John Watson stepped outside the medical clinic into a bright, moon lit night. He fumbled with his keys as he locked the surgery door and then walked along the streets of London. As he made his way to 221B Baker Street where he would be having tea with his friend, Sherlock Holmes, John noticed the absence of life.
There were no children playing in small, paved front yards being scolded by their cautious parents. No workers heading home, shoulders slumped forward and hoods over heads. No black taxis driving by trying to catch a customer. No vehicles at all. No people at all. This was extremely odd for a Friday evening, especially, John noted, when the flickering street lamps were not needed under the moon's rays. It seemed as if there was a curfew for all but him.
Most likely it was just coincidence. There was probably an extremely popular film being shown on the television. But, as John had come to learn, there were no such things as coincidences. This was why he put his hand inside his pant pocket and gripped the knife which was concealed in it. However, to John's disappointment, the weapon was not needed. As he turned the corner onto Baker Street he glanced up at the only lit window and saw the silhouette of a face watching him through the curtain. Sherlock.
John raised his hand in greeting and the silhouette disappeared; obviously his friend was coming downstairs to welcome him. He gripped his hand on the doorknob of the building and was about to turn it when the world darkened for a second. Shadows engulfed the whole street, becomming darker and darker, until John could see nothing. He heard the front door open and the shadows disappeared, allowing the moon to shine onto Baker Street once again.
John pulled the knife out of his pocket, feeling that this was a perfect setting for a murder. He stared down the road, adrenaline sweeping through his body as he waited for someone to appear. He snapped back to reality when Sherlock's voice erupted from behind him.
"John! What's taking you so long?" The consulting detective stood in the doorframe, watching John with his usual, emotionless face.
"The moon was bright just a minute ago."John held up his index finger when Sherlock began to speak. "No it's not a cloud. Or anything else you've come up with. The moon was completely put out, but just for a moment
Sherlock scratched the back of his head comically, "Yes, that is quite strange. John, I need to warn you of..." He couldn't finish his sentence because at that moment a loud wheezing noise burst out of no where, echoing throughout the whole street. "Turn around, John."
He did just that. John couldn't believe what he was seeing. A blue, rectangular, vintage police box had materialised from thin air. And its door was opening. A man stepped out of the box, folded his arms and leaned against it. He was a strange person; wearing a red bowtie, suspenders and heavily gelled hair.
Sherlock coughed and the bowtie man turned his head. "Hello. I'm The Doctor."
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125,008 Literary Works • 672,827 Reviews
HEYYYYY Dracula! Artemis on the site for the Spoopy Skeleton team.
I pretty much know nothing about Sherlock Holmes or Doctor Who, but I'm trying my best to keep up. XD I get the thing with the TARDIS. And I somehow know Sherlock's street. But I'm sorry if I'm not keeping up with things.
There's one paragraph where your grammar is all wrong. Here it is.
""The moon was bright just a minute ago."John held up his index finger when Sherlock began to speak. "No it's not a cloud. Or anything else you've come up with. The moon was completely put out, but just for a moment"
There needs to be a space after the quotation mark, right before "John." I'm also confused who's talking, because Sherlock ends the paragraph with a comment and begins the next paragraph with another statement. (At least, I think that's what happens.) It disrupts the flow a little bit and makes me kind of reread it twice. If you would put an enter after "speak," I think it'd make it clearer. You need a comma after "No", and instead of a period after "cloud" there should be a comma. At the very end, put a period and some quotation marks to finish it off.
Onto the content, Dracula!
I love the cliffhanger at the end. I've picked up enough of Doctor Who from this website to find this a pretty good cliffhanger. I know it's left people freaking out. *JuliasSneezer, Seraphinaxx, AMDDOG* I like it, too, and if I actually knew the show and loved it, I would adore your ending.
The description of your characters are pretty nice. John Watson is really well depicted here. I'm kind of concerned about Sherlock Holmes. In this chapter, he's kind of pushed out of the spotlight. Did you want that to happen? Seeing as this is a Doctor Who, Merlin, and SHERLOCK HOLMES fanfiction, you might want to elaborate on Mr. Holmes a little bit more. (Sorry if you've done this in later chapters. I haven't checked them out yet.)
Although I'm not a big fan of Merlin, Sherlock Holmes, or Doctor Who, this is a great beginning. I might wanna look at your later chapters.
XOX,
Artemis28
HEYYYYY Dracula! Artemis on the site for the Spoopy Skeleton team.
I pretty much know nothing about Sherlock Holmes or Doctor Who, but I'm trying my best to keep up. XD I get the thing with the TARDIS. And I somehow know Sherlock's street. But I'm sorry if I'm not keeping up with things.
There's one paragraph where your grammar is all wrong. Here it is.
""The moon was bright just a minute ago."John held up his index finger when Sherlock began to speak. "No it's not a cloud. Or anything else you've come up with. The moon was completely put out, but just for a moment"
There needs to be a space after the quotation mark, right before "John." I'm also confused who's talking, because Sherlock ends the paragraph with a comment and begins the next paragraph with another statement. (At least, I think that's what happens.) It disrupts the flow a little bit and makes me kind of reread it twice. If you would put an enter after "speak," I think it'd make it clearer. You need a comma after "No", and instead of a period after "cloud" there should be a comma. At the very end, put a period and some quotation marks to finish it off.
Onto the content, Dracula!
I love the cliffhanger at the end. I've picked up enough of Doctor Who from this website to find this a pretty good cliffhanger. I know it's left people freaking out. *JuliasSneezer, Seraphinaxx, AMDDOG* I like it, too, and if I actually knew the show and loved it, I would adore your ending.
The description of your characters are pretty nice. John Watson is really well depicted here. I'm kind of concerned about Sherlock Holmes. In this chapter, he's kind of pushed out of the spotlight. Did you want that to happen? Seeing as this is a Doctor Who, Merlin, and SHERLOCK HOLMES fanfiction, you might want to elaborate on Mr. Holmes a little bit more. (Sorry if you've done this in later chapters. I haven't checked them out yet.)
Although I'm not a big fan of Merlin, Sherlock Holmes, or Doctor Who, this is a great beginning. I might wanna look at your later chapters.
XOX,
Artemis28
*Sees fanfiction with Doctor Who AND Sherlock*
A;LSFJ;AEWHOIGHA;ROIHGLEWHJREOUISFBHLKRJGETQLWEIUFBHLSFDTHGEKJEHRIWOFDHOGIBNOWKJFNLDJKHLGKHFGUIHIOEJHWOPIKDFNMGLSFGKHNBLNEKSAOPDIGNELF!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
OMG OMG OMG *FANGIRLS LIKE CRAZY* THIS IS AMAZING!!!!
Ok, I think I'm calm now. I honestly think I love Doctor Who and Sherlock too much to properly critique this, but I'm gonna try. It's gonna be bullet points however, because I think that's all my brain can manage.
- As far as I can see you kept them in character pretty well.
- The first three paragraphs had a heap of suspense that made me wonder what had happened.
- "burst out of no where" nowhere should just be one word
- Infinite snowfall is right is saying it should probably be "there was no such thing" rather than "there were no such thing"
- The thing with the knife would probably stick more to the canon if it was a gun.
- GREAT CLIFFHANGER!!!!
- The introduction of the Doctor was quite interesting, as to me Sherlock seemed to know it was going to happen/what was happening.
And that's all I have to say. Now if you'll excuse me I'm going to go fangirl some more
Thank you for the review!
OH MY GOD!!!!
I want more. Don't ever cut it off like that again. I hate u. I am a HUGE fan of Merlin, Sherlock, Once, and Doctor Who. So u could say I'm a full blown GEEK. You just made me fangirl. I do, however, have a few suggestions. First of all; Sherlock would not probably come downstairs to meet john, he would be upstairs playing violin. Second of all, the doctor is obviously the 11th, I understand that. But the knife? Does John really carry a knife around? I don't think so, but he does carry a gun. I love how you included the fact that the Doctor always crosses his arms and leans against the Tardis. I really really loved it and I believe you did and incredible job. Another thing. In the last line.
Sherlock coughed and the bowtie man turned his head.
I believe that proper grammer would be 'The bowtied man' as in the man in a bowtie. The 'bowtie man makes it sound like he is a living bowtie. Other than that I found no error.
Hello, FullmetalDragon here!!
So, I happen to be a big fan of Sherlock and Merlin even though I haven't watched Doctor Who I was interested (a lot of my friends watch it) and read it.
I really liked it you dove into the story and added suspense. Anyway, loved it and hope you write more concerning this subject.
Sincerely,
FullmetalDragon
P.S. Read Chapter 2 Loved it!
Oh, my goodness, jazzydracula. I love this already. I'm not a huge fan of Sherlock, but I thought eh, why not? Sherlock can be fun, depending on how it's written, the plot, etc. AT least in my opinion. The end though totally won me over. I had the biggest smile on my face when I read that, haha.
I really like your idea of blending in the different stories. I think this story will be super fun for you to write!
As for the review part, I don't have a whole lot to say.
I don't know if it's just me, but this sentence sounds a little weird. I don't know if this sounds better: "But, as John had come to learn, there was no such thing as coincidences."
I don't know haha. Maybe I'm just weird, but I wanted to point that out.
Also, this was probably just a little mistake, but I just wanted to point it out real quick. There should be a space between the quotation mark and 'John'. I didn't notice this anywhere else, so it was probably just a slip of your fingers.
Lastly, I thought your description was really good. I loved how you described the children and their cautious parents. Oh, and the workers driving home, I liked that one a lot too, haha. I think if you added just a little more description throughout this piece, so that the readers can really picture what's happening in the story, it would multiply the awesomeness of this story by at least ten.
You don't have to of course, but it would really improve the reading experience! Well, I'm off to read the second chapter now!
~Snow
P.S. I forgot to mention that I love the title
first off, thank you!
i love all 3 of those BBC shows, and i hope you continue. i haven't seen merlin yet, but am assuming that it will come later. i like your style of writing, and the only thing i need to tell you is about your word choice. if you used more punctuation, or put the words together in a more flowing format
other than that, this was a great read, and i am looking forward to the next chapter
Hey,
First off I LOOVVVEEE YOOOUUUUU. Thank you for writing thissssssss. I was going to write a review but I don't think I'm capable of that at the moment. So all in all Amazing story. Thank you for writing this. I'm in the middle of my mersuperwholock if you want to read it just let me know. Again tho this is really well written. I couldn't find any spelling or punctuation errors anywhere let alone capitalization errors. So, maybe this is a review but I Really do think this is amazing and I really look forward to another chapter if at all possible. Keep writing.
Sincerely,
Collideascope
I haven't seen Merlin, but this still looks totally incredible. Much better than I could do. I love the description and... and everything that artemis just said, basically. :S
Please, please, PLEASE, I want another chapter!!!
As soon as I saw this, I knew I had to read it. All of my favorite shows(those BBC shows are just too addicting.)
You follow this sentence with a wonderfully written paragraph, but that paragraph isn't near as powerful or as interesting as it should be because I already know what it's about, and I'm even tempted to skim over it, which is sad because it is so lovely. You can also think of spoilers as thesis statements. In essays, you should let the reader know what's coming next, in fiction, you should not. One way you could fix it, while still having that transition, is instead of saying "absence of life." say "Something was amiss." "Something was wrong." or even "It was too quiet." Gives us a good heading without telling us exactly what's happening. Let me know if I'm making sense here.I love this way it was set up. It felt so very Sherlock, and I could just see the Doctor popping in on a night like this. The description was beautiful, the pacing nice. Overall a lovely chapter. I haven't read the one before, but it doesn't seam like it'll be a big deal that I read it after.
I have only a few little nitpicks and some writing style recommendations for you.
1. Spoilers: Like River, I advise against having spoilers in your writing. They only time you should use them is for foreshadowing of suspense-creating purposes. Let me show you want I mean by spoilers.
I found this sentence slightly confusing. Consider reversing the order of the sentence, but the face disappearing after John waves, since that's how it happens chronologically anyway.
I'm going to be using this sentence to showcase a few things, so bare with me.
First, is the words that and feeling. That is an interesting word in the human language, mostly because it is often used needlessly, same goes for the word feeling. For example, If you take out the "that" and feeling, it could become. "John felt for his knife once more.
feeling thatThis was a perfect setting for a murder, but he pulled his hand away when he realised that it was just the street lamps flicking on and off.See? it still makes sense. I recommend reading every sentence without these words and if it still make sense, delete them. There are times when you have to use them, for clarity and brevity's sake, but you'll be able to recognize those instances. Every word counts in a novel, and you don't want unnecessary words weighing down your powerful sentences.
The last thing I want to talk about are thought verbs. Thought verbs are very tell-y, when you should be show-y. Thought verbs pull your reader out of the story. They remind your reader that the story is fiction, which is no bueno. Examples of thought verbs are thought, knew, imagined, realized, decided, considered, etc... Sometimes, again, you have to use them for clarity and brevity's sake, but avoid them as much as possible. Sometimes you have to rewrite the entire sentence to avoid them, but other times you can just delete them. In this sentence, deleting them would make it, "John felt for his knife once more.
feeling thatThis was a perfect setting for a murder, but then he pulled his hand away.when he realised thatIt was just the street lamps flicking on and off."One again, getting rid of unnecessary words always makes your writing stronger.
And that's it. I really want to see all this worlds come together. You've clearly got a good grip on Holmes and Watson, so I'm excited to see your take on Doctor and Merlin, and hopefully Arthur as well.
Thanks for sharing!
-Art
If you're wondering where Merlin comes in... it appears in the next chapters.