Addiction to reading stories. Addiction to twitter. Addiction to the everyday interaction with amazingly fun and supportive women from all over the world.
Sometimes this addiction takes over and you feel like you are a slave to it. You take on too many responsibilities in the fandom that pull you away from Real Life priorities. You fight to strike a balance. This is a challenge that each of us deals with.
For some, the temptation is to sometimes just cut all ties to the online world we've created for ourselves, and focus on Real Life responsibilities and people. The term we use for this is flouncing.
I hate to see people leave my little online world! Authors, people in my social circles, but especially ones that are close to me. The thing is that of the people I interact with, I have come to love many of them, but I would want them to go, if this is what they feel they need to do for themselves. If someone feels like flouncing is the only way they can cope and do what they need to do to feel good about themselves as a wife and/or mother and/or whatever, then I totally support that decision. It makes me sad, and I would miss them, but I would eventually get over it and invest in new projects and new people in this fandom. I would move on.
It is OK to flounce the fandom. It is not, however, OK to flounce your friends and "colleagues" with no notice, and leave them holding the bag.
I think it's important to make this distinction. If you have developed strong friendships, or if you have partnerships in projects like blogs or contests or whatever, the people who have teamed with you rely on you. It doesn't matter that we are "online" friends, or if the work we do is just "for fun" because "it's just fanfic." These are real time commitments and relationships in which everyone involved has invested.
My reason for writing this post is to put forth the following:
Things to Think About When You're Flouncing
If you give 2 weeks notice (or even 1 week), the people who depend on you to get shit done can prepare for your departure. Things can be put into place, Transitions can be made.
- They can find volunteers to take on some of your duties temporarily, so they don't fall into the lap of already overworked and over-committed people who are in the same boat of struggling to find a balance of fandom in their life.
- So instead of these people having to spend their time putting out fires that you left behind, perhaps they could focus on regrouping, moving on, and investing in future projects.
If you train people to replace you, the projects in which you and your friends invested so much time, passion, and energy, can continue on, unhurt by your absence.
Something important that you might not know: when you delete a gmail account, ALL gdoc documents, spreadsheets, forms, etc. that were "owned" by that account are deleted, whether or not others use them too. (if this happens to you, there is a way to recover a gmail account that's been deleted, but that has to be done by the person that did the deleting.)
And the #1 thing to think about when you're flouncing...
The people who love you would bend over backwards to help you do whatever you needed to do, even if what you need to do is leave. It's up to you to choose how you decide to leave, but there are choices you can make that prevent your departure from ruining the Twific experience for the people around you.
When you dump all of your responsibilities onto someone else with no notice, it makes the work we do become stressful work. It takes away the joy... and any time that might have been available to actually read Twific. That's not fair. And if you truly do care about the people you've met while on this journey, you don't have to handle it that way.
This has been a PSA, and is not meant to attack anyone. It is meant to serve as helpful for people who are thinking of flouncing. If I were flouncing, I would want to know if there were steps I could take to avoid hurting the people around me. And that is why it's important to me to get that information out there.
