Fic meme

[nineveh_uk]

Courtesy of lilliburlero

Fic Work-In-Progress Guessing Game

Comment with a word, any word. If it’s in my WIP document(s) I’ll answer your comment with the sentence that it appears in.

Comments

[white_hart]

Muffin (or cake, if there are no muffins).

Sometimes I fear I have a one-track mind...

[nineveh_uk]

There are no muffins! I shall have to remedy this with judicious editing. There is, however, plenty of cake.

Wimsey ate a slice of cake and resolved to invite him for dinner.

[gramarye1971]

Resign.

(If you have 'resigned' or 'resignation' or something similar, that works, too!)

[nineveh_uk]

At last, believing that he has added all he can to magical lore, he resolves that he will give up the use of the Elixir of Life and resign himself to death, content to have added to the store of magical knowledge.

[dbassassin]

Station

For some reason I'm thinking about trains, today.

[nineveh_uk]

Not quite the same sort of station, but...

'We keep a small station of the Magical Law Enforcement Patrol down there; they spend most of their time escorting holidaymakers who’ve had one too many back to their hotels, though there was a chap a couple of months ago who pinched a pedalo and set out for Naples.'

[dbassassin]

Ha!

If I had to identify an England cricketer who might be a wizard, Flintoff would be a good guess. :D

[nineveh_uk]

How could you possibly guess that I was thinking of him when I wrote that line ;-)

[dbassassin]

Is it possible to read "pedalo" and not think Flintoff? I certainly can't.

[castiron]

Edition.

[nineveh_uk]

'I was sitting there, in that chair, the one behind you imitatin’ a pile of firewood, collating that rather nice edition of Amadis - we seem to be the only things to have ‘scaped harm – and whoof!'

[el_staplador]

Inspired.

[nineveh_uk]

Antonio’s anomalous position as a Muggle in the widowed Duchess's household is obscure and has inspired much debate.

[a_t_rain.livejournal.com]

THIS NEEDS TO EXIST.

[nineveh_uk]

I am working on it, though I fear it may not be any time soon! It is, of course, from a piece about that well-known wizarding play The Duchess of Malfoi.

[el_staplador]

I am very interested indeed.

[nineveh_uk]

It is a sort of spin-off of the eternal crossover WIP, in which Wimsey's attendance at a performance of The Duchess of Malfoi reveals in important plot point. So naturally I had to add to the endless list of WIPs by starting to write stuff about it.

[lilliburlero]

Blink. Or blank.

[nineveh_uk]

I can do both, though neither particularly exciting, I'm afraid!

He blinked and sat up.

*

'By the way, the London office has written to say they’ve drawn a blank and sent it on to Paris.'

[lilliburlero]

Thank you anyway!

(When I did it on tumblr people from Histories fandom gave me the kind of concrete nouns that often work well for medieval-set fic, of which I don't have any ip, and it kept on throwing up the same thrilling sentence about the sort of prosaic items that might be considered useful guest-gifts in the cold winter of '47.)

[el_staplador]

I have been using the verb-adjectives from my 'how depressed are you today' test (mainly because I happened to have it open in another tab the first time round), which seem to be sufficiently common but active enough to pull up interesting sentences.

[nineveh_uk]

A cunning ploy!

A 'how depressed are you today' test seems very sensible. I have a 'have you got flu or just a headache' one.

[nineveh_uk]

It's interesting what comes up with something and what doesn't. The one I'm surprised didn't for me is elmey's "wicked" - not least because it comes up in Sayers and the majority of the WIPs I'm searching have suitable subject matter. But somehow it hasn't got in there. Yet.

[caulkhead]

Brandy

[nineveh_uk]

Now this was one I could feel confident would produce a positive result!

Possibly, thought Wimsey, he was a little embarrassed at having enjoyed the existence of the ’95 brandy, hitherto unsuspected by his master.

[perennialanna]

Soup.

[nineveh_uk]

I was about to say "I do not like soup, there will be no soup in my fic," but I was wrong. There is soup, albeit metaphorical, in two successive sentences.

Only the problem with crime was that it was all very well to pull Gerry from the soup, and nothin’ nasty to come of it, and to fiddle around finding diamond brooches and sorting out inheritances and the like, but it wasn’t always like that. Come to that, Gerry’s soup had been pretty hot, and the Dawson case downright sticky.

[auntyros.livejournal.com]

Boiled.

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

'My lord, the child is twelve years old and she has never sliced a loaf of bread, nor boiled a kettle. '

[ylla.livejournal.com]

Rabbit

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

It was not, however, champing grasses of the forest’s ferny floor, but what looked like a dead rabbit.

[ylla.livejournal.com]

Ooh, intriguing!

I am impressed that your WIPs contain a rabbit (even dead). Although to be fair I'm impressed by anyone who has WIPs!

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

I was quite surprised, but there it was!

[azdak.livejournal.com]

Oh my God, is this a carniverous horse?! Wait, is it a thestral?

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

I see you remember your Harry Potter well!

[elmey.livejournal.com]

wicked

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

Apparently I don't have any WIPs containing the word "wicked". I'm pretty surprised at this! It's only in electronic form, so I could have it in some notes, but the obvious suspect yielded nothing on checking. I can think of one place it could go, though, so shall make sure to included.

I can manage an 'evil' though: 'You can tell these chaps to stow their nonsense about an evil sorcerer doing away with poor old [X].'

[elmey.livejournal.com]

I'm really surprised at the lack of "wicked". It definitely must be included!

I'll make a wild stab and guess that the "evil sorcerer" is from the neverending crossover WIP.

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

Sayers uses it (in dialogue) quite a bit, so there's definitely pastiche!fail going on there!

from the neverending crossover WIP.

However did you guess....

[marginaliana]

elbow

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

Terence had come up with a set of dress robes in a sleek navy wool satin, broad outer sleeves turned back to the elbow to display a mauve silk lining, with piping in the same at collar and pointed cuffs and embroidered arrowheads above the skirt pleats.

[wellinghall.livejournal.com]

Daimler

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

Bunter had been despatched to fetch the Daimler in the second week.

[wellinghall.livejournal.com]

Thank you.

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

I fear that it is not the most exciting sentence containing the word Daimler ever, but it seemed to be the only one there was!

[wellinghall.livejournal.com]

I thought there had to be at least one.

[a-t-rain.livejournal.com]

Crocodile.

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

I can do this one! It's from a sort of Lovecraftian parody.

'They seem very keen on crocodiles for a people who built a city in the middle of a desert.'

[joyeuce]

Clarinet.

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

I fear that my WIPs appear to be entirely devoid of wind instruments, but I can come up with violins:

The musical interludes proved really quite decent, and served their purpose nicely by enabling one to judge rapidly who among ones new neighbours was capable of ordinary conversation with a Muggle by dint of the responses to a mild comment about the violins.

[azdak.livejournal.com]

Ecclesiastical?

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

'I was not especially interested in Scandinavian ecclesiastical architecture, and after a number of expeditions to the city’s more notable sites, I found myself at something of a loose end.'

[legionseaglelj.livejournal.com]

Ooh! That sounds like a touch of the old M.R.James.

Oxford.

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

*Hastily re-writes the circumstances under which Bunter learnt Swedish massage to include a really creepy ghost-story...*

He had no illusions as to his qualification for the task: an Oxford MA he might be, and he had taken a First at that, but that was in another country.

[azdak.livejournal.com]

I was confident you wouldn't let me down! And I feel an immediate sympathy with the narrator of this fragment.

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

'Tis Bunter, explaining why he went to the Swedish massage class instead.

Remarkably I actually have two instances of "ecclesiastical", the other being David Eddings fantasy church politics - ah, my teenage years!

[azdak.livejournal.com]

Well, that explains the immediate sympathy!
A Bunter who can do Swedish massage isan improvement even on canon!Bunter...

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

I'm sure that canon Bunter can do Swedish massage, it's just never mentioned! (In Strong Poison Wimsey thinks of Bunter 'prescrib[ing] a hot bath and massage],] but it doesn't specify who does the massage. Oh dear, does this mean I'm going to have to write "The Twisted Tale of the Missing Masseur"?)

[azdak.livejournal.com]

What an excellent idea :-)

[dolorous-ett.livejournal.com]

Eldritch

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

After a fruitless computer search I was going to admit defeat, and then I thought "I bet those longhand notes for a Lovecraft parody contain it" and lo!

"More eldritch lizards. I mean, they aren't bad, as lizards go, but it isn't very imaginative. You'd think they might ring the changes with the odd porcupine or something."

(And hello! Hopefully I might manage to be in your neck of the woods this summer when you are not in China, and meet up!)

[dolorous-ett.livejournal.com]

Hooray to both!

I don't think I'm going to China this summer, but we will be trying to move house. More stress, but something positive to show at the end of it, and a lot fewer in-laws.

And is that by any chance a Lovecraft/Wimsey crossover?

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

A new house is very exciting. Good luck!

Entertaining as the thought of Wimsey investigating eldritch creatures is, I have managed to make this one not actually a crossover. It's a response to Lovecraft's The Nameless City, which in my opinion has one of the dimmest narrators in literature.