Okay, Charlotte, I'm counting on you . . .

A Sherlock Holmes club's featured post is a warning against criticisms of a particular pastiche.

An annual Sherlockian event's harassment policy comes up in a Facebook feed more often than any other detail of the event.

The head of an old Sherlockian institution attempts to define the characteristics appropriate to the membership of that institution.

And when seeing all of this, one's first thought might be visualizing a "neighborhood watch" sign going up in what used to be a peaceful neighborhood. You know that sign didn't pop up for no reason. Something occurred that made someone feel it was necessary. And yet your imagination is left to wonder just how bad that something was . . . and a little bit of, well, let's not call it fear. But it's surely a cousin to that emotion, whatever it is.

Up to this point, this was a blog post I first considered entitling "Has Sherlockiana become a bad neighborhood?" but, man, that's a negative slant. I started trying to think of something more positive that I could honestly write about. There's a lot of positive in the world of Sherlock Holmes and his fans, right? And then one more thing happened.

A prominent Sherlockian tweeted that he wasn't going to write something due to the "unpleasant climate" of the current Sherlockian world. I could see the point, and it made me rethink continuing this post. Yeah, there's troubling stuff out there. But where to go?

Hard to discuss any of the above topics in a helpful way. Probably just make matters worse.

And then I stumbled upon the new book trailer for a young adult novel, A Study in Charlotte by Brittany Cavallaro. As it comes out tomorrow, an Amazon one-click could still get the pre-order in, so one-click it was. The young adult fiction marketplace has been marked by both solid successes and "Why would anyone buy that?" stuff trying to mimic others' success in that very popular category, so it can be a roll of the dice, but maybe that was the point.

Some days, you just have to have hope. Somebody went to the trouble to make a pretty fair little trailer about descendants of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson teaming up at school, so there must be some confidence in it. Maybe this book will have some fun in it.

It's not so much about escapism, looking for another Holmes adventure to dive into . . . all of the fandom issues aren't going anywhere . . . but more about just moving forward. One more thing to look forward to as this Sherlockian world keeps turning and sorts itself out. As Watson heard in "A Scandal in Bohemia" . . .

"But you have hopes?"

"I have hopes."

221B Con on the horizon.

So I'm watching BBC Sherlock's "Abominable Bride" this morning, just in case there are any ripe cosplay ideas ready to fall off the tree for 221B Con, and when Mike Stamford came on screen, I actually stopped for a moment to appreciate this rare character who actually got to participate in the same story, performing the same function, in two eras. I like his glasses, and wonder for a moment how quickly a bargain optometrist could produce a similar pair. But the show moves on, and so do I.

Watson's empty chair . . . fun idea, tricky to rig up in a way that would be con-functional for walking around. That bride outfit . . . oh, I have a friend who would love to help put me in that one, but the lace looks a bit pricey. Various Victorian outfits . . . nothing jumping out. Colorful Klan robes . . . in Atlanta? In America whatsoever? No way. Cosplay is just not ever going to be my specialty, I guess, which is okay, because there's some real talent out there.

And then, about five minutes before "Bride" got over with, I stumbled into the news on Twitter: David Nellist is going to be a guest at that same 221B Con this year. Yes, he of Mike Stamford celebrity, modern and Victorian versions, is coming to the con. Very nice.

We're just about a month out from heading for Atlanta and that Sherlock con which was my first and favorite. (Talking cons here, not symposiums or workshops. Those are an entirely different affair.) The excitement is starting to ramp up, the feeling that I'm never going to be quite ready for it. The training starts now. Why training?

Well, there's Ali's Cookies. At last year's 221B Con, I made about four trips over to Ali's Cookies in Perimeter Place and was eating them for breakfast most days. Seriously good cookies.

And then there's the attempt to squeeze as much con in as poss . . .

[And there the blog post writer wandered off, looking into other matters of the weekend.]

A toast to Ross K. Foad . . . and others like him.

This morning brought Ross K. Foad's video comments on his post about leaving Holmes, but by this evening, the video had been pulled down. Understandable second thoughts, I would guess, whether second thoughts about taking a hiatus from his Sherlockian efforts or just the video itself is hard to say, but I sympathize with his sentiments, I really do. Been there, but not done that, especially in Ross's case -- his output and energies have placed him in a class few Sherlockians or Holmesians ever achieve.

While his comments about the thanklessness of his efforts in the field of Sherlock might inspire derision in some mediocre minds, anyone who's put their entire heart and soul into this hobby knows those moments well. If you look back upon the history of Sherlockian fandom, you'll see some Herculean efforts of monk-like devotion, literal decades worth of hours, even subtracting eating, sleeping, and day jobs, spent in lonely tasks of research, collection, and production. And none of those folks ever truly got the rewards they deserved . . . a nod here, a certificate there, when their efforts really rated bronze busts and luxurious feasting. (Along with a few groupies of the preferred gender and all that comes with that.)

But as much as some airy, snifter sorts would like to call us "afficionados," I've always preferred the term "fans." Why? Because "fan" is short for "fanatic," and the best of our past-time have always been that. Not, sitting back with a cigar and a brandy being all "afficionado-y" . . . no, the best of us are full-on crazed fanatics, giving their all to the love of a legend.

The thing is, few Sherlockians are truly crazy. We have those lucid moments when we look around and go, "What the Hell have I been doing all this time? I could have been a [Insert your version of a profession of accomplishment here.]" You can hit a real dark night of the soul, and as much as we love our Sherlockian camaraderie, it can be a lonely night as well.

When your entire crowd is busy looking at the stage where the star stands, they sometimes forget to look down the aisle to see if the people there are okay. Sherlock Holmes is our star, our focus, our celebrated one, and in this Cumberbatch-loving era, we've even got a rock star taking up the warm-up stage for the main event. (And often threatening to upstage him.) For a novelist, a podcaster, an event-coordinator or a video producer to shine a light for any length of time in today's blazing glare of Sherlock radiance . . . not so easy. The next thing is always here.

You can't do Sherlockian because it's a stepping stone to some outside-the-fandom success. You can't do Sherlockian because you hope to be recognized by the heirs to some old institution. In the wee dark hours of the lonely February Sherlockian night, you have to reach down deep and find the reason you do it just for you. And how you're going to make your own fun on your next foray into the land of Holmes. Or maybe . . . just maybe . . . that you actually are a bit mad, and that madness centers around Sherlock Holmes. 

As the great Sherlockian tidal wave of the last decade starts to ebb a bit, we're going to see a lot of Sherlockian talent facing their own dark night of the soul, taking their own hiatuses. Some will one day come back, some won't. But that didn't mean they weren't appreciated while they were here.

Like many another Sherlockian, I have been looking at this thing and that thing, gazing at my own Sherlock-shaped navel, and doing many other things besides taking time to fully appreciate and comment on some of the massive efforts being made out there in the name of Sherlock Holmes. That doesn't mean I won't be sad when I see a candle start to flicker, like No Place Like Holmes.

And hope those behind such marvelous efforts, like Ross, find their fun again, wherever they wind up. Even if it's back here, in the land of unrequited Sherlock lovers.

What would Sherlock Holmes think of "Elementary?"

A comment from Dick Sveum on my last blog post reminded me of some thoughts from our friend Sherlock Holmes that I hadn't thought of in a while: That time early on when Holmes critiqued the previous fictional detectives.

"You remind me of Edgar Allen Poe's Dupin," Watson had remarked. "I had no idea that such individuals did exist outside of stories." Holmes's reply?

"No doubt you think that you are complimenting me in comparing me to Dupin . . . Dupin was a very inferior fellow. He had some analytical genius, no doubt; but he was by no means such a phenomenon as Poe appeared to imagine."

"Have you read Gaboriau's works?" Watson then asked. "Does Lecoq come up to your idea of a detective?" Sherlock Holmes actually sniffs before making his next comment in anger:

"Lecoq was a miserable bungler; he had only one thing to recommend him, and that was his energy. That book made me positively ill. . . . It might be made a text-book for detectives to teach them what to avoid."

Can you imagine what the reaction would be, were Sherlock Holmes to unleash such words on-line in today's highly reactive world? The Poe and Gaboriau crowd on Tumblr would be having virtual brain fever fit. Sherlock Holmes, internet troll? No . . . Watson did bring it up.

But it got me thinking: What would Holmes say today, had Watson compared him to that Mr. Elementary on CBS's Elementary?

Well, I'm no Sherlock Holmes, but I did write the first book completely focused on his methods way back when, so I thought I'd try to puzzle that out with this week's show.

Mr. Elementary's first crime scene search yield a puddle of puke with antacid in it, which to him says that the killer used it to fake a seizure and get the drop on the shotgunned gang members. Since people with upset stomachs both take remedies and vomit, he seems to be jumping to definite conclusions very quickly.

The second of Mr. Elementary's methods this week involves acquiring cell phones and looking what's one them . . . given the trouble the F.B.I. is having getting into one Apple iPhone at present, it seems those in Mr. Elementary's world don't passcode their phones with pins or fingerprints like that genius Irene Adler in BBC Sherlock-land. Nothing any other unscrupulous sort in a city of innocents couldn't do, so he gets no points for that.

While Joan Watson and Detective Bell interview a witness, Mr. Elementary finds a silicone mask and wig lying neatly atop the garbage in a nearby trash can. He doesn't seem to care much for talking to witnesses or persons of importance to the case, sending Joan to talk to someone else. The NYPD does some DNA matching on the pukey antacid and the silicone mask, making that earlier questionable evidence more solid, and as the tag-team investigation and theorizing between Mr. Elementary, Joan Watson, Captain Gregson, and Detective Bell, one really wonders if Mr. Elementary could solve a case on his own.

John Noble, as Mr. Elementary's father, is all soap opera cheese this episode. Lines like "To invoke your mother now . . . you haven't changed." "Did you really believe you were the first addict in the family?" "If I could take back the last thirty-three years . . . " The "who attempted to kill Father Elementary" here-again, gone-again subplot meanders around the main plot this week . . . the show's formula always demands a second story of course, which is often where they try to shoehorn what passes for continuity on Elementary. Yet nothing that really ever distracts characters from the main procedural, of course, no matter what. Mr. Elementary's mother was an addict like he is. And she died. And somehow that's dull. And here we find the true key to it all.

What would Sherlock Holmes think of Mr. Elementary's methods on this week's episode of Elementary? I don't think he'd have stuck with this slow-moving, static-shot-of-characters-standing-still-talking-alternating-with-other-character-standing-still-talking, sleep-inducing show long enough to make any sort of judgment on his namesake's detective skills. Holmes had a real problem with boredom after all.

"You say that there's a show with the title of a word I've used on this CBS network. If it were on HBO, it would not make a pennyworth of difference to me or to my work."

Exactly. That's a word Sherlock Holmes used, too. Wonder what kind of show we could build around that?

Time to step back and remember why one is here.

Sometimes, I have to stop and remember why I like Sherlock Holmes.

Why?

Because he always seemed like the guy I wanted to be.

Not aspiring to be a genius, of course. Either you're born with that one or you're not.

Not wanting to catch criminals, either. Criminals can hurt you, you know?

Not just wanting to live in an apartment with my best pal. I like my space.

So what was it about Sherlock Holmes that I wanted so much to be like?

To be a person who didn't just accept the easy answers, the superficial story that one sees at first glance. To find the improbable truth that took eliminating all those impossibles to get to.

Sherlock Holmes had to discipline himself in a number of different ways to accomplish that simple task, and one of those things was maintaining his objectivity. Objectivity seems like such an old-fashioned concept these days, when so much of our news consists of opinion or reaction, usually born of emotion. The only reason Sherlock Holmes didn't react emotionally was because he was a sociopath or on the autism spectrum, though, right? We've even lost our objectivity about objectivity, it often seems, trying to give ourselves an out for not being like Holmes.

Solving life's mysteries is hard work. You actually have to stop and think about what you're seeing.

Sherlock Holmes didn't say, "Trust your feelings." No, that was the ghost of a guy who let his over-emotional ex-pal swat him into the ether. Sherlock said, "No ghosts need apply." And "You know my methods. Apply them . . ."

Some days, it's easy to lose sight of what made Sherlock Holmes what he was, especially in the community of his fans. And it becomes easy to dwell more on one's own reactions than those true-to-life methods we know can bring resolution, even when we're dealing with those whose view of a case might be different from our own, as Holmes so often was.

That's why I'm here, doing this Sherlock Holmes fan thing, because he's a guy worth paying attention to, for a lot of good reasons.

Some days more than others.

Searching for Mother Holmes.

About seventeen years ago, when I was publishing a fun little journal called The Holmes & Watson Report, I asked a round table of Sherlockian writers to come up with their own theories on Sherlock Holmes's mother. We're pretty sure Sherlock Holmes had a mother. Or was, at least, given birth by a human woman. It was the Victorian era, after all, not some clone-teched future or an ancient Greek land of gods. "The world is big enough for us," as Holmes himself would remind us. But what could one deduce about the woman who gave the world Sherlock Holmes from what evidence we have on hand?

Six good Sherlockian brains set about figuring that out.

Hugh Harrington decided that trust was the key to finding Holmes's mother. Who did Sherlock Holmes trust as only a mother could be trusted?

"While Watson never actually mentions Holmes's mother, we can, with some degree of confidence, find her in the Canon playing a role that not only defeats the German spy network, but also preserves the life of her son, Sherlock Holmes."

Hugh suspected Martha Holmes of being that cat-loving agent in "His Last Bow."

David R. McCallister, on the other hand, looked outside the Canon to the Cockburns of Berwickshire and "a tall, thin waif" of a Home cousin, who passed on certain "medium" genes to her son.

Tina Rhea also took a scholarly approach, looking at both the Canon and other writings on the era to surmise that Sherlock's mother might have been "entirely the wrong sort of woman."

Rosemary Michaud gathered her data and used that sort of "logical synthesis" Holmes favored to project a woman she called "Violette" who ran off with an actor and died after giving birth to Sherlock in Chicago.

Don Hobbs saw Sherlock and Mycroft's mother as a Bohemian soul who inspired neither of her sons to take up a life-partner.

My own theory, adding in my favorite theorized siblings of Sherlock (James and Violet), and looking at the admirable qualities of all her children, was that Mother Holmes was a very remarkable woman.

"I have frequently gained my first real insight into the character of parents by studying their children," Sherlock once said, and why wouldn't we use his own methods in this case, as we would any other?

BBC Sherlock gave us one of the few portrayals of that most necessary person, and a lovely one at that, and I've seen rumors that a certain other television show might be doing a mother with the last name of Holmes soon as well. But no matter who is looking into the mother of the greatest detective in the history of the world, I think we call all agree that she was no ordinary woman.

No ordinary woman at all. But then, few mothers are.

Do we always have to write Sherlock Holmes to have it read?

There was a line one used to hear about Sherlock Holmes that there was more written about him than any person except Jesus, and perhaps Napoleon. At this late date, I'm not even sure where that entered my brain from -- a John Bennett Shaw workshop, some pre-WWII bit of Sherlockian scholarship, or where. As the Napoleon reference would imply, it goes back a long way. You don't hear much about Napoleon fandom outside of "The Adventure of the Six Napoleons" these days.

But that line never saw fan fiction coming, nor the effect the internet would have on it. That combo was the invention of the nuclear warhead in some respects. We went from a day when fan fiction still had publishers, as amateur as they were, and editorial gatekeepers of a sort, even though self-publishing was always available if you had the time and bank account. Now bank account and access to a local printer (the person/business, not the household appliance) are no longer necessary.

At this point, if you can write it, putting it out for the public to see isn't a problem. You don't have to painstakingly type it out on a typewriter, send it to a typesetter (unless you were typesetting with a typewriter), get the type laid out and to a printer, with all the details in between. Now you can just type it up and push it to the web, just like I'm doing here. These words could be a scholarly essay, a short story, a novelette, or a full chapter-by-chapter novel if I so desired. It's just that easy now.

Which changes the dynamic a lot. Suddenly writing about Sherlock Holmes is as easy as reading about Sherlock Holmes. Writing well about Sherlock may seem harder than reading well about Sherlock, simply because reading is not usually done in public, so we never know whose out there struggling with literacy just to get a dose of Sherlock. With writing, we can pretty much see who did well in English class and who didn't . . . or who made the effort to improve their skills later . . . but if you really don't care what anyone says about your stuff, you can publish it anyway. (Hmm, just realized that "publish" and "public" probably come from the same root. Interesting.)

All this means that we have more writers about Sherlock Holmes than we ever did.

Last year at 221B Con, I had a great time at a midnight fan fiction workshop with what seemed like a couple of hundred other people doing fan fiction writing exercises. Think about that -- well over a hundred people in one spot caring enough about writing Sherlock to stay up past midnight to do it. That isn't writing to become famous or writing to make money. That's just writing for fun, like going to a karoake bar or going dancing.

Writing doesn't have to be about fame or fortune. It never did, it's just that those ideas are like the big Powerball lottery jackpots, hard not to let your daydreams drift to. If you've got the talent, the drive, and/or the connections to get your work out ahead of the pack, you can still go pro with wordsmithing, but you definitely don't have to. We now live in an era where an adult can read comic books without posing as a "comic collector" to try to legitimize the hobby, and writing is much the same. You can write whatever silly-ass thing you want just for your own enjoyment, just like you'd paint an acrylic nature scene without ever considering a gallery show.

That's why I enjoy blogging in the mornings. Gets the brain going, orders the thoughts a bit, and can be a sort of relaxing meditation. At this point, I think I'd be doing it whether or not anyone read it. But it dumps just that many more words into the mass of public writings about Sherlock Holmes.

We have to keep ahead of the Trekkies, Potterphiles, and those pesky Napoleonianiacs, after all.