Deciphering the Romance Arc. / The main meta event over at tumblr dot com slash winterdaphne2. A multi-part meta project that offers my TJLC reading of the show up through TAB, as of February 2026.
Meta Masterpost. / My other metas. Iāve changed my mind about some things over time, so I donāt agree with everything that I wrote in some of these. But I still agree with a lot of it! Feel free to read and judge for yourself.
Fic
Last Chances. M, 28,552 words. TSOT canon divergence. Alternates between Johnās and Sherlockās perspectives. / āJohnās stag night goes exactly to plan. Well, for John it does. For Sherlock, it doesnāt go to plan at all. After that, nothing goes to planānot for anyone.ā
Forever at a Price. T, 64,226 words. Set during S2. Sherlockās perspective. / A canon-compliant fic that explores Sherlock and Johnās relationship between the pool and the rooftop as Sherlock falls more and more deeply in love. Case fic, pining, and lots of missing scenes.
Eyes Like the Sea. M, 14,055 words. Set after TLD. Sherlockās perspective. / āSherlock and John are in love. After the morgue, maybe that isnāt enough anymore.ā
Note that youāll need to be logged in on ao3 to see my fics.
Sherlock doesnāt wear the suits because he likes the suits. Sherlock wears the suits because heās an ex-junkie trying to make a career out of helping law enforcement, heās trying to get people to take him seriously, heās trying to get people to respect him, to believe him, when he makes a deduction, because if they donāt respect him as an intelligent, competent individual they discount him as a drug addict, as making it up, as lying, as the perpetrator. He is trying, essentially, to run a small business and he needs to look like heās good at what he does, he needs to look worth paying. Sherlock wears the suits because thatās what a consulting detective would wear, thatās the image his clients expect out of a genius. The suits are only there to sell you on Sherlock the Ruthless Genius who will solve your case by any means.
Sherlock likes to wear soft inside out t-shirts and silk dressing gowns and bare feet, and heāll like the way John feels on his skin too, if he ever gets the chance to try it.
So here it is! I commissioned the wonderfull Alessia Pelonzi and I asked her to draw my favourite things in the world (should I say besides my kids..) Sherlock, John and London. And, wow, did she nail it! I adore this, Alessia! THANK YOU!
It's difficult to capture the milieu of an era you don't inhabit. Even capturing everything about the year 2025 - the memes, the slang, the influencers - is difficult because there isn't any single correct way to live in the current year or to feel about what's happening.
Fortunately, the internet is full of information that might never make it into the Encyclopedia Britannica. Or even Wikipedia.
When I write a story set in the past, I want to make my characters think and speak like a person of that era. I look up pictures of what people wore and how they styled their hair, and read what daily routines were like, what they might have talked about. I try to get the technology right by looking up the history of light switches and curling irons and indoor sanitation. I check to see what names were most popular for a man born in 1856 or a woman born in 1920. How many times a day was mail delivered in London in 1881? (Six.) How would people of different classes address one another in 1912? (complicated.) At what age did boys start wearing long trousers in the 1880s? (Thirteen.)
I'm not calling this research work. It's what I enjoy most about writing another period. And I love being able to drop historical trivia into conversations. (You might want to avoid being seated at the same table with me at dinner. I will talk about Victorian mourning customs.)
And it's difficult to even know what to ask yourself. There are so many things we take for granted, like the 5-day work week, compulsory education, standardized time. The best advice I can give is to read books written about a period, or (even better) read books written during that period.
One of the hardest things to get right in an historical story is how people talked. What would you call a secretary in 1920? Did that word even exist? Did it mean something different?
What about idioms? Did people say double down in 1895? Did English people say it, or only Americans? There are significant differences, even today, between the way an American uses the language and how other English speakers use the same words, even common ones. (E.g. "gotten" is American, not British.)
A dictionary/thesaurus has some information that can answer questions like these, but I'd like to share a couple resources you might not have used.
Note: there are many, many resources, and I do not claim to know about them all. These are just what I use often and find reliable.
Google Ngram Viewer scans thousands of books by publication date to give you a word's popularity across time. You can request information for a range of years, and what corpus you'd like to use (e.g. British or American English). From this you'll learn when a word came into use, when it was most popular, and when the usage fell off. If you're trying to compare synonyms, separate the words by comments in the search box.
For idioms, which are not always dated in a dictionary reference, I often just google it: double down idiom origin. From this search, I learn that it's primarily an American idiom, first noted in 1949, and its original context was the game blackjack. (It's also good to check what the sources are. AI makes too many mistakes; do your own checking.)
My favorite online word reference is Online Etymology Dictionary. It didn't give me any help on double down, but I learned that double trouble dates from 1520, double dip is first attested in 1936, and double-jointed was in use by 1828.
Wiktionary also gives usage information, and contains quite a lot of non-English words.
As for names, my favourite source is Behind the Name. It has sites for first names and surnames that will tell you a name's origin, other people who have that name, variations of it across regions. You can look up names by gender and nationality. There's even a Name Generator, and the beginnings of a Place Names reference.
In addition, it's useful to know what names were popular in what year, so you don't give a character a name that's inappropriate in a given time period. In Behind the Name, click on any name to get popularity graphs by country. Then you won't give an 1895 character a name that wasn't popular until 1985, e.g. Tiffany. Other sites list popular names by era.
I do not deny being a word nerd (1951, U.S. student slang, probably an alteration of 1940s slangĀ nertĀ "stupid or crazy person," itself an alteration of nut).
You may not care of characters in an historical romance are using words that weren't yet in use. I do care. It bugs me when I read a story set in a past era where the characters all talk like American adolescents in 2026.
Unless the characters are all time travellers, of course. Even so, learning the idioms of the era you're travelling to ought to be part of a time traveller's education. That's what authors are, you know. We travel through time.
If you find this helpful, please reblog! š And if you have other resources, please share!
Tagging a few who write: @mydogwatson @totallysilvergirl @raina-at @lisbeth-kk @221beloved @meetinginsamarra @copperplatebeech @naefelldaurk @7-percent @thegildedbee @helloliriels @stellacartography @chriscalledmesweetie
When publishing in the mid-1920s, Watson would have had a good idea of the growing appeal of the vampire figure to the popular imagination, but no amount of fiddling around with chronology could enable us to place the events of this adventure before the writing of Bram Stoker's Dracula. At the time of Holmes' and Watson's visit to Sussex, the famous vampire story was Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla.
Serialised in the early 1870s, the novella tells the professedly real story of the young Laura, and her sexually-charged relationship with the mysterious Carmilla. Holmes' own vampire case, though eventually not supernatural, also relies on preconceived notions and fears of āunpredictableā foreign women. Carmilla was partly illustrated by D. H. Friston, who would be responsible for the very first portraits of Holmes and Watson a few years later.
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This is what the other side looks like, when I bought it I immediately knew I had to embroider my favourite H/W quotes on the back <3 (with my sewing machine btw I didnāt do it that uniformly by hand) anyways Iām very proud of this itās such a cool object and I canāt wait to spread my message to the world :D (btw the red is inspired by @contact-guy obviously and I love the effect)
Who were all the people at John and Mary's wedding?
Sherlock, Greg, Molly, and Mrs. Hudson were there. Tom came as Molly's plus one and Mr. Chatterjee came as Mrs. Hudson's plus one. TSOT also introduces Janine, David, and Sholto and explains that they're each connected to John or Mary in some way, so they make sense as wedding guests. But that's just nine people, and John and Mary had a whole reception hall full of people who we've never seen before. Who are they?
They aren't family. John says that Harry didn't come, and we know from one of Sherlock and John's first conversations in ASIP that John doesn't have other living family members who he's close with. John does have at least one cousin who attended the wedding, because Sherlock tells Mary during the wedding planning that John's cousin hates her. But that's just one more person, maybe two if the cousin brought a plus one. Some fans have speculated that Stella and Ted from the blog are related to John, but they sent a telegram, so they weren't there. Obviously Mary didn't have any "family" there, which Sherlock and Mary confirm during the wedding planning.
Mike Stamford didn't come, and it's clearly established that John doesn't have a lot of other friends. In addition to Harry and Mike, Bill Murray is a frequent commenter on John's blog, so maybe he and his wife were there. When I first started typing this up I thought John had a few more phantom friends who regularly commented on the blog, but then I looked through all the comments and I think it's just Bill Murray. So if the cousin brought a plus one and Bill Murray and his wife came, that's only four more people.
Other major/minor characters weren't there: no Mycroft, no Sally Donovan, no Anderson. Muddying things further, Sherlock skips through several telegrams without reading who they're from, so John and Mary have even more mystery friends...or maybe Bill Murray didn't show, either.
So who are all those people? Are they all Mary's friends, and Mary just did a really good job of quickly making friends when she came to London and established her Mary Morstan identity? There's at least one bridesmaid other than Janine sitting at the front table during Sherlock's speech, so maybe. Who is Archie's mom, and how do they know her? Are all these people coworkers from John and Mary's clinic?
I think them being from the clinic feels like the best explanation, because it would explain why all of these people are logical wedding guests but also entirely unimportant, so that we never see or hear from them again.
Idk, it's just kind of weird to me, because neither John nor Mary seems like they should have a lot of friends. So I guess a whole hall full of people who probably don't know John, Sherlock, or Mary very well got to listen to Sherlock's love-confession best man speech. š
