The Paradox
(A seeming contradiction which is nevertheless somehow true)
Hardly anyone will notice that I've gone quiet on Paradox: The Sheldon/Penny fan community. I'm not that important, and I haven't been there that long. I do plan to post "happy faces" of encouragement to those people whose work I greatly admire, and let them know more about my love for their work in private. A "Goodbye Cruel List!" would be overly dramatic and inaccurate.
It's not even a permanent silence. The majority of the paradoxers are talented and good. I'll be writing more essays and eventually want to share them. I'm making progress on my "Penny gets Possessed" fiction.
But here's my own paradox, folks.
1. I love the site. I love the idea of Penny and Sheldon together. I rejoice that people have put together a site to celebrate that idea. But....
2. I hate the fact that enough people on the site--Paradoxers all--have spent over a week running down authors, mods, and other scapegoats in over 4000 entries (as of tonight) of mob mentality. To be fair, some of them are just discussing fictions, sharing prompts, etcl, albeit anonymously. But more of them are venting hostility, and some even pursued a victim onto FanFiction.net to read her work just to bitch about it.
Think about that for a moment. Would you want to associate yourself, even one degree removed, with this behavior?
One of my favorite quotes from Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way is this:
"Over any extended period of time, being an artist requires enthusiasm more than discipline."
After 18 novels and twenty years teaching college level writing? Wow, do I understand that.
The people on the hate meme are actively stomping on the enthusiasm of others, literally killing creativity. I find this blasphemous. I even find this evil--neither the drawn out word nor all-caps, but nevertheless small grains of evil, the kind that can nevertheless collect and darken the world. If that's just me, so be it. I'm okay with that.
But as long as the anonymice are feeding off the Paradox site--despite this not being the fault of Paradox itself--I cannot feed the site.
My apologies to the best, even those who lack conviction. Sadly, the worst are full of passionate intensity.