Okay, Charlotte, I'm counting on you . . .

A Sherlock Holmes club's featured post is a warning against criticisms of a particular pastiche.

An annual Sherlockian event's harassment policy comes up in a Facebook feed more often than any other detail of the event.

The head of an old Sherlockian institution attempts to define the characteristics appropriate to the membership of that institution.

And when seeing all of this, one's first thought might be visualizing a "neighborhood watch" sign going up in what used to be a peaceful neighborhood. You know that sign didn't pop up for no reason. Something occurred that made someone feel it was necessary. And yet your imagination is left to wonder just how bad that something was . . . and a little bit of, well, let's not call it fear. But it's surely a cousin to that emotion, whatever it is.

Up to this point, this was a blog post I first considered entitling "Has Sherlockiana become a bad neighborhood?" but, man, that's a negative slant. I started trying to think of something more positive that I could honestly write about. There's a lot of positive in the world of Sherlock Holmes and his fans, right? And then one more thing happened.

A prominent Sherlockian tweeted that he wasn't going to write something due to the "unpleasant climate" of the current Sherlockian world. I could see the point, and it made me rethink continuing this post. Yeah, there's troubling stuff out there. But where to go?

Hard to discuss any of the above topics in a helpful way. Probably just make matters worse.

And then I stumbled upon the new book trailer for a young adult novel, A Study in Charlotte by Brittany Cavallaro. As it comes out tomorrow, an Amazon one-click could still get the pre-order in, so one-click it was. The young adult fiction marketplace has been marked by both solid successes and "Why would anyone buy that?" stuff trying to mimic others' success in that very popular category, so it can be a roll of the dice, but maybe that was the point.

Some days, you just have to have hope. Somebody went to the trouble to make a pretty fair little trailer about descendants of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson teaming up at school, so there must be some confidence in it. Maybe this book will have some fun in it.

It's not so much about escapism, looking for another Holmes adventure to dive into . . . all of the fandom issues aren't going anywhere . . . but more about just moving forward. One more thing to look forward to as this Sherlockian world keeps turning and sorts itself out. As Watson heard in "A Scandal in Bohemia" . . .

"But you have hopes?"

"I have hopes."