Silmarillion Writers' Guild

It's that time of the year where we ask for help from any artists who want to make challenge stamps for the coming year! How it works: On Monday evening (Eastern Time), I'll share a sign-up document with anyone who is interested in helping with this. The document will contain a bare bones description of any challenges for which we need stamps. (So if you want to remain completely unspoiled as to upcoming challenges, this one is not for you!)

You'll sign up for the challenge you want, and if we have open challenges after everyone has signed up, we'll open additional sign-ups.

Specifics about what we are looking for can be found here. Please check this out if you think you might be interested in making stamps.

To be added to the sign-up document, DM me, email me/the mods, comment on the post above, comment here, send a Tumblr ask, post in the appropriate Discord channel, send an Eagle ... all the usual contacts work!

Important note that anyone is welcome to volunteer for this. You do not need to be an expert artist! We are grateful for all contributions.

And a thank you again to last year's stamp artists: cuarthol, Independence1776, Zdenka, and Grundy!

... our new Social Media Manager!

If you follow the SWG on social media, you may have noticed that the announcements there no longer come from Dawn. This is because Shadow (daughterofshadows) has graciously offered to serve as our Social Media Manager!

The SWG is a lot of little parts and pieces, and many different people help keep them moving. Shadow's role is super important for getting information out to our members and followers and freeing up the site admins to focus on fixing and expanding the features the site has to offer. Thank you, Shadow!

If you want to help support the SWG by volunteering, open volunteer roles can be found here.

Our AI policy is finalized and available on our site. Many, many thanks to all of you who were willing to discuss the policy and offer feedback and suggestions.

We've also added two new FAQs to the site.

I want to make artwork, record a podfic, or create something based on another fan's fanwork. Am I allowed to do that? We realized recently that we never actually address this on our site, so now we do. The tl;dr: absolutely, if you have permission from the other creator(s).

My challenge response was created for another fandom event. Is it still eligible? In short, yes! In fact, if you cannot post with us before the stamp deadline due to the other event's schedule and rules, we will extend the stamp deadline for you.

This year is to be our Year of History, which can be summed up as "a designation intended to force me to move over content from the old site (much of it historical at this point) rather than building new stuff." This also comes from wanting this group's history to be documented and not just a crapshoot on whether it has been archived on the Wayback Machine.

I am on spring break, so one of the goals I'd like to accomplish is moving forward with the Year of History.

Within the next week, we will begin discussions on the #town-hall channel on the SWG's Discord server around how to best archive the historical materials we decide to begin with. If you'd like to be a part of this discussion, please join our Discord server. You can comment here, or you can email us at moderator@silmarillionwritersguild.org for an invite.

Currently, we are voting on which materials we will archive first (in #town-hall). We're also looking for volunteers who will help archive this material on the site. This is primarily a data-entry role. If you'd like to volunteer, you can let me know here or at the email above; you do not need to be a member of the Discord server to volunteer.

In the weeks to come, we'll open discussions on what and how to archive various materials to make them easily accessible and useful to our community. This history belongs to everyone who has been a part of the SWG across its 18 years of existence, and I want everyone to have an opportunity to be a part of deciding how that history is preserved and made available.

Every month for our challenges, participants (both creators and commenters) receive at least one collectible stamp on their profile. For the past six years, the site mods have made these stamps. Now that the SWG also accepts artwork (as well as many other types of fanwork), we'd love to diversify our offerings and showcase the work of our artists.

We are looking for creators who would like to help make stamps for our 2023 challenges. This post has complete details about what we're looking for from our stamp creators.

If you're interested in contributing, comment here or email us at moderator@silmarillionwritersguild.org, and we'll send along a link to the sign-up document.

Sign-ups will remain open through 31 December 2022.

The site is back up and live! As is probably evident from the fact that this took FOUR DAYS (I'm not sure the site was down that long when we moved from eFiction to Drupal!), this was a labor-intensive upgrade for us. We updated our software from Drupal 8 to 9, which was itself an important change. However, in doing so, the directory structure changed, which meant that all old links would not work. We were not okay with that. So we attempted to redirect the old links to the new, which to be blunt about it, turned out to be a massive pain in the ass. At multiple points, we discussed restoring the D8 site and going back to the drawing board with redirects (which is now a four-letter word to Russa and me).

I think we are, at last, there. I will be fixing broken links and images in the days to come. If you run into a broken link or image (or anything else that is weird), please let me know in the comments here. (If you are on our Discord, I am keeping a running list in #town-hall.) If you get an error about "redirects to external URLs are not allowed," please clear your cache.

To make this whole situation even more interesting, our host has been promising for months that we are due a major upgrade, which they have decided to do tonight. So the site will go down again, briefly, sometime in the next day, and we may see even more odd behavior.

Of course, we want you to go back to using the site right away. But we also know we're going to run into problems in the days to come, so now might not be the best time to spend four hours archiving your epic novel with us. Just in case!

Finally, so much gratitude to Russandol, who has been researching and planning this upgrade for weeks and gave up most of her weekend to struggling through it. Again, please reach out to me with any questions and please report any issues in the comments.

We are very excited to announce the official opening of the Beyond the Silmarillion section of our archive! Here, creators who are already posting with us can archive their non-Silmarillion fanworks based on Tolkien's books and adaptations, and absolutely anyone can read and view those fanworks.

Who is eligible and how does one obtain permissions?

The Beyond the Silmarillion section is open to creators who have committed to posting their work with us, which we define as five fanworks or 10,000 words of fanworks. When you reach one of these milestones, a moderator will grant "Beyond" permissions to your account, and you will be able to post in the new section.

Permissions are monitored and assigned manually, by a human (i.e., not automatically, by a computer script). If you meet the requirements above, please allow us at least twenty-four hours to assign your permissions. After that point, feel free to query.

More than 200 of you met the requirements for the new section right away and can begin posting to the new section now!

If you think you should have permissions and do not, please contact us.

How do I know if I have permissions? How do I post to the new section?

You can check if you have permissions by opening any of the Add New Fanwork forms under the My Account menu. If you see a checkbox for "Beyond the Silmarillion Fanwork" under the Title field, you have posting access for the new section.

To post to the new section, simply check off this box and complete the form as usual. All types of fanwork (art, audio, link collections, multimedia fanworks, playlists, series, videos, and all types of written fanwork) are allowed in the Beyond the Silmarillion section. More detail instructions, with illustrations, can be found in the Beyond the Silmarillion FAQ.

While we have populated the Character tagset with the major characters from The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, if you need a character or relationship that's not currently on the list, use the Moderator Request form as usual. Likewise, if you need a source that is not in the Source Text tagset, you can use this field to request it.

How will the new section impact reading on the site?

Beyond the Silmarillion is truly a separate section. We are still a Silmarillion fanworks archive; however, as more and more small Tolkien-specific archives close their doors, we know many of our members would like a place to archive all of their Tolkien fanworks outside of the large multifandom archives. In the recent past, we could point to a half-dozen generalist Tolkien archives where our members' work was welcome that didn't fit on our site's requirements. We can no longer do that and so feel it is an important need to meet for our creator base.

You can find the Beyond the Silmarillion section under the Fanworks menu. If you want all the fanworks, check out the Truly All Fanworks page (you can find a link on the All Fanworks page).

If you follow a creator or tag, and a Beyond fanwork is posted by that person or to that tag, you will receive a notification.

We will also include a section for Beyond the Silmarillion fanworks in our weekly newsletter.

We hope our readers/viewers and creators enjoy the new section of the site!

We are in the process of opening a new section of our site for members who post Silmarillion fanworks with us. In this new section, active creators will be able to archive their non-Silmarillion Tolkien fanworks. You can learn more about this new section of the site here.

But our new section of the site needs a name! We have received a number of suggestions over the past week and voting is now open to choose what the new name will be.

Voting is only open to members who are registered on the SWG site so that we can make sure that we receive only one vote per person. If you're not a member but want to vote, you're welcome to register!

Voting will close on when the clock strikes midnight, UTC, at the end of Wednesday, July 20, so make sure you vote before then! We will announce the new section's name on July 21.

When we built the new site, one of our reasons and goals was to eventually be able to host just about every type of fanwork that could be created. Although we are the Silmarillion Writers' Guild, we've long recognized and sought to honor the fact that our members create much more than just written fanworks, and we wanted to build an archive where they could host all of their Silmarillion-based fanworks.

Today, we are pleased to take two steps closer to that goal. The SWG archive can now host link collections and playlists. Link collections allow you to compile lists of links both within and outside the SWG and are ideal for rec lists or resource collections. Playlists let you collect songs and other audio around a fannish theme and can be used to share fan-made soundtracks, podcast collections, and other audio compilations. If you'd like to learn more about these fanwork types, we have an FAQ on link collections and an FAQ on playlists. Ready to start sharing your work? You can add a link collection or add a playlist here.

As always, if you have questions about link collections, playlists, or anything at all, contact our mod team.

LiveJournal
The SWG's LiveJournal is no longer being considered an official social media platform for purposes of sharing announcements about the SWG. The LJ community is not closing, and we welcome LJ users to continue posting Silmarillion-related fanworks, discussions, and announcements there. However, LJ users should not rely on the silwritersguild LJ community for news about the SWG. There is more about our LiveJournal here.

Site Etiquette and Terms of Service
We have updated our Site Etiquette and Terms of Service to reflect that the only use of our site and social media should be for not-for-profit purposes. Here is the addition:

For legal reasons, the SWG must remain strictly not-for-profit. Do not use the SWG or its social media to request or offer commissions for money. If a fanwork was commissioned, do not mention that commission. Links in your profile, the fanworks you share, or on posts to SWG social media should not point to sites where you will make a profit, such as Kofi, Patreon, GoFundMe, Venmo, and similar sites. Violations of the above will be immediately taken down.

The entire Site Etiquette and ToS can be found here.

As always, if you have any questions, you can contact the moderators or comment on this post, and one of us will get back to you.