The never-ending chronology

 Sometime in the late winter of this year, I sent my friend Vincent Wright the image of a book cover.

It was the intended cover of my long overdue book on Sherlockian chronology, which I had close enough to being finished that I felt it was okay to tease Vincent with that little pic. Another couple of months and it would be out and done.

Welllllll . . . .

Shortly after that, I came up with the idea of "The Sherlockian Chronology Sorting Deck" for a little workshop at 221B Con on that very topic, and it was I was Warner Brothers and that thing was a Batgirl movie at budget time. I basically turned my mental apple cart over, dumped the apples and kicked them around the room. And to add just a little kick to all of that, fellow chronologer Bruce Harris came out with his chronology book It's Not Always 1895 a couple months after the time I had planned to release mine. Even if I had my act together, it simply would be bad form not to wait until 2023, just for history's sake. (For the five future Sherlockian chronologists who will care.)

We are a limited niche of Sherlockian culture, after all, but an ever-growing niche.

Since we began the Sherlockian Chronology Guild and started fanning that fire, we're finding more and more chronologers out there, and their encouragment for the ongoing monthly issues of the guild's monthly newsletter Timelines has distracted me from my own efforts as well.

But I've known several writers who have gotten well into writing a history book, gotten to a point that anyone else would call done, but feel there is still so much left to explore that they just can't call the book "done," and publish. Sherlockian chronology is definitely history work, and its many avenues and side alleys will never be definitively and completely explored. It's just had to find a stopping place.

But I'm just making excuses, aren't I? I had a full day off work Monday, and what did I do? Well, everything else. I did tidy up my chronology shelves. (Yes, there are two now.) And I started this blog post as the day drifted off . . . and never got to finish as some virus I picked up in Bloomington, Indiana kicked in the very next day.

Will I ever be finished with Sherlockian chronology? These days, I'm starting to wonder.