Amy Thomas's Blog, page 12

Always 1895: My 221b Con Experience

It all started with a tea party.

Well, not just any tea party–a party with Sherlock-themed teas being served by costumed characters to mostly costumed attendees. One of the first things I noticed, that night, was the prevalence of female faces. The ratio was something like 95%/5% female, and as the convention got underway, it changed to maybe 90%/10%. It’s not at all original of me to observe that this is where the Sherlock Holmes subculture is heading. Leaving aside unfortunate people in back rooms wailing about change, this is a fantastically encouraging sign. These women ranged from young teenagers to past middle age, and their interests in Holmes ranged from film and TV to incredibly technical knowledge about the original stories. Their love of Sherlock Holmes is sincere, diverse, often humorous, and in many cases, vastly intellectual.

The morning after the party signaled the official opening of the convention, complete with alphabetical registration and deerstalkers for sale. Since this was my first fan convention experience, I have nothing to compare it to, but everything was almost alarmingly organized, and the official panel schedule got underway without a hitch.

My duties for the first few hours involved the enjoyable task of meeting scores of Sherlockians from my vantage point at the Baker Street Babes table in the middle of the action. I saw some of the most incredible cosplay I’ve ever witnessed, and that afternoon featured an impromptu rendition of half an hour of Danny Boyle’s Frankenstein, performed very capably by fully-costumed young women who clearly possessed more confidence than I could hope to aspire to.

In the early afternoon, I attended the panel of Tracy Revels, college professor and fellow MX Publishing author of acclaimed pastiches. Tracy spoke about her ongoing love affair with Holmes and her way of sharing him with class after class of freshmen at Wofford College. A highlight was meeting both her and another MX author, Kieran McMullin.

Late in the afternoon, I joined my fellow Babes and some lovely volunteers in blowing up 200 balloons and preparing them to be part of a balloon trivia game. One of the most surreal sights of my life was a hotel room entirely filled with black, white, and yellow balloons.

After a hasty dinner, we brought aforementioned balloons to the ballroom allotted for S. Moran’s Invisible Tigress Speakeasy, the party the Babes had been asked to host. My job was harassing attendees at the door for the password, which had been posted all over the convention hotel using Dancing Men code. Impressively, most of the party attendees had either figured out the code themselves or found someone who had. After the pleasant chaos of balloon trivia, which was diabolically difficult for most, the party extended into the lobby for Sherlock-themed pictionary. A good time was apparently had by all, and I returned to my hotel.

The following morning, I returned in time to record a live Baker Street Babes podcast. We interviewed tea princess Cara McGee and took audience questions, which were thoughtful, funny, and generally great. This last of my official duties complete, I did some last-minute shopping in the dealer’s room, which featured some truly remarkable artwork and products.

As a first fan convention experience, I couldn’t have asked for anything better than 221b Con. I met hundreds of interesting people and enjoyed the special thrill of sharing like-minded interests. I also got to meet many actual, real-life listeners of the Baker Street Babes podcast, which helped me to see that what we do over Skype, sometimes into the night, really means something to people. Without a doubt, the greatest highlight of all was finally meeting four of my fellow Babes in person. They truly are as intelligent, beautiful, and hilarious as I’d always supposed.

For a long time now, I’ve been a fan of Vincent Starrett’s poem 221B, which contains the lines, “Here, though the world explode, these two survive,/And it is always eighteen ninety-five.” I’ve never understood the true impact of those lines as well as I do after attending 221b Con. In the presence of hundreds of Sherlock Holmes fans, it really is always 1895, in the best possible way.

__________________________________________________________

The Detective, The Woman and The Winking Tree: A Novel of Sherlock Holmes is available from all good bookstores and e-bookstores worldwide including in the USA Amazon,Barnes and Noble and Classic Specialities - and in all electronic formats including Amazon Kindle , iTunes(iPad/iPhone) and Kobo.

The Detective and the Woman: A Novel of Sherlock Holmes is available from all good bookstores and e-bookstores worldwide including in the USA Amazon,Barnes and Noble and Classic Specialities - and in all electronic formats including Amazon Kindle , iTunes(iPad/iPhone) and Kobo.

221b Con

A week and a half from now, I’m heading down the road for 221b Con, the all-things-Sherlockian themed fan convention taking place in Atlanta, Georgia on April 13-14th, 2013. If you find yourself in the area, you can register early or at the door. I’ll be hanging about with my fellow Baker Street Babes, starting with the 221b Tea Party on Friday night and continuing through our live podcast recording on Sunday morning at 10:00 a.m., with the lovely Cara McGee, princess of all things to do with tea and fandom. I am looking forward to meeting some amazing Sherlockians. Please do say hi if you see me!

I’ll also be at Stitches South petting pretty yarn all day Friday, so if you’re a knitter, wave

_________________________________________________________

The Detective, The Woman and The Winking Tree: A Novel of Sherlock Holmes is available from all good bookstores and e-bookstores worldwide including in the USA Amazon,Barnes and Noble and Classic Specialities - and in all electronic formats including Amazon Kindle , iTunes(iPad/iPhone) and Kobo.

Sherlock Holmes and the Power of Introversion

Ah, Twitter! Earlier today, a hapless celebrity (who shall remain nameless for the purposes of this post) let loose a possibly-alcohol-fueled tweet implying that extroversion is so wonderful that there must be something wrong with introverts.

Initially, I laughed. Then, I was irritated. I’m an introvert, sure, but even if I wasn’t, it’s ignorant and silly to denounce a huge, perfectly normal part of the population as inferior. However, I have to thank this errant public figure for supplying a very pertinent topic for a blog centered around Sherlock Holmes.

First, a short digression to say: I think extroverts are wonderful. My mother and sister both have extroverted tendencies, and they are two of my favorite people in the world. All my life, I have meshed well with extroverts. They have strengths I lack, and they sometimes shield me in social situations that I find overwhelming.

Nevertheless, as has been discussed a lot in the news recently, the Western world is an extremely extrovert-biased society. From toddlerhood on, children are judged not on their ability to think deeply or understand concepts, but on how social and gregarious they are, and it never ends. The reasons for this are many and varied, stemming from historical perspectives, bad psychological theories, and other things. Introverted children often internalize the idea that there’s something wrong with them (I certainly did), until they’re old enough to realize that they’re simply wired differently from their extroverted peers. Thankfully, books like Quiet by Susan Cain and more attention given to the topic has begun to shed light on the unique gifts and contributions introverts bring to the world.

Who better to help us explore these traits than literature’s quintessential introvert, Sherlock Holmes? In the next few paragraphs, I’ll use Holmes’s character to unpack and explore what introversion is and is not.

(Note: This is intended to be a very brief overview, not an exhaustive, scientific look at the topic.)

Introversion is not shyness. Shyness/outgoingness are entirely separate concepts from introversion and extroversion. Sherlock Holmes illustrates this throughout the canon through his complete lack of reticence to speak or interact in any situation that requires his expertise. He’s an extremely bold character, neither fearful nor hesitant to share his opinion with others.

Introversion is being energized by solitude. There are times in the canon when we see Holmes not speaking for long periods of time. This has nothing whatsoever to do with shyness or hesitance and everything to do with his mental processes. Extroverts gain energy by the chemicals released in the brain during social activity. Introverts gain energy from the chemicals released during peaceful solitude.

Introversion is not hating other people. Holmes is clearly not a social butterfly, but throughout the canon, we see him mention a friend from university, spend countless hours with Watson, maintain a positive relationship with Mrs. Hudson, and arguably do a great deal to benefit mankind as a whole. He’s certainly irritated, at times, by the slow pace of the normal human mind, but he’s no misanthrope. Introversion doesn’t mean being a recluse who hates human beings.

Introversion (often) is preferring limited or smaller social gatherings. Arguably, when it comes to his friendship with John Watson, Holmes is extremely social, spending nearly every waking moment with the doctor at different periods during the canon. Like many introverts, he prefers the calming company of one preferred friend with whom interacting is unstressful and fulfilling. He obviously needs interaction, but socializing with one fulfills him more than socializing with many.

Introversion is not genius. There’s a danger in holding up something to public scrutiny and yelling, “Here look at this special snowflake thing.” If you yell too loudly, the pendulum can swing too far, and you get some kind of Rain Man effect in which introversion is viewed as a savant, zen thing that leads to Einstein-like levels of brilliance. This is simply not the case. Sherlock Holmes is a genius, but it isn’t his introversion that makes him that way. For instance, Professor Moriarty, Holmes’s arch-nemesis, is equally brilliant but shows far more extroverted tendencies. (I draw this conclusion because of his decision to use his talents to lead a network of people, rather than to become a solitary mastermind.)

Introversion is a facilitator of genius. Sherlock Holmes perfectly illustrates one of the grandest things about introversion–the fact that if a tendency toward intellectual brilliance is present, an introverted mind is uniquely suited to grow and develop that brilliance into something truly remarkable. It’s Sherlock Holmes’s long hours sitting in Baker Street, thinking through strings of clues, that take a quick mind and make it a thing of unparalleled acuity. A preference for quiet and solitude gives the detective time to fill his mental attic with information that allows him to make inferences and come to conclusions that seem nearly miraculous. Like him, introverts often have the ability to sit alone and concentrate for hours at a time, to take an idea and make it into something new and beautiful to add to our world.

In the main, I’m pleased that the Western world seems to be taking a longer and harder look at introversion and coming out with a more positive and understanding viewpoint. I’m even more delighted, however, that long before Susan Cain or TED Talks, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle presented readers with the consummate introvert, the one and only Sherlock Holmes.

Are you an introvert or an extrovert? What unique gifts do you have as a result?

___________________________________________________

The Detective, The Woman and The Winking Tree: A Novel of Sherlock Holmes is available from all good bookstores and e-bookstores worldwide including in the USA Amazon,Barnes and Noble and Classic Specialities - and in all electronic formats including Amazon Kindle , iTunes(iPad/iPhone) and Kobo.

Canon Thursday: Unsolved Holmes

My fellow Baker Street Babe, the fabulous Lyndsay Faye, is the author of an acclaimed pastiche called Dust and Shadow in which Sherlock Holmes put his talents to work solving the Ripper killings.

Many pastiche authors (including yours truly in The Detective and The Woman) put Sherlock Holmes into a somewhat historical context and have him interact with real-life individuals. Others, like Lyndsay, take on the more difficult task of placing him in a true crime setting.

Today’s question is this: Which real-life case would you like to see Sherlock Holmes solve, whether on screen or on paper?

(I’d like to see him take on the Black Dahlia case.)

_____________________________

The Detective, The Woman and The Winking Tree: A Novel of Sherlock Holmes is available from all good bookstores and e-bookstores worldwide including in the USA Amazon,Barnes and Noble and Classic Specialities - and in all electronic formats including Amazon Kindle , iTunes(iPad/iPhone) and Kobo.

The Detective, The Woman and The Winking Tree

Do you have yours yet?

 

The Detective, The Woman and The Winking Tree: A Novel of Sherlock Holmes is available from all good bookstores and e-bookstores worldwide including in the USA Amazon,Barnes and Noble and Classic Specialities - and in all electronic formats including Amazon Kindle , iTunes(iPad/iPhone) and Kobo.

Canon Thursday: Holmes in a Haiku

Your assignment is simple. Write one haiku encapsulating Sherlock Holmes, and leave it in the comments.

(A haiku has three lines, consisting of 5 syllables, 7 syllables, and 5 syllables.)

Mine:

Sherlock Holmes detects

Clues, criminals, bees, but is

Self undetected

_____________________________________________________

The Detective, The Woman and The Winking Tree: A Novel of Sherlock Holmes is available from all good bookstores and e-bookstores worldwide including in the USA Amazon,Barnes and Noble and Classic Specialities - and in all electronic formats including Amazon Kindle , iTunes(iPad/iPhone) and Kobo.

Book Review: My Particular Friend

As a book reviewer, I try to keep an open mind. That said, when author Jennifer Petkus approached me with a book she described as a Sherlock Holmes and Jane Austen mashup, I was a little bit dubious. For one thing, the word “mashup,” while descriptive, doesn’t usually conjure visions of loveliness in my mind. Thankfully, Jennifer’s book is far lovelier than the sound of its genre.

My Particular Friend takes place in Jane Austen’s world, but its characters belong to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle—sort of. The narrator is a young lady of reduced means named Jane Woodsen, and her subject is another young lady named Charlotte House. As you might imagine, these two women correspond to Mr. Holmes and Dr. Watson.

Jane Austen’s world would hardly allow for a female detective in the traditional vein, and Petkus’s clever solution is to make Charlotte a matrimonial specialist—a person who investigates and assists with all manner of difficulties related to love, courtship, and marriage. As in Doyle’s stories, Jane quickly becomes Charlotte’s right-hand man (er, woman), and mysterious hijinks ensue, told in the manner of episodic stories that lightly connect to one another.

Of particular note is the masterful characterization of Charlotte as a feminized Sherlock Holmes. I’ve never seen anyone do it better, even when they weren’t changing Holmes’s gender. Petkus has clearly captured Holmes’s wit, humor, brilliance, and idiosyncrasies.

Beyond the basics, Petkus’s book is difficult to describe because of its originality. It’s witty, funny, intelligent, and chock full of both Holmes and Austen. Fans of either or both will find a great deal to appreciate. P.G. Wodehouse fans will even find a lot to love in a sly appearance by Bertie Wooster.

Of all the books I’ve reviewed, My Particular Friend is one of my favorites. It’s a French macaron—light and airy, with a center that is deliciously witty and endlessly hilarious. There’s nothing traditional about it, and it’s absolutely worth the read.

Buy it on Amazon.

____________________________________________________

The Detective, The Woman and The Winking Tree: A Novel of Sherlock Holmes is available from all good bookstores and e-bookstores worldwide including in the USA Amazon,Barnes and Noble and Classic Specialities - and in all electronic formats including Amazon Kindle , iTunes(iPad/iPhone) and Kobo.

Thursday Special: Sherlock Holmes Audiobooks

I feel great when my books are released to the public. Sure, it’s a bit nerve-wracking to send my fledgling child of a manuscript into the hands of complete strangers, but it’s also delightful and invigorating. What could be better than that?

Well, it’s an even greater thrill when my stories become e-books, because they suddenly become accessible to a whole new audience. Knowing that people who love the printed page and people who love  e-reader technology can both access what I write is a great feeling.

Imagine my excitement when I found out several months ago that a large print edition of my first book, The Detective and The Woman: A Novel of Sherlock Holmes was going to be printed for those with visual challenges. I was thrilled that yet another audience would have access to my work, an audience that has access to a limited number of printed books.

Today put the icing on the already-quite-tasty cake when I was notified that The Detective and The Woman has become an audiobook. Now my stories are accessible to people who aren’t readers or who like to listen to audiobooks during workouts, commutes, or while doing other things that preclude holding a book.

The brand-new audio version is available here:

http://www.amazon.com/The-Detective-Woman-Sherlock-Holmes/dp/B00BHTUZHQ

_____________________________________________________

In addition to my novel, several other exciting Sherlock Holmes titles have been produced in audiobook form, and they’re available here:

http://www.amazon.com/Sherlock-Holmes-Dead-Scotney-Castle/dp/B00BHTUVK2

http://www.amazon.com/Sherlock-Holmes-Murder-Lodore-Falls/dp/B00BHZPPGG

http://www.amazon.com/Outstanding-Mysteries-Sherlock-Holmes/dp/B00BHTUS6Y

http://www.amazon.com/Sherlock-Holmes-Whitechapel-Vampire/dp/B00BHW5TU6

http://www.amazon.com/Lost-Stories-Sherlock-Holmes-Watson/dp/B00BFX45L6

_______________________________________________

The Detective, The Woman and The Winking Tree: A Novel of Sherlock Holmes is available from all good bookstores and e-bookstores worldwide including in the USA Amazon,Barnes and Noble and Classic Specialities - and in all electronic formats including Amazon Kindle , iTunes(iPad/iPhone) and Kobo.

New Book and Interview

My friend and fellow author Luke Benjamen Kuhns recently interviewed me about The Detective, The Woman and The Winking Tree and writing in general.

Here’s an excerpt:

You have a new book out now. A sequel to The Detective and The Woman called, “The Detective, The Woman, and the Winking Tree. Tell us about the book!

The book tells the story of a case mentioned in the original Holmes canon, the disappearance of a man named James Phillimore, who goes into his house to get his umbrella and disappears. Watson tantalizes readers by mentioning the situation, but he never explains what happened during Holmes’s investigation, so that’s what I set out to do. I also wanted to develop the friendship between Holmes and Irene Adler, which got off to a good start in The Detective and The Woman. 

How did the story come to being?

That ends up being a somewhat metaphysical question… As I said above, I was inspired by the canon mention of James Phillimore’s disappearance. Beyond that, I just let my imagination go and tried to keep the good and jettison the bad as I wrote and edited.

What is your draw to Irene Adler? 

I think Irene is an incredibly complex character. She’s one of the few people in the Doyle canon who start out with Holmes having one impression of them and succeed in changing it for the better. I really dislike when she’s depicted in pastiches as a sexually provocative femme fatale, since “A Scandal in Bohemia” shows her getting happily and respectably married, and the story is really more concerned with her clever mind than her sexuality. She’s the one woman and one of the only people in general who successfully tricks Sherlock Holmes in the original canon, and I’m drawn to her personality and her ingenuity.

Read the rest of the interview here.

___

Don’t forget, I’ve got a new book out!

The Detective, The Woman and The Winking Tree: A Novel of Sherlock Holmes is available from all good bookstores and e-bookstores worldwide including in the USA Amazon,Barnes and Noble and Classic Specialities - and in all electronic formats including Amazon Kindle , iTunes(iPad/iPhone) and Kobo.

Sherlock Holmes and Personality

According to personality experts who have studied the canon, Sherlock Holmes has an INTP personality. That means he’s an Introverted, Intuitive, Thinking Perceiver.

To break it down a little more:

Few, I believe, would dispute the fact that Holmes is an introvert. He’s clearly the most energized by his own company or the company of those in his inner circle, usually only Watson, but sometimes widening slightly. He rarely ventures beyond that circle for any reason other than work-related tasks, and when he does, he still has a clear objective. His idea of relaxation is attending a concert for the music itself, not the people.

Holmes’s intuition is also clearly in evidence, since he uses it constantly to solve cases. Someone might argue that he’s sensory, given his sharp ability to take in the smallest detail of the world around him, but he never does it for its own sake. The information he takes in is always assimilated into his brain for processing and relating to the case at hand. He can live in his own brain for days, a classic trait of those with an extreme intuition preference.

The canon proves that Sherlock Holmes is not without feeling, as is sometimes erroneously claimed, but he’s still a thinker based on his preference for making decisions based on logic rather than emotion. He’s the ultimate example of someone who forcefully seeks to let reason inform his every decision, and he usually succeeds. His feelings are certainly present, but he rarely lets them influence his choices.

Finally, Holmes’s perceiving preference can be seen in his creative thinking and flexibility toward rules. In many cases, he applies his own standards of justice and morality to situations, and he’s rarely susceptible to outside efforts to control him. In classic perceiver style, he hates to be forced to adhere to others’ schedules, preferring to work in his own way on his own time.

Overall, the INTP personality usually means a preference for working independently instead of leading or following, a preference for intellectual pursuits, eccentricity, dry wit, and a low need for social interaction. All of these Holmes possesses in abundance.

My own pursuit of self-discovery has yielded the answer that I am also an INTP. I believe this is part of the reason that I, and people like me, enjoy Holmes as a character. He’s a successful INTP who manages, without changing any core aspects of his personality, to carve out an existence that plays to his strengths and makes those strengths accessible to the world. For those of us who often feel like aliens in an extrovert-dominated, overstimulating, emotional world, Holmes is a hero in a very personal way.

Do you believe your personality preferences, whatever they may be, influence your enjoyment of the Sherlock Holmes stories? Why or why not?

The Detective and the Woman: A Novel of Sherlock Holmes is available from all good bookstores and e-bookstores worldwide including in the USA Amazon,Barnes and Noble and Classic Specialities - and in all electronic formats including Amazon Kindle , iTunes(iPad/iPhone) and Kobo. Grab it before the sequel launches February 13, 2013!