Have I Died? Gone to the West?

No. Just been very busy and spending less time as this Elf and more time as my MAE (Mortal Alter-Ego) and as Philippe de la Matraque (another alter-ego). Then some sadness hit. My MAE and our husband are adopting. But there has been a big setback. I won't duplicate here what she put in her blog. But it was quite a blow and now we (Don't you love pronouns when dealing with alter-ego's of the same physical person?) have to practically start again.

And before that, a hard drive died. It took with it all our websites, the spreadsheet detailing adoption saving, all our stories, all our feedback, and all our e-mail for the last 10 years or more.

My MAE is a technical support person. She could't fix that drive. It was physical damage. But she did find a way to recover some of the files. She got websites from Bravenet, which had hosted them briefly in 2008. She got some story files from her laptop, thankfully including all her poetry and unposted stories. She also got some feedback by undeleting from another drive that had temporarily held all these files last year.

She says she's creatively paralyzed. And since, creatively, she's mostly been Philippe and not Ainaechoiriel, well, that leaves me with little to say or do. Certainly nothing to write, though I have occasionally ducked my ankles into Henneth Annun's nuzgul hutch and looked at birthday drabble requests. Still, nothing took hold. Really, I need to leave her creativity to Philippe anyway. He started his story in 2004 and still isn't halfway though it. But I wouldn't mind a little short story or drabble now and then and I don't think he would either.

Boy, it's been a long time

Even for an Elf to notice. Anyway, part of the reason why I've not been blogging here is evidenced by not blogging here. My MAE (Mortal Alter Ego) met this guy. And life got busier and busier until she was hardly taking the time to be me. I'd made maybe 40 comments in the 2005 MEFAs. The year before I'd make over 300! And I started ignoring all my duties as Admin. Marta, thankfully, was there to take over most of it. Sulriel and some others took up the slack, too.

I officially retired from the MEFA Admin-ship this week. I'm still keeping my toes in the door of the fandom. I still have hopes of writing more stories, should the Valar choose to gift me with the inspiration for them. Or should the darling little Nuzgul bite my ankles. I'll take it either way!

But alas, nothing at this time. When my MAE does sit down to write, too often she becomes her secret alter ego, which isn't me. She has let me try to find a nuzgul now and then though. I went trolling through the Nuzgul Hutch and challenges at HASA, holding up my robes to expose the skin above my boots, but sadly, nothing bit.

And so, not only will I not be admining the MEFAs, I'm not likely to have a story in the nominations even this year. Justice, I suppose. My MAE didn't manage a single vote, for the first time, in the ASC awards this year either. She hasn't had a story there for 2, I think. I do hope our muses aren't dead.

The 2005 MEFAs are here!

They started with a joke on April Fool's Day this year, so I had a little fun with that. But they started off, for real, with a new website! Anthony (just first names here) got the site all up and working, based on an academic paper conference website software and he's tweaking it as needed. It's been great so far! We've had over 700 nominations and there is still a month of Nomination Season to go!

And we've got over 200 members! Nearly a hundred more than last year! I hope they stick around! It's gonna be fun!

It's been awhile....

Yes, it has. What am I up to? Well, the MEFA Post-mortem, though I admit to being in a funk, like Gabrielle (my mortal alter ego) said. We have finished with the rules. We decided on categories. Now we're deciding on awards titles. I need to get some polls up with the suggestions. And boy, there are going to be a lot of them.

Also, we have a new web site in the works. Anthony has offered to build us a website that will automate nominations, categorizations, check ballots, reviews (we'll still have to write them, of course) and such. It will be great! Our rules will have to be tweaked to fit it once it's running. It's not so much rules that change as procedures.

Well, back to the grind. I'm trying to climb out of this funk and get those polls started today.

The Post Mortem

Post mortem? Well, that's what it's called at ASC so that's what I'm calling it in the MEFA's. It's a time when we, the members, decide what worked, what didn't, and what we might want to change.

It actually started in December and it's nearly over now. For the month of December we discussed changes to the rules and structure. We changed the character counts for each point value, decided authors would do the categorizing, allowed for graduated categories and some other changes.

This month, we've been suggesting new or replacement categories. There are several in polls right now, waiting for the results. Some new categories we might get: Villians (in place of Orcs), Alternate Universe, Movie-verse, Suspense (combining Horror and Mystery), Non-Fiction, Post-Ring War, and Dwarves. Once those polls are decided, we'll work on choosing three award titles for the new categories and changing others if we want to (I think Faramir could be good for Drama, but then he might be needed for Gondor if Gondor graduates from a subcategory to a category).

We also decided to move the awards up one month so that they start in April and the voting ends in September rather than on Halloween. That made for a tough crunch last year. This should ease things up.

We have winners!

You can view them on the MEFAwards web site and you can also read ALL the comments there. That is mostly what I've been doing since the 15th when we announced the winners (on time!). There was a lot of formatting to do to get them up on the web site.

You can also view the winners of the banner contest. If you can't get them to come up, it means the power is still out at Gabrielle's house. With the banners, we ran out of room on the Earthlink website. So we moved the banners to Gabrielle's server at home.

Now I think I have a few little admin-type things to do and then maybe I can have a few days to rest. Then it's on to the Post Mortem. And the surprise, which I hope will be ready by Dec. 1st.

Busy, busy, busy

Voting Season is over so the staff is busy counting and counting. We've got less than a week before we announce the winners, but we're doing good so far. We've got 13 categories' winners figured out. 19 more to go!

After Monday, things should smooth out a bit. Except that I'll have to retool the web site to show the winners.