All gifts are posted: let the guessing begin!

[tweedisgood]

Greetings gentlefans

Please commence to place your bets/guesses on who wrote or created what in the comments to this post, and please also do comment on all the lovely entries, especially if you have not yet had time to thank the creator for your own gift - but generally comment all over the shop, we all thrive on it and positivity at the moment is so very welcome.

Reveal post (and ficlet) on April 1st!

Comments

[rachelindeed]

Okay, I'll take a crack at it! (With the reservation that there are still some fics I haven't yet had a chance to read, and some I've only skimmed but will comment on soon!)

I agree with most of mightymads' guesses, but personally I would re-assign smallhobbit to The Case of the Disappearing Husband. And I'm not convinced yet about where mistyzeo's work is...there are a lot of possibilities.

I'd also guess:

tweedisgood for Vocation and Douillet

methylviolet10b for Masterpiece as mentioned above but also for the podfic So Keen a Sympathy

spacemutineer for Present, Tense

saki101 for He's Not Here

mightymads for Simplicity Itself

I notice that there was no gift for sanspatronymic, so they must have had to bow out of this round. I also suspect that Capt_Facepalm may also have bowed out, since they do not ship Holmes/Watson and every fic this round was Holmes/Watson except for the one written for them.

I am genuinely, absolutely stumped as to the authorship of The Taste of Truth. A 25K word story is unusual in this exchange, and I've tried to narrow down the suspects by considering which authors have written fics of that length before. I came up with my persons of interest list, but it's very inconclusive:

Mistyzeo (but she said in her sign-up she was limiting her offer to 1K-4K. She could have gotten carried away by the idea, but still, how likely is it she'd write 20K more than she offered?)

Garonne (I don't recall her having written so long a single story in the Holmes verse before, but she has written Man From UNCLE fic of that length. But she says in her sign-up that she dislikes supernatural AUs.)

Saintdionysus (now here is a promising candidate. Their initial offer was for a 10K story, and it seems plausible that a story initially planned for that length could have grown to 25K. As far as I can see on their AO3 account they have never published a Holmesian story before, so I cannot compare the writing style, but they regularly publish works longer than 25K in the Harry Potter fandom. They also mentioned that they write horror professionally, which could feed into the eerie, haunting quality of the fic. But a strike against this idea is the fact that they also stated in their sign-up that they didn't like supernatural AUs. But maybe magical realism/horror is a different category in their mind?)

Two other possible candidates for authoring this story would be obstinatrix (another author who has written longer fics in other fandoms, shout-out from a fellow SPN and Destiel fan! But in their sign-up they seemed more focused on cheerful sexytimes), and Sanguinity (but she said in her sign-up she'd rather not work with addiction or Moriarty, so???)

Perhaps the wisest solution is to leave this mystery to SCFrankles, who can work her formatting analysis magic. But I'm going to tentatively pencil in Saintdionysus as my best guess for The Taste of Truth.

And now I'm really just throwing ideas at the wall, but purely based on their sign-up I think that maybe obstinatrix wrote Riddle Me This, Mr. Holmes.

Okay, that's the best I can do! Looking forward to finding out how wrong I am soon :)

Thanks to everyone for all the wonderful stories this round, they've really lifted me up during this strange time.

[saki101]

You know I laughed when I saw your guess about He's Not Here. I wasn't at all surprised that you got it right.

[sanguinity]

Well, at least I confused you, if I couldn't confuse scfrankles...! ;-)

Re my sign-up: I do write addiction from time-to-time, and the same with Moriarty. But I'm particular about both topics, and would rather choose to write about them than be assigned to write about them, if that makes sense. (I don't like being pushed off the diving board, but I'm perfectly happy to jump!)

[rachelindeed]

Hee hee, I am very frequently confused when it comes to finding you, you chameleon! After the Moriarty/Athelney Jones fic I've just been like: "She can do anything. Just accept that in matters of disguise you will be the Watson to her Holmes and live in a perpetual state of surprise." :)

That it is an incredibly well-written and strikingly original fic doesn't surprise me, but I confess the length does a bit! Not because I didn't think you could do it, obviously you have an established record on that point, but because I was thinking to myself: she recently started a job and had been working on recreating writing time for herself...and I know she's been working on multiple WIPs...how likely would she be to write a 25K gift right now?? Clearly the answer was 'very likely!,' lol!

I certainly do understand your point about how you manage your offers in your sign-up, though. I do the same thing sometimes. If a topic or even a verse is tricky, it's nice to feel that you won't have committed yourself to writing it before you're sure you really have an idea for it you want to pursue, but are also mentally leaving the option open.

And your sign-up did say you loved writing science fictional AUs! But that comment was followed by an exclamation about how dinosaurs make everything better! THIS WAS NOT A HAPPY DINOSAUR AU, SANGUINITY.

[sanguinity]

Oh, god, the length! I have a reveals post about that coming, but YES, it was in fact a severe stretch to write that long of a fic, given the new job! I wrote that sucker longhand, on my commute and over my lunch hour, writing two pens dry and filling a notebook and a half. It was frenetic, I tell you. But as long as I knew what the next plot point was -- and I almost always did! -- I could scrawl out another 400 words in the thirty minutes before I had to change buses or go back to work. I didn't know until the week before the due date whether I would be able to finish it or not. I thought I could, if my length estimate wasn't too wrong and I could keep up the pace, but it was a nearer thing than I was quite comfortable with.

Hahaha, no, it's not a happy dinosaur AU, is it? But I've already done two 24K dinosaur AUS, and it'd be entirely TOO easy for you all if I did dinosaurs this time, too. ;-)

Do you mind if I ask what about the story didn't feel like me? I couldn't help but see your convo with scfrankles and now I'm curious.

[rachelindeed]

Omg, I can't imagine writing a fic of this length and complexity in snatched thirty minute increments in the midst of your travel and workday! I could tell from the feel of the fic itself that it had been an idea that possessed its author strongly, I think that's part of why it feels so intense, but knowing more about the process only increases my admiration. Wow!!

Do you mind if I ask what about the story didn't feel like me?

Not at all -- for me, it was the transition into romance for Holmes/Watson in the midst of all these discoveries. I consider you a writer who LOVES relationship negotiation, and I thought to myself that if you were the author, you would probably have made them do more relationship work before you got them together!

(Editing to add: Re-reading that, I just want to clarify that that's not a criticism in the least, the romance in the story is profoundly loving, compassionate, and beautiful! And the free gift of Watson's love is so necessary for Holmes's character arc, so ultimately freeing. It's just that, as I said, I tend to think of you as an author who usually likes to linger more on the process of relationship (re)building, so this just felt slightly unusual to me!)

[sanguinity]

Hahahah, I went back and forth on including that kissing scene, I tell you! Because you're right, I don't think them getting together is going to be NEARLY so easy as that. For what it's worth, I don't consider them together at this point. (Well, by the time EMPT is published, there in the last several paragraphs, they're probably together? But not while they're sitting there on firewatch in the dawnlight, negotiating whether they're going to be roomies again.) But the reader is welcome to believe whatever they want in regards to how much work they think these two need to do right now, and how much of a done deal their romantic relationship really is at this point. Ultimately, the story of "how do you come back from this and build something true and lasting?" is a different story arc than the one where they need to get rid of that freaking tree, and that's why I declined to do much with it.

Well, that, and also I HAD NO TIME TO DO ANYTHING MORE WITH ANYTHING. :-P

[methylviolet10b]

You got me on the podfic - how did I give myself away? Or was it just a general lack of people who offered it?

I am, I admit, rather delighted that I managed to sneak Douillet by both you and scfrankles... :-D

[rachelindeed]

Yes, I'm sorry to report the uninteresting answer that it was mainly a process of elimination from a very small pool of podfic offers. Apart from the recipient herself, the only other person who'd offered podfic was gardnerhill. Gardnerhill also regularly offers podfic over at Holmestice, but she always mentions that she can't add music/FX and so would stick to a voice-only reading, so I didn't think this was hers. I knew you were American, so the basic accent fit. The question was complicated slightly by the fact that the comm had publicly called for a pinch hitter for Sanguinity's gift; I also knew there were two pinch hits this round. By the time we got to the guessing post I knew that one outside pinch hitter had volunteered themselves, while the other was already a fest participant (given that only one of the two pinch-hitters required an extra gift). It did occur to me that, when the first pinch hit call went out, maybe a friend of Sanguinity's might have volunteered either to join the fest on her behalf or, if they were already here, to create something for her that they hadn't initially offered in their sign up -- I especially wondered if maybe colebaltblue might have done that. But I've heard colebaltblue's voice before, thanks to the convention panel she and Sang did together last year discussing Holmestice. And I decided it didn't quite sound like her voice. So I settled on you as the most likely after all!:)

But I'm sure you'll be pleased to hear that this did contribute to my overlooking your hand in Douillet! I was under the mistaken impression that you had also written Masterpiece, mainly because the author's note for that story says "written in a huge rush," which is a phrase I associate strongly with you in your posts over at watsons_woes :) Since the pinch-hitter's gift must have come from the mods, I had the choice between you, tweed, and spacemutineer, and I thought you had already created two works and that Douillet would have made three, which seemed excessive! So I guessed one of your co-mods instead :P

Oh the tangled webs we weave!