Sunday, December 26, 2004
On "Best of Year" Compilations
My thought on best of year compilations is that for the most part, they're okay. Janet Neilson (Canadibrit) used to do a Canadibrit Fan Fiction Awards from around 1999 to 2001 -- the categories are fairly extensive and I don't think such an exhaustive listing could be done today. I don't know if any of them were done after that, but I thought (and still do think) that it's bad form to list yourself as a winner of an award when you're the one counting the votes, or asking other people to vote or nominate somebody. (Ed. Note -- We are not making any statements about the value of Ms. Neilson's work in this post, nor are we implying that Ms. Neilson was jockeying for votes -- she ran the contest for two years, on her own time and clearly put a lot of work into it.)
Now before you set phasers to kill, hear me out. The problem with any official "Best of Year/Season/Month" compilation is that IF the person operating it is also writing fan fiction, people are going to naturally want to nominate that person's work. People naturally want other people to feel good about themselves, and the mere act of sending in a vote jogs the memory in a skewed way. If Steven Galloway ran such a contest, he'd get a lot of votes for "Visitations" or one of his other series. It's just human nature. Besides, people might feel that Mr. Galloway's feelings might be hurt if they didn't consider his series particularly noteworthy, and definitely if they said great things about "Visitiations" in public. (Ed. Note -- We are not making any statements about the value of "Visitiations" in this post.)
Infrequent posts about "Best of 200x" are okay, but I hope that they don't become a semi-official thing, lest fans start jockeying for position the way they always do. If fans HAVE to have recognition, they can wait for another "Spotlight On..." feature from Mr. Galloway.
As for Wouter's new picture, I'll say two things:
a) my opinion about his writing is unchanged, and
b) damn, that bastard sure can draw. I'd almost be tempted to trade my writing skill for his art talent, and think that I'd get the better of the deal.
