ATTENTION pirates, pirate lovers, & #piratecore perusers: PLEASE listen to ship in a bottle by fin aka steffan argus - & his whole album lost at sea. i really like the song abandon ship too. thank me later
“It may be relevant that I’m Catholic, and so supernatural events are not entirely ruled out. One time I was going to write a book which was sort of ‘The Exorcist in San Bernardino.’ … I got a book by Malachi Martin which was actual transcripts of exorcisms—dialogues between priests and devils—and I thought, ‘Cool! Wow, boy, I’ve got all my research right here. This is great.’ And I opened the book, and on the first page it says, ‘The author and publisher advise that anyone reading this book say the following prayer before and after each chapter.’ And I slammed it shut and thought, ‘Well, I don’t need that. Uh-uh. I ain’t doing that.’”
in 1983, the metamythical fantasy writer Tim Powers wrote a book called The Anubis Gates, about time travel and egyptian mythology and a shedload of good drama and memorable phrases - and in the early 90s someone lent us a copy of it and we fell in love with almost all of his books, pre-existing and as they continued to come out
so today we just got the audiobook version of this novel - and it started suddenly a bunch of pages into the book! but the info says "unabridged" so is it possible it was an entirely new later edition and he trued some of it down?
well we have corresponded with him about his books, so we've just emailed him to ask what the deal is, because it's very autistically upsetting to have a favourite book change, but if it was the author's intention then we will feel differently about that
edit: okay well that's embarrassing - turns out Audible (we just cancelled our subscription because fuck gen AI but we're using up our credits) have done the unthinkable and included a "teaser snippet" in the opening credits before the book actually starts - how embarrassing but what an awful practice, we hate that as much as "next time" at the end of tv shows, and that's a lot
"Ssshut up," Crowley hisses, not bothering to unslump himself from the tabletop. "You're in love with a human, you don't get an opinion."
"Better a human than a loyalist," Sherlock sniffs, and that gets Crowley to jerk his head up.
"Oi! He's not— I mean, he wasn't—"
"He was, then he wasn't, then he was again," Sherlock singsongs, before turning serious. "Once a good little loyal subject of Heaven, always one. Face it, the very fact that he hasn't Fallen means that he will always go back to them."
Crowley cradles his head in his hands, feeling far too drunk for this, or perhaps not nearly drunk enough. "That's not… He wasn't…"
A little tidbit of a scene from a much, much larger AU that I'm honestly not sure will ever get written in earnest, but that has been a project @sheliesshattered and I have circled back to many times over the years
This is post s2 of Good Omens and… somewhere in the BBC Sherlock timeline, probably post s2 but s3 & s4 don't really work with this au. Set in the universe of Tim Powers' novel Declare, though I'm hoping to write this such that you don't have to have read the book (but it certainly helps). Sherlock (and Mycroft, and others) are another form of Fallen Angel who have remained earthbound rather than ever joining Hell, and Sherlock & Crowley are ofc frenemy drinking buddies
More under the cut
For anyone who has read it: After the end of Declare, Andrew & Elena retired somewhere in the UK together, taking on the very common name of Watson. They settled down and had a couple of kids. Twins, in fact. Almost like one person split in two, you might say. Which they try not to be too freaked out about, but also they're really tempting fate when they name the kids Harriet and John, after Harry St John Philby. John (and Harry, to some extent) grows up to follow in his parents' footsteps, including certain secret missions in the mountains of Afghanistan. When he's invalided home, he assumes Declare has no more use for him, until he is contacted once more to be a 'special assistant' on one of their higher-level projects here at home in London, at which point he is assigned to shadow Sherlock & assist him in any way he might need. John doesn't know exactly what Sherlock is, at first, but he's weirdly reminded of some of his parents' stories of 'Our Stepmother' in the USSR, and he's about to learn that Operation Declare is a lot deeper, older, and closer to home than he ever imagined.
That's the starting point of Part 1 of this AU.
For those who haven't read Declare: Sherlock (and Mycroft, and others) are a different sort of Fallen Angel, who never joined Hell after falling from Heaven, but rather made a home wherever they could on Earth, becoming known as nature spirits, fae, djinn, etc. (Djinn is the most commonly used term in the universe of Declare, so that's the terminology John uses, and they are explicitly stated to be fallen angels.) They've been neutral in the Heaven vs Hell war, tho Heaven definitely views them as enemies and Hell views them as… frenemies? Enemy of my enemy? Not worth bothering with? They are largely free agents, with some different powers & limitations compared to angels and demons, since they don't have the power concentration/strength in numbers of either Heaven or Hell behind them, and their own schisms and internal power struggles, separate from anything to do with Heaven and Hell.
Part 2 of the au would be after Crowley and Aziraphale fend off the apocalypse in GO s1 and become free agents themselves. Suddenly, Sherlock has a couple of rogue agents, formerly of Heaven and Hell, in his city, where before they were Officially Posted There, so he (mostly) would avoid them, though he and Crowley have definitely crossed paths before. Those two are very much frenemies, especially since the Notpocalypse. (John, for his part, has largely come to terms with the whole djinn thing. He is not happy to learn about angels and demons in the truer sense, though.)
And this scene here? IDK, Part 3, I guess, but maybe just a little aside for Crowley angst after GO s2, maybe not a whole fic, until/unless there's some interesting fodder for this au in GO s3, thwarting the second coming with Sherlock & John in tow maybe… (and Crowley and Aziraphale having to figure out their relationship while the other supernatural entity/ies around them already have their shit together)
I'm currently reading 'The Stress of Her Regard' by Tim Powers. I never knew the Romantic Poets vs Vampires was what I was missing from my life... But it really was.
Nine chapters in and loving their different approaches.
Keats: I shall study their ways in the hopes of one day besting them.
Shelley: I shall skilfully out-manover them.
Byron: Everyone get in my Napoleon cosplay carriage. (Leans out the window) Come at me you f*#&!**!!
"For respectable reasons, I find it useful to approach writing in a provisional state of paranoid schizophrenia - to be a paranoid schizophrenic from nine to five, and then take off the funny hat and go have dinner and behave like a normal person. It’s nice to visit and not have to live there, so I commute to paranoia every morning and come home at night, and I feel free to take days off and not go in at all, I don’t gel my mail there. But for the purposes of my work, especially plotting it, and outlining it, it’s real valuable to think: ‘Nothing is a coincidence. Everything contains a message. There arc no random events, no coincidences. And whatever someone really means, it's not what they just said.'"
-- Tim Powers, In Praise of Paranoia, Locus #446, 1998
