SHIP: Clearing SugarQuill's name

[zsenya at sugarquill.com]

No: HPFGUIDX 11608

As co-headmistress of SugarQuill, I'd like to jump in and say a few 
things, and respectfully ask that the whole conversation tone down a 
bit.   It's all starting to feel very "ha ha I'm just joking you're 
just joking" in a sort of evil undertone way.
 
Kimberly was entirely correct in what she wrote below:
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I don't have any connection to Sugarquill, other than visiting the 
boards there every few days, but from what I've observed, you may 
well have gotten the wrong impression.  Then again maybe I'm the one 
that got the wrong impression - please, anyone who knows the details 
of Sugarquill, jump in if I'm way off-base.I think their rules or 
whatever they are were meant in a joking way, but have been taken 
very seriously.  Last time I visited there was a thread about what 
will happen if Ron finds out that Harry gave the money from the 
tournament to Fred and George and paid for his new dress robes.  In 
that thread there was definitely some amused discussion about what an 
idiot Ron can be.  But from what I can gather (and again, Sugarquill 
people, if I'm off-base, correct me!) the people there are just 
trying to enjoy themselves and celebrate the characters they love.  
It's no different 
from having a site for any other beloved fictional character or 
group, in that I'm guessing they assumed that people choosing to come 
there would be those who shared their enthusiasm, so the statments 
made were almost definitely jokes, rather than attempts to impose on 
anyone's first amendment rights ;).  I think it was more a tongue-in-
cheek way of warning people that if they're not Weasley fans they 
might not be interested.  At least that's the way I took it.
-------------------
Zsenya back again - the original motivation for SugarQuill was 
threefold.  First and foremost, it is a website for writers.   
Arabella and I love to write and we remember fondly our own high 
school days when we spent a good portion of class time writing notes 
to friends about how Duran Duran members were going to leave their 
model wives for us, etc.  We enjoyed a lot of the stories on ff.net 
but were a little jarred by good ideas marred by spelling and 
grammatical errors.  We wanted to create a sort of beta-reading site 
where people of all ages could submit their stories and we would help 
edit them.  We've found this to be extremely useful in our own 
writing and wanted to encourage others so that, unlike us, they might 
continue writing throughout their lives and not suddenly rediscover 
it in their 20s like we have.  Fan Fiction is a great way to 
springboard into writing original stories, and we post those as 
well.  We both started of writing Jane Austen fan fiction, but felt 
that a website with a Harry Potter base might appeal to younger 
people.
 
This part of the site has worked beautifully. We've had over 30 
submissions from people  - the average age is 14 (we've been up and 
running one month) and most seem generally happy for the advice.  The 
second motivation for SugarQuill was to have a place to archive our 
own fics and those that we enjoyed reading, as well as to showcase 
people who had submitted their fiction. We believe that no matter who 
you are, you probably want people to read what you've written and we 
wanted to give people that feeling of being "published."  Now, the 
third part of the site, the whole "Daily Affirmations" and SPEW page 
was sort of added on at the end.  We decided, hey, we'd like to have 
discussion groups too, and you know, we're the ones paying 
$14.95/month to Yahoo to host our site, so let's try to set a sort 
of "tone" or mission for this web site. We like to read stories about 
Ron and Hermione and Harry and Ginny.  We've read PoU, and Draco 
Dormiens, and others, and we think they're great (there're even one 
or two Sirius/Lupin SLASH stories that I love), but at this point 
we'd already developed all of the characters in our minds and we 
wanted to make a way to sort of "specialize" the site.  There are 
hundreds of Harry Potter fan sites out there.  We didn't find any 
that were devoted to Ron so we decided to make that our priority, as 
he is our favorite character, even though he can be a git sometimes.  
They all can. They're 14 at this point.
 
Our discussion boards are open to anyone on any Harry Potter related 
topic, but we actually have several boards, and our "Parseltongue" 
(general discussion of anything) and "Pensieve" (reviews and story 
discussion) boards are actually as heavily trafficked 
as "Veritaserum" which is the Harry Potter one.  We actually took off 
the Daily Affirmations for a while, as we thought they were a bit 
silly, but a few people asked where they went, so we put them back 
up, as a part of SugarQuill history.
 
We *are* working on what we call "W.A.I.L" (thanks to Winky and Dobby 
at ff.net) - the Weasley Adoration and Idolatry League - where we are 
going to highlight each member of the Weasley family with quotes, 
pics, stories, discussion etc.  Since we are all very busy, this is 
going to take quite a lot of time to accomplish, but people at 
SugarQuill know we are working on it.  There are plenty of sites out 
there worshipping (that's a bit of a strong word I suppose) Harry, 
and we love him too. But we admire the spunk and character of the 
Weasley clan as much as Harry does, and maybe we're all just wishing 
we came from large families of red-heads, but we thought this was a 
good way to make our site unique.  We don't love them 
unconditionally.  We're mad at Molly for snubbing Hermione in Book IV 
(and yes, we believe it was on Harry's behalf), we are very, very 
worried that Percy will choose the Ministry over his family, and, as 
Kimberley mentioned, we can't see how Ron is NOT going to figure out 
where Gred and Forge got their money and get upset about it.  We hope 
beyond hope that JKR will flesh out Ginny in future books and make 
her as wonderful as we have in our fan fiction.  It all makes for 
interesting discussion.
 
Phew, this was long.  I just wanted to point out that SugarQuill is 
not the "anti-HP4GU web site" or the "We love Ron unconditionally" 
website.  It's just a very exciting and fun project that two friends 
started two months ago and are very happy about.
 
Zsenya