Sherlock Holmes: 60 for 60

Some days ago I put up a post about the future of sherlock60, announcing that thesmallhobbit and I wouldn’t be running any more rounds after Round 5 ends. And almost in passing, I said if anyone wanted to run the next round, they should get in contact.

And… someone did!

alafaye has come forward and asked if they can host Round 6, and thesmallhobbit and I have gratefully accepted.

Things are presently still at the planning stage. This post is really just to let you know that alafaye will be running the next round and to see what kind of interest is out there. We have already decided between us all that Round 6 would be run on both the LJ and the DW comms to give alafaye the best chance of finding participants.

The present round will be coming to an end on Sunday, 6th August. alafaye will then do an introduction post on the 13th and Round 6 will formally start on the 20th August.

If you have any ideas for Round 6, please leave them in the comments. For example, which reading order would you prefer: publishing date, timeline—or something else? This is not to commit alafaye to anything—just to do a bit of brainstorming.

thesmallhobbit and I will be staying on as mods at Sherlock60, but after Round 5 we’ll be taking more of a backseat. Small Hobbit will be commenting from time to time but doesn’t want to be committed to finding time every Sunday. I will be commenting pretty regularly but I too don’t want to be committed to every week.

I’ll continue to be in charge of archiving the LJ comm over at DW. Also, Mrs. Hudson will still be transferring over to holmes_minor, where her poetry page will be becoming a monthly post, rather than weekly. But alafaye will be coming up with their own brand new activities for Sherlock60.

We’re pretty excited about the comm’s future now—alafaye’s enthusiasm being rather contagious. It looks like Round 6 is in very good hands.

Naturally LJ’s new TOS have left all of us feeling rather unsettled. However, the comm is definitely going to continue just on LJ, with a regular backup to Dreamwidth. The community aspect of the group is so important and there are so few active members, it wouldn’t be a good idea to run it in two places. And I know not everyone wants to get a Dreamwidth account.

However, this is probably a good time to talk about the future of the comm in general. Last August, at my request but with thesmallhobbit’s agreement, we decided we weren’t going to run another round after Round 5 ended. I didn’t take that step lightly—this comm was my first home on LJ, and my proper entry into fandom after lurking on the edges. This is where I’ve made my long-term fandom friends. But the comm takes up a fair bit of my time and I’d like to use that time now to try and write other things.

There may be someone out there who would like to take over for Round 6. If so, PM either thesmallhobbit or myself and we’ll discuss it. But that’s looking increasingly unlikely. So our plan is this. We’ll continue on as before until the end of Round 5. Then we’ll put the comm into semi-retirement. People will still be able to request to join, and members will still be able to post 60s. But there will be no more formal schedules and no more mod posts. It’s also unlikely Small Hobbit and I will be posting any more 60s ourselves. We would be keeping an eye on the comm though and commenting on any new 60s. Also at that point it would be OK for members to post further 60s over at the Dreamwidth sherlock60 if they preferred.

Mrs. Hudson has graciously agreed to join us at holmes_minor, where her poetry page would be appearing monthly, rather than weekly. And though we wouldn’t be having regular discussion posts, there is nothing stopping us having them occasionally—either discussing the canon itself, or a topic related to canon.

We’re not truly coming to an end—just moving sideways slightly. I’d just like to add here our thanks to spacemutineer, and to everyone who came and joined in with us over the years. I am very proud to have been, and to continue to be, a part of this marvellous community.

You may recall my personal journal was recently temporarily suspended due to it erroneously being flagged as a source of spam. This had the side-effect of all my posts also temporarily disappearing from sherlock60.

Which brought home to thesmallhobbit and I just how vulnerable the comm is. A great many people, past and present, have put an awful lot of work into sherlock60 and we really don’t want to risk any of that being lost.

Therefore, we are proposing to import a copy of the comm over to Dreamwidth, and then to re-import it at regular intervals as new content is added. (This mirror comm would just be a record, rather than an active community—we would be continuing on LiveJournal.) Before we do anything though, we want to see how everyone feels about this.

I must emphasise that no-one with a live account on LJ would lose control over their copied posts and comments at the Dreamwidth sherlock60. All authors will still be able to manage them using OpenID via LiveJournal. There is a little more information on accessing imported posts and comments here, and more information about using OpenID on Dreamwidth here.

So what do you think?

We're heading towards the end of Round 4 and thesmallhobbit and I thought it might be a good idea to put up a discussion post about sherlock60's future. We definitely want it to have a future but we also think it’s time to give it a revamp.

So, I’m going to list some points here and whether you’re already been posting, you’ve just been reading along or you’ve been considering joining in, if you’re interested in what’s going to be happening in the comm after we come to the end of this round, we’d love to hear your thoughts and suggestions.


1. Canon Discussion Post: I have been involved in some very interesting discussions over the years but it has to be said this post gets the least attention out of the various comm activities, and a lot of discussions about the week’s story often happen naturally under the 60s and on the poetry page anyway.

So, thesmallhobbit has come up with an excellent suggestion to rejig the discussion post. Instead of discussing the week’s story directly we could pick a theme connected to the story. For example, with BLUE we could look at the Victorian Christmas, for SPEC we could look at exotic animals in canon, for SOLI we could look at the craze for bicycles, and so on.

How do you feel about this? Is there something else you’d like to do instead?


2. Poetry Page: We both want to keep Mrs. Hudson’s poetry page. It’s turned out to be quite popular and a lot of fun. But even though I have consulted with Mrs. Hudson (^^”), I must admit I haven’t actually come up with any thoughts regarding revamping it.

Is there anything you’d like changed or added? Anything in particular you’d like to try regarding poetry?


3. Reading Schedule: So far we’ve had R1: alphabetical order, R2: Baring-Gould chronological order, R3: the ones thesmallhobbit needed to do, the ones scfrankles needed to do, followed by the ones scfrankles had already done (er, this is probably not one to repeat...), R4: published order.

Is there a particular order you’d like to go in for Round 5—either a new order or repeating one we’ve had before?


4. Any other thoughts and suggestions?



As well as discussing sherlock60, there’s something else we’d like to talk about.

thesmallhobbit and I are planning on setting up a sister comm, for all forms of microfiction. Or rather a little brother comm: it’s going to be called Holmes Minor (holmes_minor), the subtitle being: a playground for little fics and poetry.

This comm would still be dedicated to the ACD Sherlock Holmes ‘verse but we wouldn’t be concentrating on individual ACD stories—we’d just be writing in the ACD Holmes ‘verse in general. And all kinds of microfiction would be welcome, not just 60s. Forms like 6 word stories, 55s, drabbles, double drabbles and 221Bs. Or just anything that had a word count up to 500 words. And as it says in the subtitle, poetry would be welcome too. Our initial idea is that we might have monthly prompts.

Would you be interested in joining us in this new comm?