Our worlds of Sherlockiana

Events like 221B Con often give us the chance to spend a long lunch or dinner with a fellow Sherlockian and do something wonderful: Get a glimpse into their world.

While it's true that we can do this with anyone we meet, with enough time and a listening ear, for a Sherlockian, for someone who loves Sherlock Holmes to hear how someone else comes to that same destination . . . well, that's a treat.

Sherlockiana just gets so much larger when we add the worlds of other Sherlockians to our universe. Trying to put our hobby in a box, laying out what the boundaries are, what parts we cherish and what we can let go, those are the things we choose for ourselves, for our own path. We don't get to decide those things for anyone else, which is why other Sherlockians and their versions of the hobby are so valuable. They get to go their own way, to places we ourselves might never expect or have the nerve or abilities to get to.

When I was first coming up in the hobby, I ran into a lot of fellows who had an exact idea of what Sherlockiana should be, and a lot of that related to a time in the past they claimed would never exist again. And they were right in one aspect, as no moment in time ever exists again, but that made their attitude a bit sadder than they realized -- why would anyone want to continue in a hobby whose best days were long behind it? That had no hope of new glories or fun that would never match something a small band of dead guys supposedly did decades before?

What we've seen in the last ten years, with the Cumberbatch revolution, was initially decried by some as a flare-up of fangirls that would die off quickly and leave no mark. But BBC Sherlock changed everything by proving that Sherlock Holmes could be successful outside of the Victorian era, outside of that one world. Sherlock Holmes got more viable as an ongoing part of human culture, and things like Miss Sherlock came into being -- a new world of Sherlock Holmes.

It's hard to imagine a greater time to be a Sherlockian than the one we're in right now. We have so many worlds to explore, so many ways to understand Sherlock Holmes and John H. Watson.

And so much of that starts with our fellow Sherlockians, letting them be who they are, and just . . . listening.

Looking forward to a lovely weekend of that particular activity, and all the new worlds coming with it.