Sherlock

Finished

Two years.

3 NOVELS worth of words.

I’ve lost track of how many fandoms.

And the epic is finished.

On His Brother-in-Law’s Secret Service started as Sherlock fanfic. Then… The Man from UNCLE sneaked in. Then Torchwood. And Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And Doctor Who. Then Cabin Pressure. And The Avengers. And X-Men. (and a very sneaky reference to two other fandoms, one that NO ONE caught until I outed the character, and the other than no one has called me on yet.)

Oh, and there are the side stories. Off the Main Sequence adds another 20K words to the story, and fill in some holes in the main storyline.

I can’t believe that this thing is done. Wow.

Now back to work on original stuff.

Posted by EASchechter in fandom, fanfic, Sherlock, 0 comments

Crawls out from under a rock.

Yes, I know. It’s been a while. just about a month.

Busy month, healthwise. Apparently, I’ve run down the warranty on the meat puppet.

Since September 1st, I’ve been told:

  • I have bursitis in my right knee.
  • I have non-celiac gluten intolerance. (not quite celiac disease, but it behaves the same).
  • I have early stage arthritis in my right foot.
  • I also have tendinitis in my right foot.

The last two add up to this:

boot

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Which means that for the past week, I’ve been unable to do anything BUT sit.  (I can’t drive). So I’ve been writing. The fanfic epic is finally done (that’s another post), and I’m about to dive into a knitting project that MUST be done by next week.

What then? Well, I have a draft (Tales from the Arena)  that needs to be polished so I can send it out. That’s the next thing on my to-do list. I also have to decide what I’m doing with some other things.

So… may I please have some boring now?

 

Posted by EASchechter in a-writers-life-is-never-dull, fandom, fanfic, I really want some dull, Sherlock, Tales from the Arena, to-dos, 0 comments

How many shades of what?

My brain doesn’t want me to work on anything productive today (by which I mean paying copy). Instead, it wants to play, and write fanfiction.

I’m an odd duck among writers. I love fanfiction. I know there are writers out there who think fanfiction is TEH EVIL OMG!!!! I’m not one of them. I love fanfiction. I write it, I read it, and if it ever comes out that there is fanfiction of one of my works, I will know that I’ve made it. It means that someone likes what I write enough to want to play in my world. How is this a bad thing?

Well, okay. It’s a bad thing when someone tried to take advantage of the author (which supposedly happened to Marion Zimmer Bradley. I say supposedly, because I’ve finally heard the other side of the story, and the question of who took advantage of whom is open to debate).

And now we have the incredible popularity of 50 Shades of Gray, which the author admits started as Twilight fanfiction.  I haven’t read Twilight, and based on the reviews I’ve read, I’ve no intention of reading 50 Shades of Gray. Therefore, I am not qualified to have an opinion on the subject either way.  So I’m not going to get in to the ethics of sanding off the serial numbers on a fanfic and cashing in on someone else’s fanbase. It’s a sticky situation, and I’m not sure where I stand.

As I said, I love fanfiction. I’ve written fanfiction for Man from UNCLE, for Gatchaman and for Sherlock, all three of which offer some really challenging characters to write (try getting into the heads of Solo and Kuryakin, or Condor Joe, or Sherlock — I still haven’t mastered Sherlock, so I write from Watson’s POV).

I think it is a fantastic training ground for young writers. Getting a handle on someone else’s world, on someone else’s characters, that can be challenging. Doing it well can be even more challenging. But there is something relaxing about not having to make all the rules. If you play in someone else’s sandbox, you come into it with an established structure and a world already built. You can focus on telling the story you want to tell. For me, that’s playtime.  And for a number of other writers, too. Elizabeth Bear writes some really nice Man from UNCLE fanfic (including one that I cannot find anymore that was a crossover with Torchwood). Cecilia Tan writes Harry Potter fanfiction.  And  Melanie Rawn used to write the most amazing Star Wars fanfiction under the name Ellen Randolph (sadly, not on the web and no longer in print.)

So,  whenever someone says “You’re not a REAL writer, you just write fanfiction,” I can point them at my Amazon author page and say “Oh, really?”

Fanfiction is fun. I’m all for having fun.

Posted by EASchechter in ex-cathedra from my navel, fandom, fanfic, Sherlock, writing, 0 comments

The quiet buildup…

I’ve been quiet.  I realize that I’ve been quiet. Which is no way to go in to the week before the release. However, there’s been a LOT of things going on. Some personal, some professional, some just plain silly.

On the personal front, I’m stressing a little (okay, a LOT). My son gets tubes put in his ears tomorrow morning. So I’ve been preoccupied with making sure all the ducks are in a row for that.

On the writing front, I’ve been plugging away at both Heart’s Master, and at my very first Sherlock fanfic. (If anyone is interested, it’s over here.) I will freely admit that the fanfic took over my brain for almost a week, so not as much got done on Heart’s Master as probably should have been done.

Building up for the next couple of days, leading into the 20th and the release, I’ll be starting an LJ author chat on Thursday the 17th, talking about Princes of Air and writing and life, and revealing the SUPER SEKRIT PROJECT! You can find the Circlet Press LJ over here, and I’ll be mirroring the posts a day later here.

And now, let me leave you with this, the FIRST REVIEW OF PRINCES OF AIR!!!

 

 

Posted by EASchechter in book reviews, circlet, fanfic, Heart's Master, heeheeheehee, Princes of Air, Release date, Sherlock, SQUEEE, upcoming books, writing, writing-mom, 0 comments

Quiet…

>I realize this morning that I’ve been very quiet in the blog recently. Part of that has been the holidays and the two weeks that my son had off from school that kept me from doing much writing of any kind. However, I know the truth…

I have a new fandom.

I am a somewhat… obsessive individual. When I fall into something, I fall HARD. And I tend to focus on it to the detriment of everything else. Usually, it takes a few weeks for the initial obsession to ease up enough that I can think about other things.

So, the timing is about right for me to be able to start to think about writing again. Because it’s been about six weeks since I fell in love with Sherlock.

If you don’t know, Sherlock is the new BBC adaptation of the Sherlock Holmes stories, updated to bring our favorite detective and his Boswell… er.. Blogger, Dr. John Watson, into the 21st century. There are three episodes to the first season, and they’ll be starting filming the second season in the spring.  The show stars Benedict Cumberbatch as Sherlock, and Martin “I’m-gonna-be-a-Hobbit” Freeman as Watson.

Now, Martin Freeman is the most adorable BAMF! ever. He is going to ROCK as Bilbo.

However, the one to steal the show is Ben Cumberbatch. Oh… boy….

He’s just… yeah. You have to watch the show to see. But I am a sucker for a deep voice, and one reviewer I’ve read said that Ben Cumberbatch sounds like a jaguar hiding inside a cello.

Trust me. TOTALLY worth six weeks obsession. But now I have to get back to work.

Soon as I finish looking at more pictures of Sherlock…

Posted by EASchechter in fandom, Sherlock, why-the-writing-is-slow, 1 comment