stop whispering, start shouting

Title: the lost are like this
Fandom: Sherlock Holmes (canon, Laurie R. King/Mary Russell books)

Summary: But of course there are always reasons. It takes Mary Russell many years to understand Sherlock Holmes.

Pairing/Rating: Holmes/Watson, Holmes/Russell friendship. Rated Mature. 8,900 words.

Notes: This fic carries a strong trigger warning for mental illness, attempted suicide, and general gloominess. I shower nomad1328 with my most effusive thanks for her excellent beta services.

This fic is an AU to the Laurie R. King books in the same way that those books can be considered an AU to the canon. I wanted to explore some of the things that bothered me about the books, at the same time as I explored what a Holmes/Watson relationship would be like in this universe. This is a different Holmes, more unstable, but I think these things are hinted at in the canon, and I wanted to play those references up, not down.



the lost are like this


At first, Russell finds Holmes’ relationship with Watson puzzling. She’s read the stories. A small, ineffectual man, she thinks. Frequently dim, sometimes stupid, occasionally insightful.

But she is fifteen and she is wounded and parentless and she hates Watson, for what he represents. Because what little regard Holmes has apportioned out to his fellow human beings, he has given to Watson, unwaveringly and unconditionally.

This is before she learns that men can know each other from the inside out without ever having to give a name to the thing that they share. Before she learns how completely stories can lie, how the dream world they conjure up begs to be more real than blood and skin and bone.

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There's an awesome list of long reads compiled here: the finalists of the City and Regional Magazine awards for 2013.

Included are a few stories I enjoyed reading last year, including this story about John Wojnowski, who has stood outside the Vatican Embassy in Washington, DC almost every day for 14 years.


Also this two-part story at the Texas Monthly about Michael Morton, who spent 25 years in gaol after being wrongfully accused of the murder of his wife: the miscarriage of justice is obscene (and is why nobody should really trust small-town cops, especially in the sort of place where they get elected).

I've decided to buy a calendar online

As far as I'm concerned late February is a good time (cheap!) and calendars.com seems to have a wide enough range with not too rapacious shipping charges -- there don't seem to be any Australian online calendar stores

earlier this afternoon I narrowed my choices down to either the "Australian Pubs Calendar" or the "US Civil War Calendar" -- this one

But then I had a disquieting thought

I am turning into a fifty year old man

THESE ARE THE CALENDAR CHOICES OF A BABY-BOOMING, BEER-DRINKING, WAR-MONGERING, CRYING EAGLE LAPEL PIN-WEARING SORT OF PERSON

I really don't know what to say.

Of all the decisions I made today, I think deciding to stay up until 3 a.m. reading James Bond, anonymous fic memes, fandom_wank posts and chess openings was the worst.

I didn't even go on chat because I have spent like the last two hours in a hyped-up limbo of "I am about to go to bed."

WHY AM I LIKE THIS

Oh, and behold: the most explosive, ranty and hilarious reaction to concrit ever. Worth the read, just because.

This is my index post for fic that doesn't go in my "main" fandoms.

Lately Things Just Don't Seem The Same
Withnail and I, slight Withnail/Marwood (but only if you squint), warning for drugs and general gloominess.
I wonder why I’m here, a passive audience to your self-destruction. A Withnail character study.
AO3 DW

Against The Walls, Against The Rules, Against Your Skin
The Awakening (2011 film), Florence Cathcart/Robert Mallory.
This story carries strong warnings for self-harm, PTSD, war, and mental illness. Very slight AU, you'll hardly notice it.
London has thousands of voices and each one of them, if he listened to it, would tell him a story of loss. AO3 DW

Title: Lately Things Just Don't Seem The Same
Fandom: Withnail and I
Characters and Pairings: Withnail, Marwood. Slight Withnail/Marwood, but only if you squint.
Notes: This is my Yuletide story. I'll probably just be posting it to my journal on LJ, but if anybody knows of a comm I could post it to, comment away! AO3

Summary: I wonder why I’m here, a passive audience to your self-destruction. A Withnail character study.

You’re in a pub in Camden town. You’re telling everybody in a quavery, broken toff’s voice that you’ve just finished a ten-week run as Mercutio. I find out later that you are lying, that you haven’d had any work since a turn you did in a seaside panto eight months ago. You were sacked for falling to your knees and vomiting over the side of the stage, splattering the front row with your liquid lunch. You’re wearing an exquisite sports coat with frayed elbows and a dark stain on the front. You’re thin to the point of emaciation and your unwashed hair is combed straight back.

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I don't know if I've ever ranted about this here or not, but here goes. I have a weird name, and one of the things you notice when you have a name like mine is that people actually correct you on the pronunciation of it.

It happens with both of my parents' surnames, too.

This is not to say that my name has a non-standard pronunciation. It's just weird, so people assume, I guess, that you're wrong about it?

Let's say my name is "Bloggs," but that it's actually pronounced "Bluggs." My name is neither of these things, but let's go with that.

I'll be standing in a queue or waiting for some food or a prescription or whatever, but there'll be a point at which I'll be asked to pronounce my own name. The name I've had pretty much my whole life*, the first thing I ever learnt to write.

"Your name?" the lady in the coffee shop will ask.

"Bluggs," I say.

At least one out of, say, every ten of these exchanges, the person will say "Oh, don't you mean Bloggs?".

Sometimes they do a more subtle thing where they actually say my name the way they think it should be said.

THIS IS A THING. IT ACTUALLY HAPPENS.

I don't know what else to say apart from the fact that there are a lot of dumb, unthinking people out there in the world, and like zombies they strive to infect you with it.

*Also, I say "almost" because I was born early and my parents were kind of surprised and then one day they just sent off the naming documents in a big fat rush, and that is how I got my name. Not that they would have chosen something else, but... well, they were under a lot of stress, I think.

I can't quite get my head around Yuletide Madness, and bless the Yuletide mods, but their instructions are a trifle confusing. If I see an prompt that I like, do I just fill it and post it to the collection?

I was sitting at my desk just now listening to music through headphones when I heard something that sounded like someone using a power tool -- maybe an angle grinder or a power sander -- next door.

Then I took my headphones off and realised that it was a cicada just outside the window.

Welcome to Australia in summer.

I am about to walk to the train station in 35-degree heat. Go me!

This is a fic for The Awakening, the Edwardian thriller movie from 2011. I was expecting a horror movie but was pleasantly surprised, it's more about war and loss imo. You don't need to have seen the movie to get the fic, but it'd definitely help. Not posting to any communities for now, but if you have an idea for one please suggest it!

Title: Against the Walls, Against Your Rules, Against Your Skin
Characters and Pairings: Florence Cathcart/Robert Mallory.
Notes: Thank you to the infallible and iridescent nomad1328 for the beta. This story carries strong warnings for self-harm, PTSD, war, and mental illness. Very slight AU, you'll hardly notice it.

Summary:London has thousands of voices and each one of them, if he listened to it, would tell him a story of loss.

Against the Walls, Against Your Rules, Against Your Skin

1919

Robert Mallory had ambition, once. Now his only ambition is to breathe without feeling as if he is suffocating. It is not a medical suffocation, the physiological response of the body’s cells to a lack of air. It is a flood, a tide of things that should not be there. It fills the empty parts of him with meaningless senseless noise, chokes him. He stands on a street corner near Victoria Station and at the same time falls back through time and over 180 miles of earth and back into the trenches. He wraps his uncooperative fingers into a fist and feels the pull of the muscles in his arms, as hard and stiff as wood, as stone.

He relives every moment just as it happened, in an instant, and then, and then. When he feels the rain on his face and the pavement beneath his feet he finds that he cannot breathe. There is no time and no place, in the sterile place of his memory. Only things he cannot change.

London is noisy. London has thousands of voices and each one of them, if he listened to it, would tell him a story of loss. There is a trunk under his bed full of notebooks and papers. He doesn’t look at them. He lies awake at night, in his childhood bedroom, and reads The History of the Peloponnesian War. He finds notes in the margins in a neat, certain hand that is no longer his own.

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