May 2014 Newsletter Posted

[dawn_felagund]

Our newsletter for May 2014 has been posted on our website!

http://www.silmarillionwritersguild.org/news/may2014.php

We have lots of good stuff this month. Oshun's character biography this month is on Anairë, the wife of Fingolfin. Barely mentioned in the texts (and never in the Quenta Silmarillion proper), Anairë is in many ways a typical Tolkien woman character: little is said but lots could be inferred. Although she is fortunate to have been given a name (unlike many women characters), we know next to nothing about Anairë, yet she inspires fan writers and artists for the role she might have played in Fingolfin's reign in Aman; for her famed friendship with Earwen, the wife of Finarfin; and for her role as the mother of her courageous and independent-minded children. Oshun's essay explores what we know about her character within the larger context of how Tolkien depicted women generally.

The featured podfic is on a short hiatus and will return next month. In the meantime, we have lots of news from within and outside of our group to report. First of all, we have made a pretty big change to our policy on ratings and warnings. Authors are now allowed to select Author Chooses Not to Rate and/or Author Chooses Not to Warn if they prefer not to include ratings and/or warnings on their stories. The newsletter has more with full details in our ratings policy. The Silmarillion rereading on LiveJournal continues, progressing through some of the most turbid chapters in the book in April. "Of the Sindar" and "Of the Sun and Moon" are on tap for May 4 and May 18, respectively. Finally, the deadline for inclusion in the B2MeM ebook is creeping closer, so if this affects you, please make sure you get your paperwork in on time, if you want to be included. (Drop me a line if you have any questions or need help with this.)

We also have several announcements from beyond the SWG worth checking out. (Two with short deadlines: Ardor in August and Mythgard summer course registration both close on Sunday, so don't miss out if you're interested.) If you're looking for interesting articles and essays about Tolkien's world, our Around the World and Web section offers lots to choose from.

If you're looking for fiction to read, check out the list of stories added to and updated on the archive in April. If you're looking for fiction to write, we have two challenges running this month: "The Living Land" and "The Plot Thickens." More details are available in the challenges section of the newsletter.

I hope everyone enjoys the newsletter and want to send sincerest thanks to Oshun, Russandol, Rhapsody, and Angelica for their contributions this month!

Comments

[heartofoshun.livejournal.com]

Thank you so much for pulling it together as always!

[dawn_felagund]

You're welcome! You all make my job easy these days. :) (I remember when it took a full day versus just one evening to get everything together, and this was the days before the podfic, story list, and featured articles!)

[heartofoshun.livejournal.com]

I'm laughing at your turnaround time on my character bios. Sometimes I send you my final copy and feel like I barely have time for a bathroom break before I get it back from you with your corrections and comments. You don't screw around!

[dawn_felagund]

I usually drop whatever I'm working on for the newsletter as soon as it comes in! :D I'm always worried about dawdling to the point where I'm publishing before you've approved the changes, and I've done something boneheaded or introduced a mistake into your essay ... which is (I will admit) rare, but I have definitely done before!

[independence1776]

Eee! Choose not to warn! I'd occasionally wished for SWG to have that, so you made me very happy this morning.

[dawn_felagund]

Yay! I'm glad. :) We mod-types had talked about the possibility a few months ago, but there was policy to rewrite and whatnot, so it took a while to get it implemented. But I'm glad the option is finally here. As someone not fully comfortable with the idea of "rating" stories and applying warnings (but also respectful of those who want to avoid certain content), it's always been an uneasy thing for me to be so strict about these things on my own website. AO3 and the ToME discussion introduced a way to better meet the needs of both readers and authors who don't want to label their stories.

[independence1776]

Ratings make a lot more sense to me than warnings do. I view ratings as how intense a story is and the level of graphic and explicit content it contains, so I doubt I'll ever use CNTR. Warnings, on the other hand… I've gotten to the point where I do the archive minimum and that's it. (There's a couple of additional ones I'll add in the tags on AO3 because it doesn't have the same list SWG does-- and SWG's makes sense to me.)

[dawn_felagund]

I always have to smile when people mention that the ratings or warnings (or both!) on the SWG make a lot of sense because I came up with them rather off the top of my head when first building the site! :D But then, I think it's also one of those issues where it becomes really easy to overthink it (as became obvious to me during the ToME discussions on the topic). We have made small changes over the years (like moving AU, het, and slash to genres and, of course, this most recent change), but the same policy has mostly served for almost seven years now, which ain't bad, methinks. :)

[heartofoshun.livejournal.com]

I'm happy too! I worry less about warnings but I hate trying to chose a rating--that difficult hair-splitting decision between teen and adult--are we talking NYC teen or middle-America teen?

[independence1776]

As I told Dawn, ratings make a lot more sense to me. And unless the content contains explicit sex or graphic violence, I'll rate it Teens. But my metric for that is "can I find it in YA books?" so it may not match everyone's idea of what Teens should be. (That said, there's one story of mine that I rated Teens and sometimes I think I should have rated it Adult. But no one's complained, so…)

[dawn_felagund]

That's definitely part of what makes ratings so difficult to apply. I'm very liberal with respect to story content--I was reading Stephen King before I was a teenager, so sex and violence? not something that has ever bothered me--but I try to apply ratings like how I imagine the [largely conservative] population of my home county would. Which leads to some of what I think is ridiculous, like rating my B2MeM story "Prayers about Rain" as an Adult-rated story because it had a short sex scene between a married couple. (A fandom friend eventually talked me into nudging it down to Teens, but it is still one of those decisions I'm not sure is right ...)

[independence1776]

Yeah, ratings are entirely subjective. And put that way, I can see the attractiveness of not rating. (I guess warnings are more clear-cut: do I serve the story or do I serve the audience?) As for "Prayers About Rain," that's borderline between Adult and Teens-- and is pretty much the explictiness of my story that I mentioned above. So… go not to the Elves for advice? :P

I'll repeat myself: I'm grateful that we have the options!