Hi everyone!
The end of another year is upon us and I just wanted to take a few moments to chat with you all for a bit.
First, I want to apologize for the delay in the Felix Awards this year. I feel like I've dropped the ball a little bit but to be perfectly honest, there almost was no awards season this year. A small few of you may know this but my mother was diagnosed with a very aggressive form of breast cancer in July and she has been living with me while she undergoes treatments. It's hard enough having a house guest over an extended period but when they're your parent and they're sick... well, it has taken up a lot of my spare time.
At the same time, after finishing my graduate studies this year, I've been trying to relaunch my career. I've been busy applying and reapplying to jobs, doing testing for government positions and going to an endless stream of job interviews which, up until about a week ago, had resulted in a lot of disappointment
.
With all of that happening, I actually took a break from my AC duties for a good chunk of the fall and Mare stepped in to let me deal with the emotional rollercoaster I was stuck on. When it came time to think about Felix again, I honestly didn't know what I was going to do. Mare and I had a conversation in which she ultimately put the power in my hands and let me decide. I went back and forth a lot but knew that Felix is so much bigger than just the work I put into it. It's not mine - it's yours and I didn't want to disappoint anyone.
I tried as hard as I could to stay on the exact same schedule as last year's awards season (even going so far as to attempt to duplicate the dates things were posted on the forum) so that it wouldn't get away from me but it did. The nominations/voting portion of this season has stretched on for much longer than I ever would have wanted and I'm really sorry. I'm doing my absolute best to speed things up so you're not left waiting. I thank you all sincerely for sticking around and being enthusiastic about it all even though it's seemingly dragging on forever.
There were a few other things I wanted to take the opportunity to clear up, while I have you all here. I know there's been a lot of technical glitches with the site and I just want to say I wish we could do more to make sure they never happen again. Some of the newer people on the site/forum may not know this but Mare and I are not the owners of Absolute Chaos - we're the moderators. We're the beefy security guards standing at the boss' door and ultimately are not the ones holding all the power. We are under some limitations, including:
A. The eFiction script - it's old, full of bugs and hasn't been updated in years, but continues to be the only semi-reliable fanfiction archiving system available. It has a lot of glitches that all eFiction-based sites are experiencing and worst of all, it can't be changed. Other than changing the skins around we don't have much flexibility to do anything else.
B. The site belongs to Ash - we always pass along all of your technical concerns to Chaos/Ash as soon as they're brought up to us but once they leave our outboxes it's ultimately in his hands. If he has time, he addresses the issues and if he doesn't... we wait, just like you wait.
Despite those limitations, Mare and I will continue to work to make your experience here easy and interactive. Mare spends a lot of time on things like the monthly challenges, featured stories, surveys and daily questions just as I do with Felix and ongoing participation will be the only thing that will keep them alive.
We may have been frustrated over the lack of nominations for Felix this year, but really the kudos goes to the people who did nominate. The frustrating part was mostly that so many people expressed interest but then didn't follow through. If we decide to do it all again next year, hopefully they will. There will always be those people that will make fake accounts to nominate themselves (those get deleted), or make fake accounts to nominate their friends (that's actually not against the rules), will only nominate stories by their co-writers (what are friends for?), won't include links, won't include author names, etc but in the end it's all worth it to know that you guys had fun.
So, I thank each and every one of you for making it possible to keep Absolute Chaos going strong for the past ten years. You're the ones who have done it and it goes neither unnoticed nor unappreciated.
Cheers.
