see it. (This probably only interests about three people, since Wolfe fandom isn’t what it used to be. But it pleases me.)
My final comment before I move on from Wolfe is that the scene in Chapter 41 where Mycroft and Harry confront the Police Commissioner is a total Wolfian rip-off. In Stout’s books, Wolfe dresses down dozens of law enforcement officials in a similarly snooty and polysyllabic manner, with Archie’s total disrespect for authority adding spice to the dialogue. Mycroft is slightly more polite than Wolfe, and Archie never swore as much as Harry, but otherwise their attitudes are the same.
What’s really funny about the scene is that I didn’t realize until a few days after I wrote it that I had cribbed from Stout. It was entirely subconscious, motivated by dozens of re-readings in Wolfe canon that I accomplished before the age of 20. The mind is a monkey, isn’t it?
The other notable thing about Chapter 41 is the return of Lestrade. Two years later, I’m still pissed at Lestrade’s behavior in "Reichenbach." Only the pleas of Mustangsally kept me from killing him off, and I still haven't totally abandoned that idea. It’s best that I don’t include many scenes with him in the story, lest my bloodlust be awakened again.
As for Sally Donovan—don’t get me started. I'm not going to kill a woman of color who is also a police officer, I’m too PC. But what a horrible character she is! I place the blame squarely on Moffat and Gatiss, for never giving Donovan the least bit of three-dimensionality in the series. Why does she hate Sherlock so much? Who knows? At this point, who cares? In my universe, she can stay in fucking Manchester and rot there.
You tell him, Girl.
I love the internet. Where else can you find out how to call somebody a pigfucker in Serbian? Most of Danica’s dialogue in the lounge scene comes from a great website called My Insults.com, which will teach you to swear in a number of languages.
I guess profanity in all languages is fun, but Serbian is especially awesome. To save you some scrolling at the website, I’ll translate everything Danica said to Michael in Chapter 42. Obviously, the first two are my favorites:
”Da Bog da ti zena rodila stonogu pa ceo zivot radio za cipele.”
May your wife give birth to a centipede so you have to work for shoes all your life.
“Jebo ti konj sa krvavim kurcem sestru na majcinom grobu a ti to kao invalid gledao, dabog dao!”
May a horse with a bloody dick fuck your sister on your mother's grave and you watch it as an invalid, and God make it so!
“Samo da te pogledam, odma mi se povraca.”
Just looking at you makes me want to vomit.
“Jedi govna, majmune!”
Eat shit, you ape!
Men are so funny. If anything male said that stuff to Michael, the sayer would be eating his own testicles. But let a big-eyed blonde with great breasts say it, and Michael falls in love.
I have to confess something: I can’t stand Mrs. Hudson. I don’t hate her the way I hate Sally Donovan, but the interpretation of the character for the modern BBC series gets on my last nerve. That fussy flibbertigibbet thing is so dated: Mrs. Hudson would have been a young woman in London in the swinging ‘60s, running around Carnaby Street in go-go boots and going to the Marquee Club to get high with the Stones. The calico dresses and pastel sweaters and general attitude of dewy cluelessness makes no fucking sense at all.
My ideal housekeeper character is Helen Fucking Mirren in Gosford Park. Who doesn't love a character capable of serving her rotten old employer arsenic-laced tea before calmly heading downstairs to plan the linen rotation for the week?
Mrs. Thompson is Dame Helen: slim, acerbic, whip-smart and brooking absolutely no nonsense. When Mycroft and Sherrinford were boys, they were both terrified of her, with good reason. She tanned their bottoms more than once, and they deserved it every single time. Mikey and Sherry were awful children; it was like having dueling Draco Malfoys on your hands. That Mrs. T survived without a serious drinking problem is a credit to her constitution.
She was softer with Sherlock, who was alone and so tragic, with his sticky-uppy hair and sad eyes. She was also older by then, and melancholy over what the family had come to. I have absolutely no idea how old Mrs. Thompson is now, but if one posits that she went to work for Siger and Violet when the couple first married in 1968, and that Mrs. Thompson was young herself, she’d be around 65 or so. She has easily saved enough for retirement, but she doesn’t want to leave Mycroft alone. If he ever marries and settles down, she’ll be gone within a year, just as soon as she’s taught her replacement that phenomenal shepherd’s pie recipe.
Vanilla Black: small, exclusive, vegetarian, expensive. Ford would absolutely take a date here, even if he didn’t plan to eat anything but the cucumber water and mint appetizer. (Which is actually served at the real Vanilla Black, and sounds like a great big mouthful of nothing.)
There are contrasting cuisines in this chapter: Mrs. Thompson’s shepherd’s pie vs. the goat's cheese and toasted cauliflower mille feuille. The latter is served at Vanilla Black, the tony vegetarian restaurant where Ford wants to take Neville. Would Ford even like a toasted cauliflower mille feuille? Probably not. (Also, it would be a disastrous order if you were planning to have sex later in the evening.) Ford does love shepherd’s pie, but he feels monstrously guilty for eating it. He probably worked out for two hours in penance after having half a plateful in Chapter 42. Shepherd’s pie is what Sherrinford Holmes comes from, cauliflower mille feuille is what he thinks he's due as Ford Huxley, five-time Oscar winner. Whether he likes it, whether he even plans to eat it, is not the point. It’s what he deserves, dammit.
Hello Darkness, my old friend . . . a very Fordian picture of Jack Davenport.
Chapter 42 begins to further define the Ford and Neville relationship. Ford is finding that the notoriously easy Neville is not such low-hanging fruit, after all. Despite the instantaneous sexual attraction, their interactions don’t really start to take off until Ford begins spinning the tale about Nero’s “true” origins in this chapter. Ford seduces his prey with a story, which isn’t at all surprising, given that he is a master storyteller and Neville is a ravenous consumer of narrative. Nev is a storyteller too, but more than that he is a journalist and a critic. He can separate the real from the false like few people can, and Ford has been pinging his bullshit detector since he shook his hand in Speedy’s. But Neville also senses something real in Ford, and something special, and also something very lonely. He doesn’t trust Ford but he is fascinated by him, and he’s confident enough in his own cynicism that he thinks he can dance on the edge of that glittering abyss without falling over.
Nev is very good, but those Holmes boys have a way of sucking you in. Neville has been seduced already, but the consummation which actually happens is going to surprise him. Oh, those Holmeses! They are twisted little crullers. I can’t wait to tell you all about Neville and Ford’s first date, a story you'll hear somewhere around Chapters 53-54.
Well, darlings, I’m out of inspiration for tonight. I will return ASAP, as I’d like to have the last three chapters of the next-to-last update (43-45) annotated before I begin the new set of chapters (52-58). Writing all of this meta has been helpful in working out a very critical sequence coming up in the story. I hope the next scrapbook post proves just as inspirational.
