SHERYL HOLMES

Oxford comma proponent. Find me on AO3 as Sheryl_Holmes. MCU, Labyrinth, Harry Potter, Hellblazer, Sandman, Witcher, Jessica Jones, Stranger Things, Daredevil, etc.

[sherylholmes]

(Do You Talk to Me When You're) Talking to Yourself

As Severus Snape awaits his trial in Azkaban, Hermione Granger takes it upon herself to write him letters. He never replies. The months wear on, and the post-war world begins to look bleaker and bleaker. Hermione starts to worry he won't be getting out alive.

As Severus Snape sits in his prison cell, he wonders why the only person who seems to give a damn that he's about to be condemned to death is that blasted Granger girl.

Updates every Saturday!

[sherylholmes]

Updated Tra La La, Dr. King

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

Oops, someone tagged me on Tumblr, and I remembered this exists.  (Thank you for recommending my work, @anarcha-queer-horror !)

I’m kidding about having forgotten about this, though.  I’ve been trying to finish this fic for ages, and as recently as last week I wrote a whole other cache of notes for it.  But seeing one of my readers wonder aloud if this story is abandoned lit a fire under me. 

“No, it isn’t! It’s almost done, I’m just busy!” *cries in young professional*

Anyway, I had planned to post the two chapters I’d already had written, but then this one ambushed me in a dark alley and mugged my creativity for its own advantage.  So, uh, here’s a chapter that was never supposed to be written but now feels necessary?

[sherylholmes]

Love Is the Immovable Object

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

Final installment in a lil series I wrote about two broken people falling love. George Weasley/Draco Malfoy.

When Malfoy glanced up from his drink, George realised that he never had looked Malfoy in the eyes before. If he had, he might have known long ago how astonishingly blue those grey eyes could be. They were storm clouds in a pale blue sky. And they'd been raining all night. Malfoy's love had proven to be stronger, more unyielding and stubborn and loyal than any romantic love George had seen outside of his parent's marriage. But, which would win? The unstoppable force? Or the immovable object? Draco was stubborn as a Hippogriff. But George's trauma was a forest fire, and he knew it would raze everything in its path.

[important-animal-images]

[sherylholmes]

Chaos.

[stardustschild]

Apparently my director went to see a production of West Side Story a few years ago, and the guy playing Chino forgot his gun before coming out for his final scene. Once it got to the big scene where he is supposed to shoot Tony, he screeched “Poison Boots” and kicked the actor playing Tony until he went down. The girl playing Maria then had to jerk the shoe off of Chino’s foot, and had to do the gunshot scene asking “How many kicks Chino? How many kicks, and one kick left for me”. 

[tbbackus]

There should be a blog dedicated to theatrical urban legends. Like that opening weekend of Dracula where Dracula (still hungover) vomited all over the audience during the first stage direction that everyone has a friend of a friend that worked on the show and was there.

[crutchie-morris]

or the one where the bridge never came out for Javert’s suicide and so he just pretended to stab himself and then lay there until the lights went out

[musicofthestage]

best story i heard was when a friend of mine saw a show where juliet forgot to bring the dagger out on stage so she just ripped the squib out of her chest and blood squirted everywhere

[agatharights]

During a passion play a friend of my brother was supposedly in, one of the roman soldiers who was supposed to stab jesus on the cross and accidentally grabbed the wrong spear- he was supposed to grab one with a fake tip, but instead he grabbed one with an actual metal tip and, well

Jesus screamed “JESUS CHRIST YOU STABBED ME”.

Since that Jesus had to be taken down due to a bad case of stab-itis, the backup Jesus came in, but he weighed significantly less than the original Jesus- which would have been fine, except that at the end the cross was supposed to ascend upwards with Jesus on it, and the weights hadn’t been adjusted.

So Jesus, instead, ROCKETED UP into heaven (or, just, above the stage).

[soulpunchftw]

This is wild from start to finish

[totalspiffage]

I was in Peter Pan once and one night at a performance, the adhesive holding our Hook’s mustache on was wearing off. It was near the end with a big fight scene and when he got attacked, he let his mustache fall and went “YOU RIPPED MY MUSTACHE OFF!” in a scandalized tone and it added a new note of hilarity to the whole scene (which was supposed to be funny anyway)

[punkbatsarchive]

In my seventh grade play, which was a midsummer night’s dream, Thisbe didn’t have a sword so she stabbed herself with a coathanger

[redheadeddisneyfreak]

My junior year we were doing Romeo and Juliet and after Juliet poisons herself it was supposed to go dark and she’d get off the stage. well the light crew accidentally turned them back on and Juliet who was sitting up slammed back down on the wooden bed with a loud bang. To which my theater teacher says into the com “zombie Juliet” and everyone who heard that had to keep as quiet as possible while our eyes were filling with tears.

[sammywhatammy]

i attended my county’s performing arts high school majoring in vocal studies, (mostly geared towards musical theater and opera styles) and once a year we got a field trip to new york (we were in jersey, so it’s not exactly far). we would do one touristy thing, an actor’s workshop with friends of our teachers working in various performing industries in nyc, and then see a show. 

my first year doing this, our industry contacts were 1 actor, 1 casting director, and 1 producer to get different aspects of the business, and they all gave us amazing advice and told fantastic stories. the actor in question was Zazu on Broadway’s The Lion King for several years, and told the best story by far.

in The Lion King, there are only two pieces of pre-recorded noise in the whole show. one, when Pumbaa does a MASSIVE fart while fighting the hyenas, and the other being Mufasa saying REMEMBERRRRRR as Simba climbs Pride Rock. the actor told us while struggling not to laugh that, during one night’s performance, someone forgot to flip the tape of these pre-recorded noises.

so, at the end of the show, the great climax where Simba finally accepts his place in the Circle of Life, the heavens parted and-

PFFFFFFFFFRRRRRBTFTBTBFTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT

everyone froze. and then all ran off stage positively HOWLING with laughter.

the lesson: sometimes there are fuck ups you just can’t recover from.

[cinder-ember]

During a high school production of Beauty and the Beast, where I was assistant costumer and assistant prop master, our director decided that we needed to spice up Gaston’s introduction. You know: in the movie, when Lefou runs in trying to catch the duck/goose that Gaston has just shot out of the sky?

Originally, the actors were going to stroll on stage with our Lefou hauling in the really neat (and real!) taxidermied deer head that we had found in a local thrift store. Now, two days before opening night, our director wants Lefou to run in from off stage and catch a stuffed duck that Gaston has just shot. This, of course, requires two things to work properly as a scene: a gunshot noise, and a stuffed duck.

The gunshot noise, we had covered. Blue-collar, redneck school? Guns a plenty to record. The stuffed duck? Harder than you might have thought to obtain.

Three hunting stores, two taxidermists, and one Pet Supply Store ™, I’d finally found a semi-realistic pheasant squeaky toy. What follows is an account of the ways this dog toy managed to be the nightmare prop of the six show run.

Opening Night: The stagehand, who was supposed to drop the bird from the ceiling catwalk, missed his cue and didn’t drop the it. Lefou’s actor rolls with it and does an excellent job of looking around foolishly before getting cuffed upside the head by Gaston. The stagehand then drops the bird squarely on Gaston’s head. Cue laughter.

Saturday Matinee: Different stagehand throws the bird instead of dropping it and beans Lefou directly in the face with the prop. Lefou falls over. Cue laughter.

Saturday Night: Bird is missing during curtain call. Director hauls the deer head down from it’s place on the tavern wall and tells Gaston and Lefou to revert to the old blocking i.e. no gunshot, no bird, just walk in with trophy. During Gaston and Lefou’s conversation, gun shot sound goes off and a stagehand throws the bird onto the stage…from the wrong side of the stage. Lefou and Gaston stare at it in awkward silence for a solid thirty seconds before Lefou makes off-script, subtle joke about Gaston’s gun going off late instead of early. Cue adults in the audience laughing.

Sunday Matinee: Director begs the stagehands to get the cue right at least once. Gunshot and bird prop go off without a hitch. Lefou accidentally catches the prop when it falls from the catwalk. He’s so startled that he caught it that Gaston runs right in to him. They drop both the gun and the bird props, and grab the wrong prop in their scramble. Gaston spends the rest of the scene gesturing dramatically with a stuffed pheasant, instead of a gun.

Sunday Night:  Director is fed up with bird prop, decides that Lefou should just carry bird prop in after gunshot happens off stage. Lefou accidentally squeezes the prop during the intro conversation, startling both actors into silence with the squeaky toy noise - apparently, neither of them realized it was a dog toy.

Monday Elementary School Show: Lefou walks on stage with the bird. Accidentally drops the prop during conversation with Gaston. Gaston doesn’t notice the dropped prop and steps on it. Cue depressingly sad squeaky toy noise. Cue ten years olds laughing.

[fat-hippie]

I was in Twelfth Night during high school and we were lucky enough to have identical twin girls playing Viola and Sebastian. Due to the blocking in the first half of the play, their characters didn’t appear on stage together but rather almost consecutively one after the other for a majority of the first act.

It was awesome because when people saw the play and didn’t know the girls were identical twins, it literally looked like it was one actor doing multiple, uber fast costume changes.

One of our first performances was for our peers and it was a big school so lots of people didn’t know the twins. This - for some reason - was also the performance they chose to record.

Listening to the confusion of the audience during the playback was fantastic and completely topped by the moment Viola walked off stage left just as Sebastian walked on stage right and someone right beside the camera goes “OH WHAT THE FUCK” so loudly it drowned out everything else.

The best thing? That was the copy of the play that was made available for purchase by family and parents. Haha.

[whereismyvillage]

Oh my god. I went to one of the Spiderman shows where he flew out above the audience and then got stuck and had to awkwardly hang there for about 10 minutes, but these stories are brilliant.

[andthereisnotragedyinthat]

okay so, my senior year of high school and I’m part of the stage crew for Peter Pan. There’s a scene where Hook and Smee are searching for Peter and the Lost Boys. Now the theater department at my high school isn’t very well funded (in the southern USA, football is king), so the sets we managed to make were pretty kickass for the money we had. We had a structure painted like a big tree stump for the entrance to the Lost Boys’ hideout. You could climb to the top of it, but also go inside it through a trap door that we kept locked up during most of the play.

It’s like our third show and everything has been going surprisingly well. Hook and Smee climb to the top of the “tree trunk”, supposedly looking for Peter and not knowing they’re standing above his hiding spot the whole time.

Turns out someone didn’t close the trapdoor properly, because the second Hook steps on it, he plunges through the thing. He’s able to catch himself, but he’s got his ass and one leg dangling through this hole where it’s like a ten foot drop to the ground. All of us stage crew are literally two feet away from him offstage, just gaping at him because???? Y'all this fall looked BAD. Looked like my dude did the splits in mid air. The whiplash caused his fucking wig to come off. The audience is dead silent, all of us backstage are dead silent, the director is like already looking up how to treat a broken groin.

The kid who was playing Hook was like a fuckin sophomore and he KILLED it. He gave himself a second to catch his breath, never broke character, just looked up at his castmate and growled “Smee, you fool, help me up!”. He ended up playing off the wig thing as an embarrassing comedic bit for Hook, and the play went on. He was completely fine. It was the best thing I’d ever seen.

[squidspawn]

There was an infamous performance of the opera Don Giovanni where in the last act Giovanni was suppose to be dragged into hell via trapdoor but the overweight actor got stuck, leading someone from the audience to shout: “Hey everyone, Hell’s full!!” 

[sarahviehmann]

I’m pretty sure I’ve reblogged this before but the Lefou story has me in tears every time.

[dwlostcompanion]

As someone who did Tech stuff in High school for 4 years, Lefou!

[five-very-happy-years]

I was a costumer on a stage version of Titanic, and in the scene where the women and children are getting in the lifeboats, one of the men (who was supposed to be saying goodbye to his wife he knows he will never see again because his is about to die), realized his fake mustache was falling off and instead of playing it cool… he rips it off his face, and hands it to his wife with the line “Something to remember me by”…it was the funniest thing that I have ever seen in my 8 years in theatre, the entire cast lost their shit laughing at the most dramatic moment possible

[edensgardener]

I am laughing so hard I’ve been crying for ten minutes. Thank you

[commander-vas-normandy]

My high school did Dirty Rotten Scoundrels one year and still one of the best bits, especially on opening night, was some museum bit.

Lights come up on the stage and there’s a statue dead center of the stage that two characters are circling around while flirting. The whole scene goes down without a hitch.

Well, because we couldn’t get a statue prop, the staue was actually one of my friends in just some really good makeup, a perfectly still pose, and plaster in her hair that really sold it.

So then the characters walk off stage and the lights don’t go down. So she waits. She waits. Then she just shrugs with a big, dramatic sigh and storms off stage in a comedic fashion and everyone died laughing in the audience so we rolled with it every night after that.

[santapau]

New Secret Knots comic - "In the Mirror"

[saltwaffle]

why did shipping turn into a contest of “most accurate” or “most likely to be canon” why do i have to get a 40-slide powerpoint, three defense lawyers, a fortune teller, and a background check of myself and my whole immediate family to say i want two ppl to have sloppy makeouts in a car

[thevirdirthara]

Also: when did shipping turn into a ‘which relationship is the most healthiest in real life terms.’ I mean I ship people because I think their story is interesting, not to get relationship advice.

[quackles]

I ship people because I think their story is interesting, not to get relationship advice.

[molly-ren]

hey what's up with the "!" in fandoms? i.e. "fat!" just curious thaxxx <3

I have asked this myself in the past and never gotten an answer.

Maybe today will be the day we are both finally enlightened.

[molly-ren]

woodsgotweird said: man i just jumped on the bandwagon because i am a sheep. i have no idea where it came from and i ask myself this question all the time

Maybe someone made a typo and it just got out of hand?

[stevita]

I kinda feel like panic!at the disco started the whole exclamation point thing and then it caught on around the internet, but maybe they got it from somewhere else, IDK.

The world may never know…

[molly-ren]

Maybe it’s something mathematical?

[michaelblume]

I’ve been in fandom since *about* when Panic! formed and the adjective!character thing was already going strong, pretty sure it predates them.

[hosekisama]

It’s a way of referring to particular variations of (usually) a character — dark!Will, junkie!Sherlock, et cetera. I have suspected for a while that it originated from some archive system that didn’t accommodate spaces in its tags, so to make common interpretations/versions of the characters searchable, people started jamming the words together with an infix.

(Lately I’ve seen people use the ! notation when the suffix isn’t the full name, but is actually the second part of a common fandom portmanteau. This bothers me a lot but it happens, so it’s worth being aware of.)

[nentuaby]

“Bang paths” (! is called a “bang"when not used for emphasis) were the first addressing scheme for email, before modern automatic routing was set up. If you wanted to write a mail to the Steve here in Engineering, you just wrote “Steve” in the to: field and the computer sent it to the local account named Steve. But if it was Steve over in the physics department you wrote it to phys!Steve; the computer sent it to the “phys” computer, which sent it in turn to the Steve account. To get Steve in the Art department over at NYU, you wrote NYU!art!Steve- your computer sends it to the NYU gateway computer sends it to the “art” computer sends it to the Steve account. Etc. (“Bang"s were just chosen because they were on the keyboard, not too visually noisy, and not used for a huge lot already).

It became pretty standard jargon, as I understand, to disambiguate when writing to other humans. First phys!Steve vs the Steve right next to you, just like you were taking to the machine, then getting looser (as jargon does) to reference, say, bearded!Steve vs bald!Steve.

So I’m guessing alternate character version tags probably came from that.

[raincityruckus]

100% born of bang paths. fandom has be floating around on the internet for six seconds longer than there has been an internet so early users just used the jargon associated with the medium and since it’s a handy shorthand, we keep it.

[sassafrassarah]

Absolutely from the bang paths–saw people using them in early online fandom back in 1993 for referring to things.

[taraljc]

I had been doing it for a very, very long time but never actually knew the actual name for it. This is exciting! I like learning things.

[akorah]

Ascent (AO3) (one-shot, 4k)

After Theodore Nott cures Albus Dumbledore's curse in sixth year, Albus realises he's watching the rise of the next dark lord.

“There is a potion I can create from this that will give you back your hand.” Albus frowned. A potion, even a complex potion, seemed too easy of a solution. “There are other steps, of course,” the boy continued. “A potion can cure the curse in your blood, but it’s in your soul, too.” The boy sat, setting the jar with its glowing contents next to his teacup on the edge of Albus’s desk. “What do you know of horcruxes, Headmaster?”

Dumbledore POV. Trigger warning for needles, and generally dark themes. Background Theomione, but this is more of a genfic than a romance.

[sherylholmes]

Basically, one of my favorite Theo Nott one-shots of all time.

[salvadorbonaparte]

Hey did you know I keep a google drive folder with linguistics and language books  that I try to update regularly 

[salvadorbonaparte]

**UPDATE**

I have restructured the folders to make them easier to use and managed to add almost all languages requested and then some

Please let me know any further suggestions

[salvadorbonaparte]

[clockworktardis]

….holy shit. You found the holy grail.

[kittydesade]

….. is this a DIFFERENT person keeping gigabytes worth of language books on google drive? Holy crap.

[wyvyrn]

This. This here. Is why I love Tumblr.❤️❤️❤️

[bard-llama]

Update from OP:

UPDATE because apparently not everyone has seen this yet the new and improved version of this is a MEGA folder: https://mega.nz/folder/kQBXHKwA#-osWRLNCXAsd62ln8wKa8w

2411 files and 819 subfolders

[flootzavut]

Holy shit. OP you are a wonderful human being.

[grendel-menz]

an skeptic accountant in a haunted mansion

[sherylholmes]

Just did a little joyful dance because the book I'm reading unexpectedly uses the Oxford comma.

[imissthembutitwasntadisaster]

Tolkien at the start of the Hobbit: oh I’m going to tell a fun little story for my children about how even the smallest people can make a difference!

Tolkien at the end of the Hobbit, gripping his son’s shoulders intensely: Chris. Christopher. Listen.  Greed will only corrupt you Christopher, it will twist your mind like a poison, like a disease, until you are nothing but a hollow wreck of what you once were.  Also I’ve killed off like half the characters in a battle I don’t even show sorry. 

[sherylholmes]

Shout out to my brain for giving me unsolicited new plot bunnies to pursue instead of letting me focus on the 50 WIPs I've been planning for 15+ years.

[1617]

telling the truth is fun because it’s more chaotic than lying

[sherylholmes]

Next time somebody says Slytherins can't be Moral, I'm going to direct them to this post. This shit right here is how to be consistently Good but also questionably Evil.

[sevssillyincantations-deactivat]

I see your hc of Snape having a clarinet. And I raise you Snape playing violin and piano

Oh baby this is gonna be one long ass post because music is my passion and I think A LOT about musical headcanons of Snape.

I think we all agree that Snape didn’t learn to play an instrument during his childhood. His parents wouldn’t have had the money to pay for the lessons or the instrument itself, but I always imagine that Snape had a great interest in learning some kind of instrument. He has this enorm thirst for knowledge in every aspect and I think music wasn’t excluded in that. Also because playing an instrument has a certain status (meaning you have enough money to learn it) and Snape craved this status.

I like to imagine that he first realized how badly he wanted to play an instrument when he visited the Malfoy manner and saw the huge collection of instruments there. He saw Malfoy playing the piano, too and ever since the thought never let him go.

But I think he didn’t start learning playing until his time as a teacher in Hogwarts. We don’t really know what he was up to as a death eater. But I imagine he wasn’t in a really good place mentally and he barely thought about it anymore.

Now let’s talk instruments:

I can totally 100% imagine Snape playing either piano or violin! Both instruments have this elegance, the whole exterior is simply beautiful and matches Snape perfectly.

I can see him hunched over (specifically hunched, remember in Snape worst memory the way he was hunched over his paper, his nose almost touching the paper) the piano tiles in deep concentration while he learns a new piece. His brows are furrowed and he clicks his tongue every time his fingers accidentally hit the wrong tile or a difficult combination doesn’t work at first try. Then when his muscle memory kicks in and his elegant, long finger hit the right tone almost on their own, he sits upright, takes a deep breath, closes his eyes and starts playing the piece. He loves the sound and being able to create this harmony fills him with pride. His fingers almost dance across the black and white of the piano and it all relaxes him fully. If he starts learning a piece he won’t stop practicing before he got it perfectly. Even if that means a sleepless night.

I don’t know much about playing the violin, but the sound has something melancholic to it and I think that matches Snape’s persona very well. When I think about Snape playing the violin I see the scene from Sherlock in which he stands by the window and plays this melancholic melody over and over again thinking about Irene. (Irene’s theme)

I think while playing the violin he thinks about lily a lot. Her tragic loss, their friendship and their love (wether platonic or not). I see his regret mirrored in the sound of the violin but also new hope.

And here’s why I specifically said clarinet;

first of all it’s a long, elegant, black instrument with many many details and buttons. Just think about it haha!

But the sound of the clarinet is very smooth it reminds me of the smoothness of Snape’s voice. (An example time: 1:44 starts the clarinet solo) It’s also a rather deep instrument. It reaches quite low tones which resonates in the chest and spreads warmth (for me at least).

The clarinet is also a common instrument in jazz and I really like the idea of snape turning on the gramophone and playing some jazz to relax to it.

While playing I also like to imagine him rather hunched in concentration. His fingers pressing the buttons smoothly and precisely, the veins in his hands and forearms prominent. You can see every tendon in his hand move, while his eyes are closed in concentration. The tip of the clarinet placed on his lips.

To make a specific sound you have to flick your tongue at the tip. And it takes some skill… playing the clarinet requires precise finger and tongue movements… just. Think. About. It. Gaaaaaah!

Okay thank you for joining my long ass daydream about Snape playing instruments. I’m sorry for not adding ‘read more’ but I’m writing this on my phone! AND PLEASE LET ME KNOW WHAT YOU THINK AND IF YOU HAVE ANY HEADCANON IN THIS DIRECTION! 🖤🖤🖤

[sherylholmes]

I find it so hilarious that you made this a *buttons* pun. I'm fucking here for it.

[saveourskinship]

mixtapes/misdemeaneours

Pairing: Theodore Nott/Hermione Granger Rating: Teen Tags: Mixtapes, Sixth Year, Post-Hogwarts, HEA

Synopsis: Theo finds a mixtape in the halls of Hogwarts and becomes enamoured.Enamoured with the music. Enamoured with the recorded message. And enamoured with the mixtape’s owner.

Excerpt:

[sherylholmes]

For Reasons, I think we all have Psycho Killer on our Theo mixtapes.

...no? Just me and @saveourskinship ?