We love our Sherlock Holmeses.

It always amused me a little bit that some of our elder Sherlockians held such contempt for Cumberbitches.

The idea of discovering an actor through his portrayal of Sherlock Holmes, then enjoying that actor's full body of work, becoming a fan of that actor . . . well, that never happened in Sherlockiana before Benedict Cumberbatch arrived on the scene. Basil Rathbone . . . Jeremy Brett . . . well, they were . . . different.

And that William Gillette . . . well, he was . . . let's face it, another actor who got "the Sherlock bump." We meet an actor as Sherlock Holmes, get fond of him in that part, and then follow him into his other works. There's a reason Secret Service is on my bookshelf.

It's easy to see the glow we add to the work of the big Sherlocks from their time as Holmes, but that phenomenon also carries over to less Sherlock-identified actors. Like Joaquim de Almeida.

You may have seen Joaquim de Almeida before, in the TV series 24 or the Robert Rodriguez film Desperado. He's one of those familiar faces you see around on movies and TV, often without knowing the name. He's currently featured as a candidate for the Bolivian presidency in the movie Our Brand is Crisis out in theaters now, and I have to tell you, the Sherlock glow was on him as I watched that movie this morning.

You may not have seen O Xango de Baker Street, as it's not the easiest Holmes film to come by, but Joaquim de Almeida stars as Sherlock Holmes in that quirky adaptation of the quirky novel of the same name. Having seen it myself, de Almeida is forever branded a Sherlock in my head, and I always enjoy seeing him perform. Good character actor.

In Our Brand Is Crisis, Joaquim de Almeida is performing with that first lady of modern American cinema, Sandra Bullock, and as brightly as her star shines (Love me some S.B.!), the Sherlock glow that enhances my enjoyment of de Almeida put him right up there with her as I watched the film.

Because we do love our Sherlock Holmeses. Even when they're not Cumberbone Brettlette.

Sherlockoween trick-or-treating, anyone?

Now that our parents won't let us go house to house begging for candy any more . . . "YOU'RE FORTY-EIGHT YEARS OLD! WHY WOULD YOU WANT TO DO THAT?" . . . we children of the modern age must find new traditions to placate our holiday sweet tooth this Halloweekend. And if we can't go tricks-or-treating out in the old neighborhoods, why not take it up in one of our newer locales? Why not go trick-or-treating on YouTube with some random video-to-video search-knocking?

Here's what I found in my goodie bag when the night was through:

A Sherlock version of The American Horror Story theme?

Zombie night at the Villain's Pub with another Cumberbatch character?

The entire movie of Rathbone's Sherlock Holmes Faces Death? (It's got a raven and a bottle of "Mother's Ruin" served up before taking you to spooky old Musgrave Manor and its corpse-lights "waiting like lost souls in the limelight.")

Oh! It's Creepy Watson! He's always an old favorite!

Sherlock and TV's Rumplestiltskin just being all music-video horror?

Downey Jr. Holmes and the kid vampire from Let the Right One In. People do like their crossover music videos.

Emmy Holmes hunts a dog eater. Scary business -- I mean, dog eater!

The top five scariest Sherlock Holmes stories by a guy who likes to call his audience f@#%ing morons. He does use Jeremy Brett clips, though.

That's Halloween trick-or-treating for you . . . you get what people are willing to give you, based on their own tastes, budget, or what was laying around. The same seems to apply for videos and candy, and both seem to be something you shouldn't depend upon for your good health.

But, hey, it's a holiday and even Sherlockians need to commemorate it somehow, right?

The "S," CBS, and the needles.

Had a bit of deja vu this week as a favorite larger than life figure whose name began with "S" was brought low thanks to CBS and a few hypodermic needles.

Perhaps my least favorite thing in all of television has always been the episode when the hero is robbed of their gifts and brought low, to stagger through an entire episode. It goes all the way back to watching Mannix as a child. (Mannix, for those of you far too young to know, was one of those private eyes that drove around in a cool car and punched people. Back in the day, those were a thing.) I suppose one would call it drama, to show a hero barely able to function at all, dragging his semi-conscious form through some desperate gambit. I called it "not getting to see what I tuned in for."

Last night, of course, this victim of television drama was Supergirl, who, upon donning the triangular "S" for one of the first times and flying off to stop a fire, is rendered helpless by government agents shooting kryptonite darts and using kryptonite handcuffs. Poor girl doesn't even get to just fly around feeling super for a whole hour before the mere mortals have to show her she's nobody special. It's fictional socialism at it's finest, spreading the powers around so the playing field stays level.

Whether it's those lovably idiotic geniuses of Big Bang Theory or Scorpion, the schlub who gets smarter via a pill in Limitless, or . . . well, I shan't say here, in order to be an individual who rises above, you have to actually fall below. If you want to be efficient and competent on CBS, you must below to a government agency with initials, and be a part of the program.

What does all this have to do with Sherlock Holmes? Nothing, of course. Not a darn thing.

Sometimes one just gets in a mood to rant about a network.

That's all.

Sherlock Holmes and monsters, again.

Boy, you have one book with one demon hound and you get typecast . . . .

Really. Fifty-nine stories solving mysteries that didn't include murder all that much -- odd hiring practices, issues with the spouse, the occasional criminal genius to be dealt with -- those are the things Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson spent almost all of their time on. And yet, the two encounter one . . . ONE . . . demonic canine, which they almost immediately debunk, and what do we get?

Sherlock Holmes meets Dracula.

Sherlock Holmes versus zombies.

Sherlock Holmes against Cthulhu's cousin Cthwurds in the Cave of the Waxen Ghost Goblins.

People just don't seem to get that Sherlock isn't Fox Mulder. He doesn't "want to believe." He's the Snopes.com of Victorian England, the literary Myth-busters, the guy that sets the world back to its default settings. And yet, once a horror monster passes it's prime, somebody always wants to put the creature against Sherlock Holmes, have Sherlock go, "Wow, there really are weird things!" and let that poor old beastie feel vindicated since the famous Sherlock Holmes allowed for its existence.

And now that Clive Barker's Hellraiser Cenobites are nearly thirty years old, it looks like they're going to get to join the "Sherlock admits I exist!" club, in an upcoming book called Sherlock Holmes and the Servants of Hell. Are they beating Freddy Krueger and Jason Voorhees to get their mid-life Sherlock validation? Could be . . . there are so many pastiches these days, and fanfic beyond that, that surely they've run across each other somewhere. The Cenobites just got the official nod for commercial publication.

As much as Holmes version actual supernatural foes makes no sense from a strictly Holmes purist point of view, though, one can see why creators are drawn to pitting him against larger-than-life horrors: Sherlock Holmes looms too large himself to seem a fair match for any mere murderer. At this point even serial killers don't seem quite an even match for the Master of all Detectives.

So can the Cenobite "servants of Hell" provider an adequate match for him?

I dunno, but I really hope they don't get their hands on Watson.

When the bar goes up on your pastiche tolerance . . . .

Eventually, a bunch of words with the name "Sherlock Holmes" somewhere in the middle just isn't enough.

As I struggle to make myself care enough to continue reading that popular novel "co-written" by the former sport star, I can't help but think back to my college days, and the delight I had reading anything and everything Sherlock back then. It was the 1970s, of course, and publishing houses still served as gatekeepers to the world of fiction, and the authors and I tended to have a certain gender perspective in common, but still . . . I enjoyed it all.

These days, however, it's a real Holy Grail quest just to find a Holmes novel that will hold my attention, end-to-end. I don't blame the fiction. Magic tricks are great the first time you see them, but there can be only one first time. Eventually, you've seen all the tricks and it takes a real talent to make the familiar all fresh and exciting. Sometimes you need the higher grade Baker-street drugs. (Yes, I've done Omegaverse fic. But I'm not addicted to it. Not at all.)

And then there's always that constant comparison of everything to your first time at anything, from romance to your favorite movie. Eventually our fresh, young Sherlock fans of today become the crusty old Star Wars fans of yesteryear, so enamored of their first love in the field that no later installments will ever measure up. You see it in every fandom, from Dr. Who fans who can't get past that one favorite Doctor, James Bond movie fans who say no one will ever be as good as that hairy Scottish bloke, or even . . . already . . . Sherlock fans who hate season three for not being season one or two.

The problem is, some later incarnations of things are actually of a much lesser quality than their earlier installments. Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back can be measured against Star Wars: Episode One. Goldfinger can be used to see how bad Octopussy is. (Yes, Virginia, that really was an actual James Bond movie.) And sometimes things actually do improve with time (looking at you, Dr. Who), if you can step back and look at them objectively.

But as one grows older and ages as a fan, it becomes very hard to judge that middle ground . . . the mediocre can be passable sustenance when you're young and enthusiastic for it. But as time passes and you find so many other joys in life to vie for your time, mediocre just doesn't cut it any more. It's a very natural, very normal process. Becoming a cranky old fan is almost inevitable.

The trick, as with most mental illnesses, I suppose, is being aware that one has a touch of the cranky. In my mind, matching memory to current intake, I may actually feel that Austin and Utechin's Hellbirds is a better Sherlock Holmes novel than Cullin's A Slight Trick of the Mind, but realizing that a very heavy nostalgia factor is entering into that equation, I'm not going to write a passionate blog post tearing down Cullin's work for not being that earlier experience.

Yet sometimes you have to let it out. Sometimes, you just have to rage against someone's nutty decision to make their main character Darth Vader as a little boy with a durpy sidekick. You've got some real emotion behind it, and you just need to vent. As with so many other things in life, it's a matter of picking your battles. Is it just worth a momentary gripe or two to your nearby pals? Or a series of feverous blog posts that continue over time?

It's your choice. And you could even just decide to write a rambling analysis of your changing feelings on Holmes novels instead of critiquing the currently popular one. Like this.

Sherlocking NaNoWriMo.

November draws ever so near.

And with it, the annual November challenge. Why must we have so many months with challenges? Someone must have less to do than I. But like the hunting hound stuck in the house when the call to the chase sounds outside, I can't help but feel the pull of it.

National Novel Writing Month -- "NaNoWriMo" -- is coming once again, and some happy folk have even got a Sherlockian Twitter feed, tumblr site, and IRC channel (whatever that is -- sounds like some old school internet) focused on the Sherlockian side of creating a novel in a month.

Having been to the well-attended writing workshop sessions at 221B Con, I know there are more Sherlockian writers out there than ever before, if the number of authors with existing Sherlock books on Amazon or MX Publishing sites weren't evidence enough.  It's really quite intimidating . . . or maybe just redundancy-feelings-inducing. We have sooooo many words now that you no longer need paper and ink to get them in front of other people's eyes. Why does the world need mine? (A completely ridiculous question from a man who spews so many into the blogosphere every month.)

And yet the challenge of the November novel beckons. Especially after you've done it once. Marathon runners have their reasons, and so do novelists. There is pain, there is frustration, but there are also those moments that are so pure, so Zen, and so full of actual magic ("Where the hell did that come from?") that you crave going back into the arena once again.

My previous November novel, which I'm trying to remember if anyone has actually read, was a prequel to a novel that I've started about four times and never made it past the fourth chapter. Holmes and Harth is the title of that novel, a tale of a fellow who gets a very special collectable in the mail one day . . . something that very well may be the taxidermied corpse of Sherlock Holmes. Or something much more intriguing. That novel never seems to get written.

But during NaNoWriMo, I got the prequel Harth of Peoria, which was combination treasure hunt, runaway bride romantic comedy, and conspiracy novel whose greatest flaw is that halfway through the novel, the main character sort of lost interest in the supposed love interest and fell for what was supposed to be a minor character. I had great fun writing it, letting a plot grow organically, and even discovering I might have psychic powers in the pure Zen state of intense writing. That novel is only sitting as a Word document on my hard drive, with a CD backup, of course, but I'd still do it all again.

I've already got a November commitment this year: the West of Baker Street experiment. And I may see if I can push 50,000 words out of that just to see if I can pull NaNoWriMo off a second time with a Sherlock bent. But the as with the rest of this year, November might be a troublesome beastie from forces outside of Sherlockiana and writing, so we shall see.

But if you think you might have the writing mojo to pull off a novel this November and you've never done it before, I'd really encourage that you give it a try. It's so much safer than climbing Everest, but it's an accomplishment you'll enjoy having on your soul long after, even if no one ever reads the result.

The new Sherlockian studies versus the old.

I finally finished that durned "Sexpisode" yesterday.

Catching up on my podcasts this week, and after listening to the Three Patch Podcast take on Hamlet, monster Holmes, and deathfic (As well as pre-ordering the t-shirt. I love their artist's work.), my smartphone queued up the rest of their previous episode . . . the notorious "Sexpisode 3."

Yes, the one that gave me the vapors back in September during its "Sexy Headcanon" segment from Gridlock 2015. SO MUCH random coupling . . . or tripling, I guess . . . fried my poor midwestern late-baby-boomer brain. I backed slowly away from it after that segment then, but coming back to the episode and bits like its thoughtful look at the Sherlock-John-Mary triad, I was a little more secure that the ladies of Three Patch weren't going to terrorize my inner old maid any more.

I really enjoy listening to Three Patch, much more than I Hear of Sherlock Everywhere and the Baker Street Babes of late, because they always make me think. The old, cozy Sherlock talk is a little too relaxing for my sleepy old brain, and the view of that new Sherlockian planet that internet connectivity has taken us to is fascinating, and a bit energizing. Like one of those old B movie sci-fi plots, we rocketed to Mars in our future Sherlockian world and found it populated by women.

And listening to Three Patch today, acclimating all the more to the environment of Planet Cumberbatch, coming to see it as Sherlockiana Now and the old Sherlockian scholarship as the different thing, it became very apparent that the Sherlockiana of the 1940s and 1950s was Sherlock Holmes studies as done by men. Think about it . . .

Locating 221B Baker Street. Charting its floor plans. Enumerating and classifying Canonical characters. Researching and hypothesizing to make Watson's dates exact and reliable. Bring in the math and spatial dynamics wherever possible and, good gawd, spending so much time trying to work out that damned Musgrave ritual.

Not to be all gender-stereotyping, but this was Sherlockian scholarship created by men for men.

Had it been women who created it from the get-go, perhaps the focus would have been on something else even back then: Relationships. Reactions. Emotions.

For when you distill it down, that's what the amazing multiverse of fanfiction is: studies of human interaction. Taking the fascinating specimens of the Canon and putting them in experimental conditions and seeing what they do. True, there is a bit of experimenter bias going on, but that was true of the old Sherlockian scholarship as well. Sherlock was a golfer, a Buddhist, or a wine lover pretty much according to how much to writer wanted him to be. Now it's more who winds up in bed with whom as we explore their reactions to class structure, death, gender issues, power dynamics, and all those other ways humans relate to other humans (even if Holmes and Watson are not exactly human in a given fic).

We saw a Golden Age of Sherlockiana in the 1900s. We're seeing a Silver Age of Sherlockiana evolving in front of us in the 2000s. And as much as the Bronze Age of Sherlockian of the 2100s might be too much for my poor brain to wrap itself around, I would still be very curious to see what it's going to look like when that third wave hits.