Saturday, November 19, 2011

ada lovelace? what are you doing in my sherlock holmes novel?

The Countess herself.
I didn't mean to have Ada Lovelace as a character, I swear. I was planning not to. I actually said, "No, I can't have her, because she would totally steal the spotlight. At any rate, by 1881 she had been dead for 19 (updated: twenty-nine, actually. nano ate my math skills, and holmes is not, in fact, seventeen.) 29 years, and this may be alternate history, but I still don't feel right about that. Anyway, I think I want to go in a direction that's a bit more gaslamp fantasy than it is outright steampunk. And that aside, the whole 'Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage fighting crime and musicians' thing has totally been done already, and Sydney Padua is mad clever and also can draw."

And then Holmes and Watson are climbing down a rope ladder after Irene Adler blew up their airship, and then they're following her down a chimney and who do they meet at the bottom but the Countess of Lovelace?

...

Oh John, I can empathize.