I’ve been thinking about this subject as well, and I second Kacie’s argument. She took the words right out of my mouth.
Like she said, fanartists have varying art styles, and the people who view their work have varying tastes in fanart. Furthermore, not everyone who votes for the Fanart Award looks at everyone's fanart, just like not all fanfiction readers read all fanfictions.
It could be argued that fanfiction is different from fanart in that it generally takes much longer to produce a good quality fanfiction than a good piece of art, but on the other hand, many great fanartists don’t create artwork very often, but when they do, it is spectacular. This is not too different from fanfiction writers.
As I said, give us time and as I've stated before, fanfiction in the past has not been a very large part of the community, hence we have not done a fanfiction award before, and that is why it was not on the list this year.
Maybe there aren't a lot of GOF members writing fanfictions, but I think a fanfiction category would still receive a substantial number of voters, perhaps even more so than some other categories, such as the RPG award. People who read fanfictions do not need to write fanfictions themselves in order to evaluate them, whereas almost all of the members who read RPs and vote in the RPG category are RPers themselves (Members who skip voting in the RPG category all give the unanimous reason that they are not active enough in that section). Forgive me if I sound like I'm dissing the RPG Award; I'm not. My point is that if we can have an award for RPs and an award for fanart, why not one for fanfiction as well? The reasons against it are just as applicable to these two awards which are already established.
I'm all for a Fanfiction Award.
I agree that we should bring this up in the Rock Circle.
