silwritersguild | January 2019 Challenge: New Year's Resolution (Reply)

The party hats have been put away, the last of the champagne is gone, and it's time to plunge into 2019. For many writers and artists, this will mean resolutions about improving their output of creative work over the next year.

As we start another year of SWG challenges, we encourage you to begin another year of creative accomplishment on the right foot. For our first challenge of 2019, participants can choose to complete any of the previous year's challenges. Did you miss a challenge you wanted to complete? Do it now. Did you start a fanwork for a challenge but never completed it? Here is your chance to finish. If you didn't leave any unrealized or unfinished projects behind you (congratulations!), choose from any of 2018's prompts and start the year by creating a new fanwork.

You will receive a stamp on your 2018 collection for any challenges that you complete now, as well as a stamp for the New Year's Resolution challenge on your 2019 collection. When you post to the SWG archive, please make sure you select the 2018 challenge you're completing and the New Year's Resolution challenge.

In order to receive a stamp for your fanwork, your response must be posted to the archive on or before 10 February 2019.

2018 Challenges

The listing and complete guidelines for the 2018 challenges are available here.

February | Breaking Boundaries

The ages of Arda are punctuated by encounters between peoples of different cultures.They fight and fall in love and battle and betray and colonize and corrupt one another, forging understandings on one hand and rejecting them on the other. This month's challenge asks you to create a fanwork that shows a meeting between characters of two or more cultures. There are no prompts this month, but if you're looking for inspiration, check this page for a list of important cultural encounters.

March | Middle-earth Museum

In the Germanic tradition he admired, Tolkien gave us many named objects in his stories: knives, helmets, lamps, jewelry, and--of course--swords. However, much more ordinary, nameless objects also existed, and imagining what these looked like, how they were used, and how they differed among cultures is something many fanworks creators delight in doing. This month's challenge asks you to stroll the halls of an imaginary Middle-earth Museum and choose one (or more!) objects to inspire the creation of a fanwork. Choose your own prompt from the list of objects found here.

April | Rise Above: Women in Science

This month's challenge Rise Above is inspired by women in the sciences. Each participant will receive a quote from a woman who has advanced the participation of women in the sciences. Email us or comment on this post to receive your prompt.

May | Competition

This month’s challenge invites you to take a look at competitions - serious or silly, spectacular or anti-climactic. And because May is the month when the members of the European Broadcasting Union meet to compete in the Eurovision Song Contest, this challenge’s prompts will be past entries from the ESC. You can use any part of the prompt that inspires you - the mood, part of the lyrics, elements of the performance or whatever else tickles your muses. Email us or comment on this post to receive your prompt.

June | Analysing Arda

This month's challenge is a nonfiction challenge. All nonfiction is welcome, from headcanons to essays to multimedia responses. There are no claims for this month's challenge, but if you need some inspiration to get started, check out this list of member-sourced nonfiction and meta prompts.

July | Teen Spirit

This month, challenge participants will create a fanwork about an adolescent character or adolescence. Your prompt will come from a random prompt generator. You can choose a prompt from one, several, or all of the four different categories. Click here for the challenge prompt generator.

August | Discovery

Every year in August, we give special attention to the Second Age and stories set during this time. In the spirit of the Númenórean taste for seafaring and discovery, our challenge theme for this month is Discovery and prompts this month will come from two songs from Moana, a film inspired by the Polynesian wayfinders, possibly the greatest seafarers in the history of Modern-earth.

You can use any aspect of either video as your prompt: the lyrics to or a line from the song, an image from the video, a theme relative to the video such as courage or discovering one's cultural identity, historical details of canoe-building and wayfinding in Oceania--whatever inspires you! Fanworks do not have to be set during the Second Age or concern seafaring.

Find the video prompts and links to the lyrics here.

September | Sitcom!

This month's theme features a bingo card for participants to self-select a prompt or prompts to inspire their fanworks. While the prompts are based off of sitcom tropes, your fanwork doesn't have to be a sitcom or inspired by one; it doesn't even have to be (or attempt to be!) humorous. To participate as a creator, you need only to create a fanwork using one prompt; however, for the more adventurous among us, we encourage you to combine prompts, complete rows, or attempt one of the dozen variations of card patterns. You may use multiple prompts in a single fanwork or use prompts to inspire multiple fanworks. View the bingo card here. Find text-only prompts here.

October | B-Movie

This month's challenge is a Matryoshka challenge based on the predictable plot arc of the hilariously abominable, eye-rollingly corny, so-bad-they're-actually-kinda-good horror films. Your fanwork does not have to be a horror story, but prompts will be loosely inspired by the plot arcs of these films. (Please note that prompts are not horror-specific. Any genre of fanwork can be created based on these prompts, although there may be a special reward for participants who attempt a horror fanwork.) Email us or comment on this post to receive your prompt set. (See this post to learn how a Matryoshka challenge works.)

November/December | Holiday Feast

In the spirit of the festive season, whatever holidays or holy days you observe - or even if you choose not to celebrate anything at this time of the year - the SWG would like to invite you to a splendid five-course banquet. But as everybody has different preferences for their dishes and a digital meal just isn't the same thing as a real-world feast anyway, our banquet is taking the shape of prompt sets instead. For every "course" of our feast, we're offering you a choice of five prompts - writing, reading, commenting, artwork or meta. You can take as many as your appetite (and your time during this busy season) allows. Find the prompt menu here. Click here for a text-only version of the prompt menu.