Lesser-known steps of the writing process:
Finding all the paragraphs where you used some hyper-specific word more than once
Rearranging paragraphs that you swear you wrote in the right order but turned out to be totally backwards
Going for a walk, coming up with the perfect line, and forgetting it as soon as you get home and open your laptop
Creating a separate document where you can dump all of those nice sentences that no longer fit in anywhere
Waking up in a cold sweat because so-and-so was supposed to be barefoot but never actually took his shoes off
he's so me
Knit Vests // Frankie Print Co
Some of these Holmes stories honestly are the fanfic equivalent of when an Algebra textbook goes “solution is trivial and left as an exercise for the reader”
The Shore - Barry McGlashan , 2023.
British, b. 1974 -
Oil on paper over panel , 12 1/4 x 8 1/8 in.
In the early 1930s, scholarly studies were done on the impact of screen stars on teenagers, because of fears that the movies were sexualizing them. These studies found that teenage girls learned sex techniques through watching Garbo’s sex scenes, especially those in Flesh and the Devil; they then practiced her techniques at home with their girlfriends. Raymond Daum described Garbo’s many young female fans as having “schoolgirl crushes on her” that “defined a national idolatry.” And knowledge of Garbo’s non-heteronormative sexuality was spread through lesbian networks “from coast to coast.” Moreover, the 1920s was an era of commercial expansion in which the ranks of saleswomen and typists, careers dominated by young women, increased. These women made enough money to see a movie more than once. They identified with female stars and liked to see them in powerful roles. Greta Garbo in Flesh and the Devil (1926)
(Sorry for quality) From ‘Holmes & Watson’, by Lee Shackleford.
Candies - Matias Quetglas , 1975-76.
Spanish , b. 1946 -
Egg tempera on board , 46 x 53 cm.
We were on location somewhere and he serenaded me at a restaurant table in the middle of a very crowded restaurant in the evening … and when he serenaded me, he really did serenade me. He wasn’t taking the mickey, it was absolutely serious as only Jeremy could be serious in a situation like that. I was sitting there, and suddenly his voice was floating out all over this restaurant, and he improvised this song all about me and my beautiful wife and my beautiful son. I was absolutely crimson with embarrassment. But it didn’t make me love him any the less. - David Burke on Jeremy Brett’s irresistible urge to sing
The problem with saying that ACD coded Holmes as gay is Late Victorian gay culture was OBSESSED with Classicism, which Holmes has no interest in. Mycroft would've been more recognizable to Victorian audiences as gay, considering he runs an establishment intending to give men the benefits of domesticity in a way that is not reliant on women. It is also named after a Greek philosopher.
That’s very true, though I wouldn’t say Holmes shows no interest in the classics at all—he does compare Horace and Hafiz, with noticeable appreciation. I’m of the school that believes Doyle wrote Holmes as gay just by recording the traits of men he’d known and loved who were queer (or who he wished were uninterested in any intimacy but his friendship) rather than deliberately queercoding him, and we’re left to fill in the blanks of what he could be. I read Holmes as intersex and gay and mycroft as asexual, but the reading could easily be reversed.