I've been staying off the Interwebs since the beginning of the year to avoid major spoilers for Sherlock S3 and I'll continue to do that until episode three. But having just seen The Empty Hearse I have a few very quick preliminary thoughts.

( The Empty HearseCollapse )

Today is my LJ anniversary. Like many people I'm spending more time on Tumblr these days. But I rarely produce content there.

So I finally finished my first Sherlock piece about half an hour ago. It took ages and I'm still not entirely happy with it. It's a double 221B and I'm finding that I liked drabbles because I think they encouraged tight writing but the "b" part of 221B always makes the ending seem artificial. Anyway, time to give it to my betas and brit-picker. One of my betas probably won't have time to look at it and my Brit-picker is in the middle of a move so who knows when it will get posted. It will get posted though, promise.

This piece was inspired by a piece written by earlgreytea68 and our subsequent conversation. I have another piece (maybe another 221B?) that I've been thinking about that was inspired by another fic although unfortunately I can't remember which fic. I have it bookmarked but my bookmarks are in hopeless disarray. I keep meaning to go back and start doing fic recs. I'm sure I could locate it that way.

There's another story I was following that the author just finished after a very, very long hiatus. I didn't love the ending but I do appreciate that s/he came back to finish it. There's a single scene from there I really want to take and run with but a) I don't know the author at all and I'm not sure how I'd even start that conversation and b) I don't know that I could do it justice anyway. But that single scene has stuck with me the way that few things have. I don't think I can actually do anything with it outside my own head. It would feel like stealing even if I had the author's permission.

I've never been good at writing anything longer than a short piece and the difficulty feels even greater with Sherlock. I would think anything of length that's not an AU would require a case (or cases). And doing cases well takes talent and practice.

It worries me a bit that I seem to be able to draw inspiration from other people's stories but come up dry on my own.

Is anyone interested in giving me a prompt? Maybe that will help start something.

I'm okay and so far everyone I know is fine. My brother may be stranded in Bellingham overnight.

News article here if you're interested.

Several of my local friends have started playing an Android game called Ingress. It's surprisingly addictive. My friends and I are Enlightened but sadly the area where I live is mostly Resistance. Is anyone else playing?

Speaking of games, I give you Sherlock the game.

So in January my apartment building installed new fire alarm/carbon monoxide detectors because under state law they had to have carbon monoxide detectors installed. About 2:30 a.m. mine started giving three beeps. Since they didn't give us any documentation, I had no idea what that meant. I knew there wasn't a fire and I was pretty sure carbon monoxide wasn't an issue either. Fortunately, the new detectors are just that much lower that I could actually reach the thing (standing on a chair).

After fussing with it for about 10 minutes I got it to change from three beeps to one beep every 90 seconds or so. That, at least I knew what it meant. Low battery. Off to QFC at a quarter till 3. Fortunately it's only about 5 minutes away.

Replace the battery. Still beeping. Try the battery in a different position. Still beeping. Try the battery in a third position (I'm not tall enough to see any markings tell me which way the battery is supposed to be oriented). Still beeping. It won't fit a fourth way.

Call the after hours emergency number. They take my information and basically say, "well, that sucks." They ask if it's an emergency. I say, "well, it's very loud. I won't be able to sleep and I'm sure the neighbors are pissed..."

Apparently that did not constitute an emergency. I talked to the apartment manager this morning and apparently three beeps indicates a malfunctioning detector. Good to know. They're going to replace it today.

I regularly reblog things on Tumblr and up til now I never bothered tagging anything. Then I wanted to find a picture of Ben Whishaw that I'd seen somewhere. It wasn't on the Tumblr I thought had originally posted it so I tried to go through my own Tumblr to see if I'd reblogged it. But I kept getting to the same place and then Tumblr would crash my browser. I tried multiple times on different browsers.

I'd thought I'd be able to go back and tag the things I'd already reblogged but apparently not. So the lesson is: always tag your important posts. Although apparently when you do a search it will only bring up the last 200 posts with that tag.

As I may have mentioned before, Sherlock has introduced me to the fun of AUs and fusions. I'd always felt pretty meh about them but my previous fandom didn't really lend itself to that kind of thing.

Current I'm following several very good WIP fusion or AU stories:

earlgreytea68 is writing an absolutely fantastic baseball AU called The Bang and the Clatter. Sherlock is the ace pitcher and John is the reliable catcher a season away from retirement. They're both put on a new (fictional) expansion team. It's an awesome story and Sherlock in particular feels true to character. Greg Lestrade is the GM and Mrs. Hudson is the owner.

bendingsignpost is writing a Phantom of the Opera type thing called Bel Canto. John is the doctor at an opera house. Sherlock and Mycroft are wealthy patrons. John is helping the masked man in the basement write an opera. There are awesome descriptions of music.

leopardwrites is writing an awesome Time Traveler's Wife fusion called The Illusion of Free Will in which John is the Time Traveler.


And this one isn't an AU or fusion but I'm also loving truths_in_lies' Midnight Blue Serenity in which Sherlock is undercover as a bartender in a club and John is undercover as a bouncer.

I'm quite sure they'll all get full review write-ups when they are no longer WIP.

The thing I liked about the TV meme (which I still need to finish) is that I posted almost every day. It wasn't terribly substantive though, so I will try to do better.

I attended Norwescon this weekend and had a lovely time.

I finally got to meet lishwitch in person. She was intelligent and fun and generally as awesome as I knew she would be. I only wish she lived closer so that we could hang out more often. Our third amigo was skyote, who I hadn't seen in a while. It was a tremendous amount of fun just hanging out and chatting, talking about life and fandomy things. We went to some panels together, too. I also had a chance to catch up with knotted_rose for a while which was also fun.

Norwescon had a lot more fandom/fanfic/slash focused panels than in previous years, which was pretty cool. I enjoyed almost all the fandom related panels I attended. Surprisingly it was the Sherlock panel which I enjoyed the least. It was the least conversation of the panels I attended, which is to say it was pretty much the three panelists saying "here's what I think about topic x." But the part I really disliked was that one panelist said no spoilers, followed by, well, this isn't really a spoiler and then proceeded to talk about pretty much all the spoilers that are out there for season three.

Generally speaking, I don't mind being spoiled and might even go looking for spoilers. I was planning to try and remain mostly unspoiled for season three, but holmesian_news warns that the media part may have spoilers but just cuts and pastes headlines without using cut tags so I already knew some of what was being discussed and I'd seen most of the rest on Tumblr. I know it's a risk for being spoiled when you go to any event like this, but I would think the panelists would at least be good about not giving away any spoilers. I don't think anyone in the audience gave anything away with the few questions that were asked.

So I was annoyed about that.

The fanfic and slash panels were pretty fun though. A few of the panelists were the same and I think every single one of them wrote in the Sherlock fandom, among others.

I didn't go to Masquerade but I watched some of the photo session from upstairs. There were some pretty amazing costumes.

Next year one of the special guests is apparently going to be seanan_mcguire which makes me very happy.

In other news, I read a fantastic book called Bailout: How Washington Abandoned Main Street While Rescuing Wall Street by Neil Barofsky. Barofsky was the Inspector General for TARP. His job was to prevent fraud. His account of his time there is fascinating and disturbing. I already knew some of what he talked about because I've been following this issue, but there were still things that were new to me. There's almost no "term of art/financial speak" in the book so it's very accessible to a lay person. You can read my review here.

If you're even remotely interested in what happened to the TARP money after it was approved by Congress (as opposed to how we got into this mess in the first place) I highly recommend this book.

Chris Hayes has a new show that premiere's tonight. It's All In which airs nightly before The Rachel Maddow Show. Up is still on but will have a new host. I'm excited to see more of Chris but concerned about Up.

One of my favorite authors, earlgreytea68, is going to write a Sherlock baseball AU which I think is very exciting.

Speaking of recommendations, I really want to get back to doing that. I feel like I should clarify that my recs are generally stories I enjoyed or like but not necessarily the OMG read this now stories. I am trying to keep a list of those stories and if and when I finish I'd like to go back and revise it and maybe treat that section a little differently. I've also thought about doing a section for the stories I'd recommend to someone who was new to the fandom. Not really a fandom guide because a) I don't feel qualified for that and b) that's a ton of work.

I'm enjoying the achievement contest I'm in but it does mean that I feel an obligation to play video games in a way I normally wouldn't. And yeah, I know how strange that sounds. But I'm part of a team and I'd feel bad slacking because of other, non vital things I want to do.

I'm sort of kind of thinking about changing my LJ name to match my tumblr name. I know, I don't change my name for years and now it's like every 3 months. I'd think about changing it at AO3, too, but apparently that would break any external links. I don't know of any that exist but that doesn't mean they aren't out there. I guess that's what psueds are for.

Game of Thrones is back, which is nice. Justified has its finale tomorrow.

I did definitely come back from Norwescon wanting to rewatch both seasons of Sherlock. There's just never enough time in the day.