@acdholmesfest revealed today! Way back in January, @capt_facepalm saw that reveals were scheduled for April Fools, and so asked permission to be assigned to herself, as a prank on all the guessers. She succeeded.
My own contribution:
The Taste of Truth, for @colebaltblue
ACD Sherlock Holmes x The Lie Tree (Frances Hardinge)
Holmes/Watson, past Mary Morstan/John Watson
Reichenbach, Magical Realism, Lie Tree AU, Angst with a Happy Ending
25,500 words
Two and a half years after Reichenbach, John Watson discovers the magical tree that caused Holmes to fake his death.
Back in August of 2017, @colorwheel recommended Frances Hardinge's The Lie Tree to me, saying that it reminded her of me. My vanity being what it is, I immediately procured a copy from the library and began reading. Partway in, I wrote to @colorwheel:
- I really wish the pov was more sympathetic to Myrtle (the mother).
- I really wish the Myrtle-Faith dynamic didn't feel like it was put in just so that the reader, via identifying with Faith, could claim to not be like other (girly) girls.
- Oo, snake!
- Oo, fossils!
- goddamn, but Victorian sexism is a fucking drag.
- Oo, boats!
- goddamn, but Victorian mourning is a fucking drag.
- ...and now we've gotten to the secret journals about the mendacity tree and I'm writing Sherlock Holmes fic in my head as we go FIE ON YOU COLORWHEEL FIE
The Sherlock Holmes fic in my head went like this: "What if Holmes faked his death because he needed a REALLY BIG WHOPPER to tell the Tree?? And what if Watson found out by stumbling across Holmes' secret journals about the Tree?? Hoo boy, Watson would be MAAAAAD!"
In the end, I wasn't sure I really liked the book, but I did like my idea for a Holmes fic based on it, to the point that I never quite returned the book to the library. A half-dozen times since then, I've run across the book on my shelves, been reminded of the fic premise, considered writing the story, dismissed it as too much work, but was unable to dismiss it completely… And so the book remained on my shelves for two and a half years, just in case I should ever decide to get my act together and write that story after all.
Meanwhile, life went on, I got a new job, and the new job torpedoed my ability to find writing time. I spent a month tearing my hair out in frustration, but finally managed to figure out that I could get some writing done on my morning bus, if I brought a spiral notebook with me and wrote longhand. I felt just optimistic enough about morning-bus-longhand that I signed up for @acdholmesfest (they don't run every year! I would have been very sad to miss this one!) I told myself that I'd do something SHORT. SHORT and also EASY. Because whatever it was, I'd have to write it longhand on my morning bus -- there simply wouldn't be time for anything that wasn't short and easy!
Assignments came out, @grrlpup asked me what I was thinking of doing, and I shrugged and admitted I had no ideas. (I almost never do for ACD Holmes, for some reason.) Except maybe that one idea based on Hardinge's The Lie Tree, the one wherein Sherlock Holmes fakes his death because he needs a whopping big lie for the Tree. Her eyes lit up, absolutely electrified by the idea. Unfortunately, it didn't sound like a short idea. I sucked my teeth. "Eh, maybe I could pull it off in 8K if I'm strict with myself? I'll start brainstorming on the bus tomorrow and see how it goes."
Mind you, in all this time, the fic-in-my-head had never developed beyond "What if Holmes faked his death for the Tree, and Watson found out? Oo, Watson would be SUPER MAD!" I started brainstorming proper details on the bus next morning, and pulled together enough to start writing the morning after that. The central question, though -- "What does Holmes want to know so bad that he fakes his death for it??" -- was still a big question mark. But I had six weeks; I'd figure something out.
Two weeks later, after religiously writing daily during my morning commute and over my lunch hour, the writing week bookended by marathon transcription sessions on the weekends, I had 8K. I was maybe a third of the way through the story, as best as I could tell? (Shit, fuck, shit, shit.) And I still had no idea what Holmes wanted to know so bad that it was worth faking his death for. (Fuuuuuuuck.)
I grabbed @grrlpup, made her go on a long walk-and-talk story-doctoring session with me, and we eventually came up with a handwavy sketch: something-or-other had happened to Holmes' father when he was young, and Holmes had never been able to solve it. What happened to Holmes' father? No idea, but it was enough that I could begin foreshadowing it.
I continued to write feverishly, morning commute and lunch. I wrote a pen dry. I filled a notebook. I wrote another pen dry. I spent eight hours every Saturday doing transcription and first-pass editing. I was maybe at the half-way mark. If I could keep this pace up, I could probably hit 24K before it was due? Please, please, please let it be no longer than 24K.
Unfortunately, I still didn't know what Holmes' backstory was. And the farther I got, the clearer it became that I wouldn't be able to hand-wave it, either: at some point Holmes would have to tell his backstory for the reader. I kept hoping the backstory would come to me, but it didn't.
Two weeks out from the deadline, I was getting within pistol shot of the story's end, and I'd written just about everything it was possible to write without knowing that fucking backstory. Unfortunately, I had no time to spare for thinking it over: I had to keep writing at the pace I'd been holding if I was going to finish this in time. In desperation, I grabbed @tgarnsl and demanded that she brainstorm something with me. I had a vague idea that the grandfather had done something shameful overseas a la Victor Trevor's dad, and the grandfather's actions had somehow rebounded on his son, resulting in Holmes' father disappearing under a shadow -- but that's all I had. @tgarnsl and I sat down and started working out timelines, and figured out that if whatever-it-was happened before Holmes's father was born, then it almost certainly happened during the Napoleonic Wars. @tgarnsl came up with the idea of loosely basing it all on
Martin Guerre's story, and we spent the rest of the morning trying to brainstorm the details. We initially tried to put Holmes' grandfather in the army, but I know jack shit about the Pennisular War: Wellington thrashed Bonaparte (or so the Gilbert and Sullivan song goes), and Wellington was Hornblower's brother-in-law (or so the Hornblower novels go). @tgarnsl wisely suggested we fall back to what we both know: Nelson's Navy. I kinda hated doing that -- I thought it would make me far too easy to guess -- but I was out of time. Over a morning we slammed together a timeline for Sherrinford Holmes and his double, outlining when the switch happened and how, and at lunchtime I took my notebook to the downstairs cafeteria where no one knew me (and thus no one could interrupt me), and I started writing the big reveal of Holmes' backstory.
I finished my first draft five days before the deadline, woo-hoo! And it was in fact 24K words, just as I predicted, OH MY FUCKING GOD. But I'd never even had time to read the thing start to finish! When the fucking FUCK was I gonna edit it? I asked for an extension, and the mods, bless them, gave me an extra week. @grrlpup printed the monster out, sharpened her red pen, and set to work. @tgarnsl pitched in, too. Meanwhile, I wrote another 2K of journal entries, and rewrote one of the Moriarty entries from scratch.
Altogether, we only just finished it in time: the day it was due, @grrlpup and I spent eight hours apiece doing final line-edits, going through the draft in parallel, she a couple pages ahead of me. All said, I'm happy with the result, though. It'd be interesting to see how the story might change if I'd had more time to grow and nurture it, but I think it's pretty soundly built as it is.
One thing that felt really strange while writing this story, was that I was taking the position that Holmes was the lying liar -- usually I see that role assigned to Watson. Surprise, it is much harder to have the liar be Holmes! I couldn't just handwave away inconvenient canon details, saying that this or that was just another of Watson's fibs: I was instead taking the strong position that everything in the story that Watson observed with his own eyes and ears actually happened. Holmes really did show up with barked knuckles the night before they fled for the Continent, they really did spend a couple of days cooling their heels in Brussels, the hotel page really did come up to the Falls to summon Watson back to the hotel, and so forth. I think I did fairly well coming up with an alternate explanation for all the canon events of FINA? But it was a far stricter exercise than I usually engage in, when I'm writing the story of what "really" happened.
Astute readers may also notice that the story diverges significantly from my original idea -- Watson was in fact not hopping mad about Holmes faking his death. This often happens to me in the course of writing a story -- the way I predicted my characters would feel, and what actually makes sense for them to feel by the time the story gets there, often don't match. While writing, I'd been worrying that my original premise assassinated Holmes' character, so I had been trying to make it clear in the journal entries why Holmes was doing what he was doing, and giving him, well, if not a good reason for doing it, at least a sympathetic one. Watson being Watson, he was largely sympathetic to Holmes' distress -- and especially so, given that most of the time he spent reading that journal, he was feeling nostalgic about his dead friend. Sure, it was a sharp shock when it turned out Holmes was alive, but his emotional throughline was very different than what I first envisioned for him. I think this way worked pretty well, though.
@rachelindeed also
noted in guessing-post comments that it was somewhat unusual of me to not make Holmes and Watson go through the work of rebuilding/repairing their relationship. I dithered all through the revision process about whether to leave that kissing scene in: I liked it on its own merits, but the principal arc of this story was "What to do about the evil tree?" and was in no way about whether/how/when Holmes and Watson got together. I didn't have time to do both, sure, but I also couldn't make the second arc fit into the timeline of the first. The Tree plot was resolved in 48 hours of narrative time; the romantic arc couldn't possibly be resolved that quickly, not to my lights. And if I couldn't resolve a romantic arc, should I have it in there at all? But both of my betas liked the kissing scene and thought it worked on its own merits, so I left it in. Sometimes you've just got to trust your betas.
So. That's what I spent February doing: feverishly writing a story, and mumbling vaguely whenever anyone asked what I'd been up to lately. (One day over lunch my coworkers asked what I was writing, and I answered "A novel," not wanting to split hairs about novel/novella. They all thought I was kidding around, and eventually decided that I was actually pulling a Harriet the Spy on them: obviously I was writing down scathing commentary on all their doings. But they never tried to steal my notebook from me to find out, so I left them to their conspiracy theories and wrote the next 200 words of my novella. BECAUSE DAMNIT I HAD 24K WORDS TO WRITE.)
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