And the line is crossed.

Two years and one month ago, my Sherlock Peoria blog moved to Google's Blogger site. Prior to that, it held out on an old vanilla HTML site at sherlockpeoria.net where the blog was updated once every week on Sunday nights . . . for ten years.

Ten years, fifty-two weeks a year, that was five hundred and twenty blog posts. And some weeks, it was llke pulling over-stuffed teeth to come up with a topic. Sure, there's a whole encyclopedia full of material on Sherlock Holmes, but I come from a line of hunters who like to sit up in the tree and wait for the prey to come to us. And the game doesn't wander down the Peoria trails like it once did.

And there was something about that Sunday night routine that had gotten a little stale after a decade. Weekly publications were a thing of an earlier day, not in this new millennium. So in July of 1012, when Sherlock Peoria came to Blogger and a more irregular schedule, I wasn't sure what would happen. Would I write less, without the weekly deadline, or just keep up?

Well, here we are two years and one month later and I've already surpassed the 520 posts of the ten years previous to July 2012 through August 2014. Why?

I'm sure there are those Elementary fans who would credit their favorite TV show for my raised output. My very second blog post on this Blogger site was entitled "'Elementary' Perversion" and began my ongoing love affair with a certain lady of the prime-time evening, so to speak. If it was up to those same Elementary fans, I might have even written another hundred or two hundred posts on the show, as the desire to discuss the matter with me seemed to be quite energetic. But one must show some restraint and stay on the topic of Sherlock Holmes, after all.

The thing that I noticed, though, was that the ability to just whip on to the internet and drop in a blog post at any given moment, for better or worse, had a tendency to capture those fleeting Sherlockian thoughts that might not have lasted until the weekend, t'were I still waiting until then to write up a little something. While it's probably impossible (and definitely inadvisable) to completely dump one's unedited train of thought out to the internet, it does a better job of actually living up to that thing we call a "blog," short for "web log," and log the day-to-day Sherlockian business of one particular Sherlockian.

I occasionally get accused of egotism a lot for putting my personal opinions out in public, but I really wish everyone kept such logs. Dropping in to see what John Foster or Alistair Duncan are thinking can be enlightening, but you know there are active Sherlock Holmes fans out there that make all of us regular bloggers look like pikers in terms of their personal Sherlock-related activity. I can think of any number of folks I'd loved to have seen 520 posts from in the last couple years . . . and not because I agree with every thought in their heads.

I know, I know, practicing restraint and publishing in well-edited places when one is sure of a well-researched, unassailable Sherlockian thesis is a grand and noble thing, but it's like saving your kisses for Valentine's Day. You might have a grand romantic moment for that occasion, but you're going to miss a lot of good moments you might have found along the way, had you just let it go every day.

And you'd certainly be a lot better kisser when Valentine's Day rolled around. (And maybe just an absolutely slutty lad or lass as well . . . but hey, this is 2014! Slut-shaming is on the decline.)

Over 520 blog posts in just over a couple of years . . . if you think you can't write anything of value about Sherlock Holmes, look at that number and consider if you yourself produced that many . . . some of them would have to be good, right? And one of them might even be absolutely fantastic, and make the whole thing worthwhile. Or at least better than what you're reading here for somebody, and probably a lot of somebodies. You just never know.

Once you do get going (or if you already are), let me know where you are on the web. I can always use another little cottage on the digital Sussex Downs to look in on now and then.