The stressful Sherlocking of autumn.

Pay attention long enough and you'll see your own patterns emerging.

This time of year tends to be among the most hectic, as we transition into fall, school, the last quarter of the year . . . everybody wants to get everything done by the holidays. My biggest problem with it seems to be in that little late August/early September lull when I start getting great ideas for projects that are inevitably killed by everything that's going on in the months that follow. Halloween costumes. Nanowrimo. New fall TV.

Cite a fall project, and I can tell you what killed it -- one of might biggest regrets was the Dark Lantern League online role-play group, killed, ironically enough, by an intensive webmastering class. And if that trend wasn't bad enough, you know what else comes when life gets hectic and the brain is churning hard when downtime comes?

Even more ideas for Sherlockian efforts.

Get a few weeks with nothing to do, and . . . nothing.

Get a month without a spare moment, and the seeming greatest of all Sherlockian inspirations appears  . . . only to be old hat by the time the schedule clears up.

That's why the blog business seems to work so well for me: Spit out an idea, give it a little fleshing out, just enough to get it out of the system, and move on to the next. But it's treading water. When nothing gets fully developed, it's hard to move forward, whatever one defines as moving forward.

The obsession project, the thing that eats your whole existence for months on end, has been my best way to get the bigger things done. Not the slow and measured pace that allows some distraction alternating with the discipline to return to the work. Being able to take the long view and stick to the course.

I wouldn't be writing this rather whiney post if I wasn't starting to set my mind to gets some things done in the Sherlockian field this fall for a change. Ideas are here and some of them might actually have value. So let's just see what happens this time, and if the patterns break for a change.

Watch this space.