The Slasher's Annotated Sherlock Holmes

Hi!  I'm Jane *waves*.  I started this mad little endeavour, but it belongs to The Internet, and The Slashers, and The Holmesians/ Sherlockians.  Here's the idea:  Holmesiana is a BIG topic.  Even if the Canon were all there had ever been, it'd be a job to keep everything clear, but there's been a CENTURY of good ideas batted around, and a century of the world changing, since most of the stories were written, and we're all of us human.  This is why annotated versions of the Canon are a good idea.  There are two printed editions, edited by William S. Baring-Gould and Leslie Klinger, respectively.  They are both very good and useful tools, and I love them dearly, but one of them is very expensive, and the other is out of print, and neither is at all sympathetic to slash.  Also, each of them was written by only one person, and that, in the era of the internet, when we have unprecedented access to the brainpower of much of the world, is just silly.  SO, this is a new kind of annotated Canon.  Possibly you write fic, or draw pictures, or make fanvids, or enjoy reading/looking at/ watching the above, and possibly, in the course of these activities, you've accumulated notes, links, observations, research, and other bits and bats.  Possibly you simply love the original stories and have a battered old copy with comments scribbled all over the margins.  These things are interesting and useful to other people, and it's time they were collected for the world!  That's what The Slasher's Annotated Edition is meant to do.

Okay, How?

This here is SpringNote.  If you've never used it before, you're not alone; I'm just learning it myself.  But it's pretty basic stuff, so fear not!  If all you want to do is read the notes that other people have left, all you really need to know is the links to the stories are over there <-------------.   I'd recommend poking around the site a little before starting to annotate, just to get a feel for the place.  Four of the stories are now pretty well-annotated:  I've got my own notes up in BLAN,  Slash4femme has been working in GREE, Cress has added a wonderful set of notes to SPEC, and Elaby has outdone herself in SIXN, so those might be good places to start.  If and when you want to leave notes, you're going to have to join the group, which is super-simple.  SpringNote takes openID, so if you've got a livejournal, a yahoo account, or any of a dozen other basic social networking ID's, you're good. Login, then click the edit button in the corner of any page to make the request to join; I'll let you in as quickly as I can.  Once you've joined, you'll still be in view mode.  If you want to elaborate on an existing annotation, open up the page for it, click the edit button in the top right corner, and go to town.  If you want to add an annotation at a new point in a story, clich the edit button in the corner of the page for that story, select the text on which you want to comment, and click "link" up in the bar at the top of the page (it you've got no bar, click the dohickey with the four arrows in the top right corner and you will).  Your options should come up properly the first time around, so just click create.  Now click on the link you just created.  it should once again get all your options right for you (you want no template, just for the sake of reference), so click create one more time.  And that's all there is to it.

What kind of notes should I leave?

Okay, here's the first VERY IMPORTANT NOTICE: SpringNote has a bit in their policy prohibiting sexually explicit content.  This scares me a little, and I'm considering other hosting in future, but for now, this has to be kept to PG-13 at most, mmkay?  I'm sorry!  It's not my fault.  But yes, keep it non-explicit, or this could all get yanked with no warning.   You don't need to be Victorians, or even Edwardians, but exercise common sense.

Other than that, here's how I think it will work best: every page, including the stories and each individual annotation, has a comment section, and there should be a division between stuff-that-goes-in-the-annotations and stuff-that-goes-in-the-comments.  If you have an observation, a connection to some other part of the Canon, a bit of knowledge, or a link to useful resources or fanart  of any and all kinds which relates to a specific story or line, put it in the actual annotations.   Also, if you want to insert bits of art in annotations, go for it-- I'd LOVE to get the Paget illustrations in there, and of course fan-created art too!   Annotations do NOT have to relate directly to anything slashy (and, if your note does, it can tie in to any pairing under the Canonical sun).  For example, if you happen to know absolutely everything there is to know about enteric fever, or Victorian walking sticks, or Mendelssohn's Lieder, by all means share!  If you want to make notes relating to dramatic productions of various kinds (Granada, the BBC radio dramas, that sort of thing), that's fab too.  The whole point is to assemble as much Canonically-related knowledge as possible.  Oh, and at least for my notes, I'm writing in the spirit of The Game-- that is, under the theory that (most of) the Canon was written by Dr. John H. Watson, and that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was simply his agent.  But you can be all grounded-in-the-real-world in yours if you really want to.

On the other hand: if you want to solely to squee or giggle or otherwise emote, feel free, but please do it in the comment section rather than the annotations.  If you want to talk about how all this relates to Harry Potter, or what it might have been like if it all happened on Mars, or tell us about your trip to London, go right ahead, but please do it in the comment section.  I'm not good with hard and fast rules, so if anybody else can think of a way for me to phrase this distinction more clearly, please help me out.   I think the point is pretty self-evident anyhow?

A few more quick things: for each story, I've created a page for introductory notes and a page to discuss dramatic interpretations of that story, just so there's someplace for annotations of a more general variety.  I'm mentioning it here because these aren't linked to specific words in the stories, so you'll have to go looking for them in the list of notes if you want to read or edit them.  Also, the text I used is from  the Project Gutenberg Australia Omnibus, and may contain some minor imperfections.  I've tried to clean it up a bit, but if you notice typos, please do fix them.

Besides the pages full of stories on the left, there's also a guestbook, a noticeboard, and a discussion board which I'm hoping will end up a little bit meta-- full of comments about the Slasher's Annotated, rather than about any of the specific stories.  There's also a list of the Jay Finley Christ abbreviations, 'cause it's always useful to have those around.  And... I think I'm done with the spiel-bit now.  Go forth and enjoy!