META/LNH: And what was your favorite LNH year?

[Adrian J. McClure]

My favorite year, without question, is this one. I defintely look back
with fondness on the days when I first started writing, when it seemed
like the LNH was having a resurgence after a long fallow period. This
is when Tom started NHOP and Jamie did Miss Translation. Of course,
everything was exciting and new to me back then, but I reread Miss
Translation recently and it holds up just as well today. NHOP... well,
there was a reason Tom revised it, the original version in retrospect
was deeply flawed but compelling. I think most of Tom's revisions were
good calls, but it's still fascinating to look back at that; I even
liked some of the purple prose. There was also the Flame Wars IV, one
of the better crossovers in LNH history, which showed that you could
tell a compelling "big event" story at a relatively small scale. I
loved the handling of all the loser LNHers who'd been donated to be
killed off; Saxon and Jamie treated them as characters who were
mattered and brought them to life. I wasn't expecting to be hit as
hard by the death of Giant Wandering Cow Kid as I was.

2006, when I came back after what I thought then was a long bout of
inactivity, was good too: it had a lot of great humor stories from
Tom, notably the Haiku Gorilla series and Master Blaster: Insufficient
Postage, Mitchell Crouch's debut, and of course the debut of hte Guy
in a Trenchcoat fighting Ninjas. Of course, there was also Killfile
Wars, which had kind of a disappointing ending after an interesting
and at times genuinely compelling start, and had one of the most OOC
uses of the Ultimate Ninja ever. What I mainly remember was the rise
in interaction in the group, and how I felt like I really belonged
here the most since I'd joined. I felt like I was really starting to
come into my own as an LNH writer, but predictably I dropped out just
as I was finally starting to go somewhere. (I was worried it would
happen again this time when I got buried beneath a mountain of real-
world stuff last month, but thankfully I seem to be gaining a second
wind.)

There are definitely things I miss a lot about the old days of RACC. I
miss Jamie Rosen, who was generally a class act as well as a good
writer. Jamie was the first person who ever offered feedback on one of
my stories. I miss 8fold as an imprint, and while I'm very happy with
the course the LNH is taking right now, I wish we had some more non-
LNH activity as well. I even miss Jesse Willey. He always had
interesting ideas, even though his stories were so incomprehensible at
times it was hard to make them out. In the later issues of Adventures
Beyond Comprehension he actually seemed to be finding more of a
synthesis between his style and the LNH style, at least when it came
to his own characters. And while I'd gotten into arguments with him in
the past, like everyone, he was getting noticeably better with that
too, aside from Tom. That made the whole business with Electra even
more difficult for me, especially since I was actually planning to
collaborate with him on a story, and that was a contributing factor
for me leaving for a while. The way he retconned Electra without
permission was inexcusable, but I don't think he was without any
redeeming features either as a writer or as a person.

But for all I miss those who've gone, I'm very excited about the
course things are taking right now. LNH20 has opened up new approaches
for a lot of us in our writing and galvanized our community. I've been
writing more than I have in years. We've also had a lot of good ideas
for reaching out to new audiences and reconnecting with old writers,
and although that seems to have fallen by the wayside now that we're
all so busy, I hope we can start thinking about that again once summer
starts. In the years since I joined, there's never been a better time
to be on RACC.

AJM (I wonder if I'll live to see Saxon resolve the Chinese Guy
storyline :P)