New Year? I bloody well hope so

[erastes]

Things to be thankful for today - That I'm out of Potterdom.

I made some great friends in Potter fandom, I have a lot to thank fandom for, it started me writing, convinced me I could write, that I could write things that people would like to read and created little playgrounds and nursery slopes for me to run around in and have people say nice things while I made mud pies with words and experiemented. The friends I made have stayed with me, in the main, and that's wonderful too.

But I never enjoyed the wankery and general asshattery and - let's be honest - the bloody mean spirited shadenfraude LOVE that swum in the undercurrents beneath it. Make one mistake and you were mincemeat. This led to everyone always having to praise fics instead of doing constructive criticism - which is vital to any writer's development. To criticise a fic was TEH EVOL and you would be pilloried for it.

99 percent of the fandom moves along without problems and then there's something like the harry_holidays debacle today and everyone in fandom gets to have a good laugh at other people's expense under the guise of "it's in the public interest."

Being a moderator of a community that does gift exchanges is a hard task. I won't say thankless, because everyone thanks the moderator afterwards, but it is hard work and I take my hat off to devotees like gmth who slaves over merry_smutmas every year. I created and modded harry_holidays for one year as a Smutmas overspill and it nearly killed me with all the hair pulling out. I was prepared to do it again in 2006, even though I had left fandom, because people had a need for it, and I was more than thrilled when annephoenix offered to take it over.

She did a stunning job. She created a whole new look - far better than anything I'd managed to do, and worked harder than I ever did in my stewardship, making lists of popular pairings and other such trivia. *applauds*

Everyone makes mistakes, I've made more than I can admit to, and I am so bloody lucky that I never ended up a regular figure of fun over at the Wankery-Pits - setting uphp_literotica was tantamount to putting myself inside a pinata, but luckily, other than a few bitchy grumbles from non-inviteds, the community saved itself from wank, it didn't need me in front of it with a burning sword.

One small balls up does not make you a bad mod, and lets be honest, it's not a mistake she - or any mod - will make again. I certainly didn't read the fics as they were sent to me on HH, I probably should have done. As it turns out, I've just had a comment from one of 2005's participants who accuses me of making almost exactly the same mistake as annephoenix has just done, evidently I got muddled and gave them a gift that squicked them, and even thought it happened a year ago, I've only just found out and I do feel really bad about it. But it does go to show that mistakes are made, and they aren't deliberate. You wouldn't be a mod of a massive gift exchange if you wanted to hurt people's feelings, would you?

I've had gifts I didn't like, but in 99.99 of the cases I am sure that all writers and artists do what the giftee want and if the giftee doesn't like the result, then it's not too difficult to smile and say thanks, just like you did to Granny when she bought you socks. Again.

I hope that the giftee in this instance gets the fic they wanted, and I hope that the thoughtless authors think twice before "being clever" again.

and I hope that Potterdom gets less wanky. But one can't have everything one wants in life.