No sleep til 221Bcon!

Well, I suppose I will sleep sometime between now and 221Bcon. But it's not going to be easy.

Tonight, for example, after a weird crazy quilt of a project at work that threw me off by three hours all day long, an assortment of pre-travel errands that included a big favor from a kinsman and a sudden, dark rainy rendezvous with part of the trusted inner circle, and finally getting time to pack for our departure tomorrow . . . well, suddenly I found myself taking time to decode a message in Dancing Men code.

I soon discovered that I already had the information coded in the message, having caught up with the Baker Street Babes latest announcement of Sebastian Moran's Invisible Tigress Speakeasy. But that was okay . . . it reminded me of a time when we used to do things in Dancing Men code. And by "we" I mean that generation who was once energetic and creative and all those things we're seeing in the Babes and the much maligned Sherlock fandom, back when we were not so slightly toasted (if not burnt out) by the years and that long, hard drought between Brett and Downey/Cumberbatch.

Sure, there have always been certain ever-glowing flames in our midst. And there have been ever-burnt-out curmudgeons in our midst as well. Most of us fall somewhere in between, or alternating between the two, after a time, but the thing of it is this: we're all looking for something new. A new Sherlock Holmes. A new book. A new movie. A new event.

After all these decades, 221Bcon is something new to the land of Sherlock Holmes. A con. Not a workshop, not a symposium, but an unashamed, flat-out con. Cons are what the popular fandoms have, fandoms with a center that has current pop culture momentum . . . kind of like Sherlock Holmes does these days. People want more Sherlock, and not just the die-hard fans. When I mentioned I'm going to a Sherlock Holmes con this week, people actually reacted like it was kind of cool, instead of the slightly perplexed look one got in past decades at the mention of a Sherlock weekend.

Let's make no mistake: Cons can be amazing, but cons can also be disastrous. You especially roll the dice when you go to a brand, new one. But whatever the experience, they're almost always memorable. And this one, with its currently unknown attendance figure, rumors of at least one significant media presence, a goodly contingent of Baker Street Babes doing their podcast, and being the first major Sherlockian event at which I will have ever even come close to cosplay . . . the interest factor is very high, at least for this Holmes fan.

But I'm starting to ramble on from lack of sleep, I think . . . and there's more of that to come.