221B Con 2026: Friday Night Random

 Sometimes you can be your own worst enemy with something like 221B Con.

There are so many paths open to you, so many choices to be made, and then there are your personal little obsessions entering in. How do you consume as much of an idea banquet as possible when you can only take one bite at a time? Sometimes only one course is offered, as when the con starts at 5 P.M. with a little intro session from the con board, but for the most part, choices must be made.

After a stop in my room, for example, I was headed to my first discussion of the evening, on the recent Amazon Young Sherlock Holmes show, which had been a fun watch. But then I saw a late arriving friend Rob Nunn) in the bar and went to say hello. Rob, however, was sitting with Curtis Armstrong and Ashley Polasek, and when Curtis suggest I take a chair, I eventually took a chair and just chatted with Rob, Curtis, and Ashley for an hour, as well as consuming one of the house specials for the con, a mixed drink in a bag called "The Scarlet Claw" after the Rathbone film of that same name.

After that very happy hour had passed, however, there was going to be a remote conversation with Paul Waggot from New Zealand, the actor playing John Watson in the amazing Sherlock & Co. podcast. While Paul is not John Watson, closing your eyes, you could imagine that familiar Watson from the podcast was the one on the screen at the front of the room. Congoers got to step up and ask Paul questions about his portrayal, got a lot of great answers, and then, at the last, got a surprise drop-in from Acushla-Tara Kupe, Paul's wife and his Watson's Mary Morstan from Sherlock & Co. The whole thing was an wonderful opening-night feature for the con.

Another hour of chatting with friends and my next stop was one of those little off-Sherlock-topic panels that are the spice of 221B Con's main meal. And if former con-runners Heather Holloway and Crystal Noll are going to discuss a topic they love, you know it's going to be a fun listen.

And so I went to (buckle up, dedicated Sherlockians!) the con's Fast and the Furious panel. It's nine o'clock at night and there are a "Crimes of Sherlock Holmes" and an erotic fanfic panel overlapping, so a lot of folks were otherwise engaged, and, as happens sometimes, a panel has less attendance than expected. But that never stops the good time. And it sure didn't here.

From there, I headed to an 18+ fanfic writer's workshop, where random prompts are handed out, and everyone in the room starts writing fanfic. There's not nearly enough time to finish a full tale, but just getting a story started from such random prompts as "plane," "inappropriate snowstorm," and "somnophilia." Adding to my personal challenge -- I had forgotten my laptop, had to run to the room to get it ... 

Okay, let's be honest here. If you go full 221B Con, you really don't have time to keep up with blog post entries, guerilla podcast recording, or any side activities. Just staying hydrated is good. Right now, I'm sitting the the big room where the Sherlolly panel is happening in twelve minutes, the start of SUNDAY'S programming. That starts at 10 AM, and nobody is even here yet due to all of the hijinks of the previous evening -- the Nautical themed prom (multiple jellyfish costumes) and Drunk Canon (a bit fiesty at times, but what I thought might be a chokehold turned out to be a hug-from-behind on a seated person). So, yeah, con life can be pretty immersive. But back to Friday . . .

So I had to see if there were any character prompts for the writing, and there weren't, so I went with Mycroft Holmes and Greg Lestrade, since that's the favorite of one of my fellow podcasters.

Just another flight out of Atlanta on a summer. day. The heat and humidity required extra effort to ignore, but Mycroft Holmes was a champion at ignoring the small annoyances. Greg was already on the Diogenes Club plane waiting at the Diogenes Club underground hanger beneath a popular airport hotel that pretended to be part of a popular chain, yet was completely Diogenes Club. The plane was being rolled out to the airstrip, where Mycroft would board, and his timing was perfect. 

Here came the plane, here was Mycroft.

And then the oddest of things happened. First clouds silently rolling in without perceptible wind. And then snow. Lovely large flakes that, given time, would close down the airport. 

Mycroft walked toward to coming plane slightly faster than normal. He waved for the support crew to get the door open and the steps down slightly faster than normal. And he climbed the steps into the plane, slightly faster than normal.

Where he found Greg Lestrade laying, stretched out upon the couch, fast asleep. Like Snow White, like Sleeping Beauty, like a Scotland Yard Disney princess, laying so perfectly on his back that he seemed to be awaiting a prince’s kiss to wake him.

A voice came over the cabin intercom.

“Sir, they’re holding all the planes until the snow situation is sorted. It’s gotten quite thick quite fast but it seems to have stopped. They’re saying thirty minutes.”

I'll let you figure out where that was going. After that, I wandered back to the hotel bar where a bunch of my friends had just finished playing Pictionary using the sixty original Sherlock Holmes stories as prompts. Apparently it was the most hilarious game of Pictionary ever, and they walked me through every one of the pictures to see if my guesses confirmed their own. The picture they seemed to fixate upon the most was this one.

The story this was depicting was "The Adventure of the Nobel Bachelor," and the folks telling me about it had a lot of "Why is there a star?" and other questions. My one thought, was, "I have materials in my room to cosplay that piece of art." So let's jump ahead to the next night's Drunk Canon, where the art met the artist . . .

 After all that, I went up to my room and collapsed. On to Saturday . . .