What am I doing?

Just finished a pro story that WOULD NOT DIE OMG. I cannot write short stories. Anyone who’s witnessed any of my fanfiction should be hilariously aware I cannot write short stories. My first novel was 200,000 words, FFS, of course I can’t. Masked Ball was supposed to be 4000 words and is 31,000. This was supposed to be 5,000 and is 10,500. I just hope they actually PRINT it.

Writing. The only career in which you have to apologise for doing twice as much work for free.

Now  I will be lying on the floor and drinking and maybe emailing people and replying to comments. (Thank you, everyone who’s commented/kudos’d Masked Ball!)

Still, if I do two more of these things, I maybe have a collection. But first, I have a week to somehow do all the editing on the book and write a lecture because it would be so nice to, for once in my LIFE go on holiday and not bring any work with me.

Meanwhile...

My mother on the phone to Little Waidbrother: Oh dear. Oh dear. Oh DEAR!
Me: What? What?

My mother: Tell Waid about it, she might want to put it in a  novel.

Me: Yes! I might want to put it in a novel!

Little Waidbrother: YES, HAND ME OVER I WILL TELL HER.
Me, on the phone to Little Waidbrother: Oh dear. Oh dear. Oh DEAR!

My little brother has hero-worshipped Middle Waidbrother for twenty-seven years. Middle Brother is five years older, 6’5, extremely handsome, fights crime with his brain (YES REALLY!) and now has a lovely bride to be, a little boy, and a sick father in law he helps take care of. So he is legitimately quite impressive.

Little Brother was always the slightly irresponsible, feckless, unfocused one, who went off the rails quite badly and scared us all when he was a teenager. But he has buckets of charm and musical ability and has pulled himself together pretty nicely, and he’s very geeky,  and he and I have always been pretty close despite the seven year age gap.

Middle Brother took Little Brother on his stag weekend in Bratislava and killd Little Brother’s respect for him stone dead. Murdered it. Dismembered it. I really don’t think it will ever quite come back. It is kind of terriblawesome.

Little Brother: [Whose thousand-yard stare can be heard down the phone] They kept making each other drink till they vomited and then keep drinking. Down pints in one go. Over and over again. Why do you do that, what is the point of that, why. I’ve thrown up before from drinking too much but I didn’t SET OUT to do that.  They ganged up on me when I didn’t want to drink any more. They all walked around with no clothes on...

Me: Oh wow, it’s like every stereotype about boys I never believed was true.

Little Brother: They went to the loo with the door open. They’re deaf, so they can’t hear the sounds. I’ve seen more of my brother’s penis this weekend than I ever needed to see.

Me: OH MY GOD YOU POOR BABY! [I was not mocking him, I was appalled at Middle Brother and wanted to wrap MY POOR WRONGED  TINY SURPRISINGLY CIVILISED BABY BROTHER up in a blanket and give him cocoa]. But... Middle Brother’s always so responsible!

Little Brother: *scoffs* I had to stop him getting arrested by the Slovakian police. I had to give him my shirt because he was wearing only a mankini. I had to carry him home [he is six inches shorter]. Twice. He ended up in a pink Power Ranger costume, being sick into a bag. I had to put him on the plane, telling him “just act normal, for twenty more seconds,” and him going “I can’t, I can’t, I’m fucked, I can’t.” It was terrible. Terrible. Terrible. Civilised! He is a little boy. I feel so much more grown up.

It’s pretty much a short story right there;  a young man comes of age but his view of his idolised brother will never be the same...

The sequel was that while Little Waidbrother had evidently assumed Middle Waidbrother was too committed to his course/drunk to care what Little Waidbrother thought of him, when Dad went to see him a few days later he found a still-hungover young father painfully conscious his little brother heavily disapproved of him. And talking about never doing it again and maybe getting new friends. As well he might, though I am afraid the horse has bolted. I would hate to be disapproved of by LIttle Waidbrother so hard, and he never even hero-worshipped me in the first place.

I am so sorry for/to the people of Bratislava.

And it's done!

Do let me know if anthing is still messed up -- I've never particularly felt the lack of a beta before but I did, rather on this one. I realise that posting at midnight last night was not entirely wise; I've fixed everything (including a technically fine but clumsy repetition) that I'm aware of.
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Six months after Holmes’ return from the dead, the delicate equilibrium in Baker Street is disturbed when a stranger walks out of the London fog with a case – for Watson. Holmes is wary, Watson is fascinated. But who is the man calling himself Álvaro de León? And what does he really want?

In this chapter: Álvaro de León's alter ego returns with a final request.

Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4, Chapter 5, Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 and Chapter 11 on A03. Comment either there or here.

Well, this was the first piece of H/W I've written in which there's actual on-page sex, rather than just the before or after. I HOPE YOU APPROVE. I have still to post a bit of Avengers crack, and then maybe -- MAYBE --  I will write WiL-verse porn for Wordstrings (and then get back to Antidote to Sorrow). But first i have a book to edit and a lecture to write -- I have no idea why I agree to these things.

As you may have seen, I published today's chapter early, but I didn't get a chance to link here as it's my birthday and I was off shopping with my mother in Brighton, where  we failed to buy anything. No, anything at all. Unless you count a couple of doughnuts.

* *

Six months after Holmes’ return from the dead, the delicate equilibrium in Baker Street is disturbed when a stranger walks out of the London fog with a case – for Watson. Holmes is wary, Watson is fascinated. But who is the man calling himself Álvaro de León? And what does he really want?

In this chapter: HEARTBREAK,  REPRESSION, ANGST AND MISERY.  (coz it's my birthday.)

While I'm posting Masked Ball (3 chapters up, more this evening) I might as well also cop to this Pepper/Tony fic I wrote a few months back. I didn't mean to cheat on Holmes, it just kind of fell out.

Month of May. In which Pepper's birthday will always be the anniversary of Tony's kidnapping, things happen to and around Tony Stark in May a lot, and Lady Gaga has the flu. 3606 words.

1. Having finished a novel


2. Having  signed a publishing deal


3. Having actually got paid for it (which is supposed to be synonymous with 2, but HA.)


4. Not currently depressed and only manageably anxious


5. Most importantly, had finished the piece of fanfic I owe Tweedisgood and Perverse_Idyll.

perverse_idyll

tweedisgood

I just need to swing through quickly and tell you all to read this Sherlock fanfic on Ao3 by M_Leigh. It is agonising, one story that I think hardly needs the touch of slash to reinforce its emotional punch. It deals, unlike any other post-Reichenbach fic I've seen, with the particular agony not of "simply" losing one's best friend,  but of losing him to suicide, a form of torture Canon Watson is at least partially spared. But John cannot stop re-examining his every memory of Sherlock's life in the awful light of its apparent ending, cannot stop speculating about his earlier years as always unbearably focused towards self-destruction.

Every memory he has of Sherlock has become about his decision to throw himself off of a building. Every one. He cannot look back at anything Sherlock said or did without wondering: was that a clue? Was that a sign? Was he thinking about it even then? Or even if he wasn’t, if nothing about it was premeditated, the fact remains that somewhere inside of him resided some impulse, some urge, a kind of self-destruction that went far beyond hypodermic needles and a seven percent solution.

You missed it, the voice tells him, almost gleeful.There were so many signs, so many obvious signs he left for you, and you missed them, and now he’s dead.

He has never been this angry about anything, at anybody, and maybe that’s because he never loved anybody like this, either; he would always have thrown himself in front of a bullet to save somebody but only for Sherlock would he have done so with a kind of effortlessness, a pure and unadulterated joy at the sacrifice. But he could not step in front of Sherlock to save him, because there was no bullet, there was no aggressor save Sherlock himself, and John could not divide the Sherlock he knew and the foreign Sherlock he clearly never knew at all; he could not stand between those two selves and give himself up. He wishes he could have. He would have done it without thinking twice.