Tour de Holmes

Whew.

After fifteen months of reading, writing, and research, I’ve finally finished all of my “Tour de Holmes” essays — seventy-five in all. The last four are done, so I decided to spend all next week (Monday through Friday) putting them out. Friday will also have a special bonus — a rarely seen Holmes story by Doyle!

Now that the essays are done, what happens next? Well, as I’ve mentioned a few times, I’m going to compile all of them into one manuscript. Part of the reason to get these done now is that I want to use November to get my Far West short story done for Gareth, and to just take a break from writing about Holmes for a while. In December or January, I’ll pull up the manuscript up and start revising it. I already have a few places I want to add some more material, and there are a number of essays where I quickly hammered through to hit the deadline rather than digging into the text or the history as much as I could have. Once the manuscript is nicely polished and expanded upon, I’ll start shopping it around — I already have a couple of publishers who have expressed interest, and I want to explore that route before I consider self-publishing it.

In the meantime, if my fearless readers have had new thoughts or opinions on any of the stories, please feel free to go back and add more comments on the appropriate entries on my blog or LiveJournal. There wasn’t very much discussion during the Tour (although many people told me that they were enjoying reading the essays), but additional thoughts can illuminate places where I beef up or expand on my thoughts on particular topics.