November's end.

And so we come to the end of November.

National Novel Writing month has hit it's final deadline, and am I racing to hit that 50,000 word goal on this final night, or am I blogging here and now, writing what you're reading?

Let me check my official NanoWriMo word count . . . well, if I get in another one hundred and forty-seven words tonight, I will hit ten percent of the fifty-thousand word goal. Did I write fifty-thousand words this month? Probably. Was it all focussed into one single novel-length work of fiction? Nope.

And therein lies the key -- focus.

I wouldn't say I have attention deficit disorder, because it sure doesn't get in my way of getting anything done, hence, no "disorder." But I do have a problem keeping my attention in one place without a very purposeful, very task-oriented focus . . . and this month did not have that at all. In the end, I don't think I wanted it badly enough.

I did wind up finishing the book I wanted to finish writing in October, and got it off to my beta readers last night. I did write a couple of toasts, a short story or two, a bit of podcast content, ten other blog posts, a few long e-mails, and . . . hmm, seems like there should have been something else . . . oh, yes, five thousand words on that novel I was supposed to be writing.

On to the next thing, I guess. I have hopes for 2021, but at this point, don't we all!

The amnesiac Sherlockian

 Yesterday Morton L. Duffy tweeted a very interesting question on Twitter. 

Waking up with no memory, in one's own bed, surrounded by the collected paraphernalia of one's life, is a very curious mental puzzle. The bedroom alone would make me wonder several things, like "Why do I have a shelf and a half of what looks like the same book?" "I guess I'm a hat guy?" "Who wears this women's underwear that doesn't seem to fit me?"

Wandering across the hall, though, and encountering the library overstocked with Sherlock Holmes related books, however, would be the true mind-boggler. With no memory, the fact that all these books had that odd name in them would show there was something somehow important about this guy, but how long would it take to understand which books were the original source material, buried in all the works that came along after? Honestly, I think my first reaction would be writing off the entire mystery as way too big to start trying to figure out which one of that legion I should read to solve the puzzle. Besides, I'm probably hungry, having just woken up, and wanting to find food. 

Hunger might be the great motivator, but even with no memory, one has to wonder if one's emotional core will still hold on to something that would hold a reaction, even if one didn't know why. Would certain books draw me to them, while others would automatically be ignored?

If any feelings toward individual books remained, Baring-Gould's Annotated would draw me to it, and the exceptionally battered nature of one particular edition might even attract my intellect once I got something to eat. Any book that beat up and still owned must have some significance, and, even now, I think that would be the best primer to bring me up to speed about Sherlock Holmes . . . though about the current state of Sherlockiana? Not anywhere close.

I'd have a hard time logging on to the computer that sits next to it if I couldn't remember my password, but if I made it past that little hurdle, I'd find a browser with an initial quick button that has a little blue bird and says "Twitter," at which point the confusion really starts. But that is where I think I have to start to answer Morton's question: The difference between what I read from Baring-Gould about the hobby of Sherlockiana and what I see on Twitter would definitely be the mind-blower.

The big question, however, would be "Would Doyle's prose work on blank-slate me?"

Some of us had a route to Holmes that started with a movie, went first to pastiches, then back to the original source material. Along the way, I remember blowing past a lot of old Sherlock material that only got more interesting when a whole lot of other Sherlock Holmes input got loaded in first. And my original introductions to Sherlock Holmes came with the developing brain of a thirteen-year-old, and loaded in during the. following years. How would a fully-formed adult brain react?

I'd have to get dressed, of course, and opening the t-shirt drawer might distract me from Holmes immediately, as I'd have to go look up the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the Mandalorian, and there's a real danger that I might just become a Marvel Comics fan and not do the long study of the library across the hall for quite a while. Sadly, Avenger's: Endgame might leave my mind numb to the more subtle influences of earlier times.

But this is the world that new Sherlockians are going to come into. So much media out there, competing for time and mental space. And as good as Enola Holmes is, without that gap we used to have between entertainments, does someone follow that back to the source, or just roll into the next Netflix movie? All of the great fandoms were built on wanting more but not getting it quickly enough. Star Wars, Star Trek, BBC Sherlock, even Strand Magazine Sherlock at Reichenbach Falls. Once that fandom is built, and once one finds one's self in the midst of it, it's great place of joy. But waking up with no memory anywhere other than the Sherlock Holmes birthday weekend or 221B Con?

That's a real puzzler. Of course, Sherlock Holmes was all about solving mysteries, so if one gets to that particular key, maybe it won't be so hard to unlock.

Why place limits on virtual Sherlockiana?

 The Baker Street Irregulars are holding their January "dinner" virtually this year for the first time. Invitations have gone out, and I have signed up. It's been a few years, and I'm curious. The thing is, my curiosity always makes me wonder things, and that's where I tend to get into trouble with some folks, especially concerning the Big Sherlockian Institution. Because I tend to be a little public with the thoughts that most reserve for personal conversations, so as not to get into the sorts of trouble that I get into.

But since I'm already in that strange purgatory of certain people's shit list, why not just dig that hole a little deeper. So let me ask this question:

If you were running the Baker Street Irregulars, and a pandemic forced you to hold that annual meeting online for the very first time . . . why not make it open to everyone?

Every reasonable excuse I've ever heard for keeping the dinner and membership limited has had to do with banquet venue size. It was never "we don't want people to know what we're doing." Nothing that weird or out-of-the-Sherlockian-ordinary goes on there. So why place limits on it?

Is there a fear that if everyone saw what goes on there, the mystique might go away? A fear that a wide open virtual dinner might lead everyone to expect to be able to come once a physical dinner was possible again? Or is just the "exclusive" part of the Baker Street Irregulars so ingrained at this point that the very concept of a wide open BSI meeting is not even on the table? One hates to think it's fear or a locked-in mindset.

What purpose do limits like that serve? 

Any other corporate entity, and let's be honest, there is a certain brand-based incorporated aspect to the BSI, would see thinking-inside-the-box limits as something to be avoided. But historically, the organization's first reaction to any new thing is to see it as a threat and tighten the sphincter. The internet? Whoa! Hold up! A new Holmes fan base thanks to a hit TV show? Whoa! We're a literary society! The turns come very slowly. And this whole pandemic Zoom shift in Sherlockian lifestyles has been a high-acceleration drive into a turn none of us were ready for.

But, as any optimist knows, challenges like this offer opportunities as well as troubles. There is an opportunity here that many Sherlockians and groups are taking advantage of, and pushing new ideas forward.  It's a little ironic that the BSI chose to charge thirty-five dollars for the virtual event and build into that cost a donation to its own charity for helping its members and guests afford the costs of its annual dinner. One of the growing issues across the board in America is finding ways to help fund people unable to pay high prices, rather than just lowering prices, so on that one, maybe they get a pass. But this was definitely a moment where some fresh thought would have been welcomed.

The BSI "dinner" packet price includes a souvenir, and I have a feeling that the group won't be able to hold the "dinner" without the standard group photo so everyone can show they were there, so I'm betting it might be a screenshot of all the little Zoom windows. New idea, or just same old, same old? (Which is also called tradition, of course. Ah, tradition!)

It's going to be a very interesting year in any case, and I shall be curious to see how it all does play out. And seeing if curiosity kills the cat, as the saying goes. We shall see.

The new Sherlockian nomads

 It wasn't too long after I started attending Sherlockian weekends that I noticed a certain commonality. There was a certain pack of Sherlockians that, despite having no coordinated plan for such, always seemed to be at such events. "The Sherlockian gypsy caravan," I used to call them, before the word "gypsy" was something I learned was best avoided. They were the ones who found their community, the ones who knew the reward for the trip made it worth leaving home, had one the ability to do so.

And then the world changed.

Another nomadic community started to form, except these weren't folk who had to travel -- just folk comfortable enough with current tech and time to handle regular Zoom calls. New familiar faces started to show up time and again as the new regulars of Sherlockian gatherings. Others disappeared from sight. We saw what the online symposium looked like, not once, but twice, and we saw that about any Sherlockian society meeting could have the same level of content without taking up a whole day, and a whole lot of people went, "This works for me." And even though the community of Sherlockian Zoomers was created by the restrictions of the pandemic, it really seems like the best parts of it might just live on after it's over.

I suspect if one were to bring a new Sherlockian into our world at this point, they would think the three biggest Sherlockians in American are Steve Mason, Greg Ruby, and Rich Krisciunas. Each of them has made a splash into this new pond by just putting in the time and effort to get around and make some things happen, in their different ways. There are a lot of other folk, old Sherlockians (and hoo boy, have we all gone gray since I last saw so many folks!) and new (some really impressive new, too) that are starting to feel like the familiar folk of a new small town that we all suddenly found ourselves in.

It's so much like the old weekend workshop/symposium regulars, but the big difference here is that you get to see all these folks a lot more often. That old BSI buy-laws gag line "and there shall be no monthly meeting" has been tossed by the wayside by the sheer number of monthly meetings that any Sherlockian could easily put on their calendar.

It's funny that, since the Zoom is a substitute for local meetings, there are still local Sherlockians. Some folks will always be happy with the people they already knew, staying in touch with local friends. Having the ability to attend meetings all over the place doesn't mean it's for everyone, and there are always going to be gathering that fit some more than others. But when the pandemic plight is done, and the locals go back to meeting in person, I'm pretty certain that the community that connected across time zones and even oceans during this change will continue to evolve. It's just started working a little too well for many of us.

But who knows? It's been an invigorating time for a lot of old Sherlockian warhorses, in any case, and I hope the bonds that have been forming with this new sort of community continue on. This new group of Sherlockian nomads have a whole lot of future territory to explore.

The 43rd Anniversary Meeting of the Hansoms of John Clayton

 There are those who say that because something can't be what it once was, maybe you should just let that thing go. You find that sentiment a lot among fans of different fandoms. Fear of overlaying old memories of thing they enjoyed I guess. But the world never ends with any of us, and sometimes things go on.

And last night, Peoria's Hansoms of John Clayton went on for one more night.

It's been a bumpy road since Bob Burr gave the group up with the turn of the century. He was the heart and soul of the Hansoms during its peak, and my biggest challenge in carrying on the group, especially during those dark times of the early 2000s between Brett and Cumberbatch, was those clear memories of all that came before, and moments never to be recreated. 

But when the Cesspuddlians of London, Ontatrio (whom I always think are in England, for some reason), tweeted last Friday that the Hansoms were coming up on a birthday, well it nagged at me for most of the weekend.

At some point Sunday night, I realized that any attempt at a 43rd anniversary meeting was better than no attempt at all, so I started inviting the few members and nearby friends I still had connections to, and those fellows we all know who are attempting to attend a Zoom meeting for every scion society ever. I didn't want to try to beef up the numbers too much, as I had no program for the meeting as of that moment, and it was two days away. So I started to throw together a program, with the help of two Hansoms who have came aboard at least as early as me -- one was the good Carter, of course, and the other was George Scheetz, youngest of the club's three founders.

We ended up with a dozen fine folk in attendance, and I got out the old podium with the club logo on it and managed to zoom from behind it.

We kept to the basic rituals that we observed at every meeting: Start with the Clayton Ritual, end with Starrett's "221B." As our banquets had forever had a letter from Sherlock Holmes writing as to why he couldn't attend at the outset, we had one of those. The meeting minutes of the first meeting forty three years ago, held only a few hundred yards from where I was currently hosting the meeting, were read, and we rolled through a slide show with random talk of Hansom history. I kept it to an hour, as I promised those in attendance. (It was a school night, after all.) And after that hour, I offered the option to view the video of the Hansoms' lowest-possible-budget recreation of "The Three Garridebs," which featured some of the worst line-reads imaginable, and was a little sleep-inducing. But it was only twenty minutes long (with at least four or five of that being hand-written credits being . . . hand . . . written), and eight of our dozen dutifully suffered through.

It was definitely more about the Hansoms of John Clayton than Sherlock Holmes, which can be a bad thing for any club -- becoming more interested in itself than the great detective -- but the Hansoms hadn't had a meeting in a many years, and it seemed a good way to do a reset. This is where we've been, where are we going next, if we are at all? Who knows?

People always ask me if the Hansoms of John Clayton still meet in Peoria, and I like to think they do. And since we just had a 43rd anniversary meeting, with old members and new, I can now say we definitely do. Some clubs meet annually and leave it at that. Maybe that will be what the Hansoms do now as well, until someone triggers something further and new traditions are built underneath the name, should it be carried on.

Next year, there will be a 44th anniversary meeting, and since I have a year to prepare, it should have a program that's something new and not about the club of years gone by.

Because the world never ends with any of us, and sometimes things do go on.

Major Holmes and Captain Watson

 Back in the eighties, when I was first getting into Sherlock Holmes, it seemed like any non-Sherlock, Sherlock-related folk in books or comics were all trying to be Sherlock clones. Irene Adler would grab up a Watson of her own. Solar Pons just flat-out copied everything. More and more since the Cumberbatch wave hit, I'm seeing writers create some marvelous original characters who exist in Holmes's universe and bloodline without being dreadful mimics of the master detective.

One such delightful new character is Captain Sheffield Holmes, the nephew of Sherlock and the start of Cloudwrangler Comics series Major Holmes and Captain Watson. I've had some real disappointment in Sherlock-related comics lately, so many just trading on the name, and I'm very happy to find the Major Holmes & Captain Watson does not fit that category at all.

Another successful Kickstarter that hit every single funding goal it went after, the book is a lovely thing and writer Jeff Rider and artist Ismael Canales put their talents to make it a rip-snortin' wartime tale that captures the magic of comics that many a Sherlock-ish comic doesn't, which makes it a very special beast. The book doesn't waste any time in setting Sheffield apart from Sherlock, the blond, tossle-maned nephew getting pulled from bed with a boyfriend on the very first page. His "Watson" arrives and quickly sets herself in place as an able partner . . . though one that might have been more contrived to be just that than a random relative of Dr. Watson who just happened to be handy. And who would contrive such a thing?

Well, that would be telling. The ride that Major Holmes & Captain Watson gives a reader is the kind you don't want spoiled, and I was very glad to get the book with a completely blank slate to place my first impression on. (I'd forgotten the preview pages, as I backed the project so long ago.) I'm saving the second issue to read when the time is best suited, but since I backed it at "The Special Dossier" level, and received the file of extras, one of the intelligence photos did give away a secret I hadn't read yet.

That particular secret was still a grand treat, as I had already developed my theories on the subject -- which immediately proved wrong, even though I should have seen it. (Aren't those the best twists, the ones you kick yourself for not seeing sooner?)

You can find copies of the comic at CloudwranglerComics.com as well as some other items of interest, and, being a comics fan as well as a Sherlockian, I've already ordered a couple of Jeff Rider's other comics.  And I'm definitely looking forward to this series going forward.

Thirty years to an ASH meeting

 It is 1:04 PM on Sunday, and I am already reviewing the meeting of the Adventuresses of Sherlock Holmes that started at noon. Why? Because somehow, Evelyn Herzog, with technical support from Greg Ruby and Steve Mason, distilled what felt like three hours worth of Zoom speakers into a terrific hour of Sherlockian fun.

Of course, the fun for me didn't truly begin until I got to finish my toast to "Friendship," because I was more nervous than I've been in a decade, about anything. Why?

Because I've been wanting to get to a meeting of the Adventuresses for well over thirty years.

Back in the eighties snail mail days, Tina Rhea was a frequent correspondent and would write me of all the glories, fun, and frolic of the ASH gathering together. At a time when the BSI was still men-only and seeming a bit stodgy, that group seemed like the true fun Sherlockians, and I had even promised Tina I would attend in 1989, then got talked into the other January dinner by a friend who was strongly hinting at a shilling might be my reward. (It was, but that's another story.)

Now, I don't know about you, but even though we weren't Catholic, my mama raised my with a fully activated sense of guilt, and a couple of years later, when the Irregulars started letting women in, and the alternate January dinner was no longer the ASH dinner, I did get to NYC again and attend that other dinner, at least a couple of times. But it wasn't the ASH dinner. And since getting me to fly to New York for any reason became a harder and harder sell as the years past, the non-January ASH dinners never saw me in attendance either. That little thread of Sherlockian guilt never fully left.

Even after 2008, when I became an Adventuress myself, I never got to a meeting proper, but then along came this pandemic and Zoom. Suddenly, my chance was here. I actually volunteered to give a toast, not realizing how big that moment might feel, finally getting to be with the ASH and their friends, virtually traveling to New York in my mind. And had I not become so practiced at pontificating in front of the computer screen for podcasts, I might have been just a little freaked out by all that.

But, the moment passed, as all moments happily do, and the ASH meeting as a whole was full of thoughtful toasts and excellent presentations, all kept in one tidy hour in a demonstration of how much diverse and quality content can be put in a single hour of Zoom -- an inspiration to those of us trying to wrangle our own Zooms. While we didn't get to see all the faces of all those hundred and fifty Sherlockians present, and there was some confusion in the chat as to who was Peter Blau, it was one of the best virtual Sherlockian meetings I've attended, and while I hope the ASH can return to their old habits soon, I would not mind another one of these at all.

And if not, how much is a ticket to NYC?