SWG News

Update to Site Etiquette and Terms of Service

Posted by Dawn Felagund on 6 March 2022. Last updated on 7 March 2022.

It is important, for legal reasons, that activity on the SWG remain strictly not-for-profit. And while this has been our de facto position for as long as the site has been in existence, we realized that this is never directly stated in any of our policies. Therefore, our Site Etiquette and Terms of Service has been updated to add the following language:

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.

Please note that the translated Site Etiquette and Terms of Service have not yet been updated.

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.

SWG LiveJournal No Longer Posting Announcements

Posted by Dawn Felagund on 5 March 2022. Last updated on 6 March 2022.

The SWG moderator team has decided that we will no longer be updating the SWG's LiveJournal with official group announcements. This community does not receive a high level of engagement, and the values of LiveJournal's owners continue to be at odds with the values the SWG embraces.

This does not mean that we are closing this community. We invite people to continue to post fanworks, meta and discussions, and announcements about fandom events here. However, this community should no longer be used to keep up with SWG-related news and announcements.

If you want to keep up with what's happening on the SWG, we have social media accounts on Dreamwidth, Tumblr, and Discord. (For a Discord invite, contact the moderators.) On our website, you can find announcements on our News page, and if you are a member of the site, you can subscribe to our weekly email newsletter. (Go to My Account and click on the "Newsletter" tab to sign up.)

Our LiveJournal community, along with our Yahoo! Group, was the SWG's original online space. For almost two years before our website and archive opened, we shared fanworks, discussed Tolkien and writing, laughed, played, and made new friends here and on Y!G. We are sad to take the next step to move on from LJ but grateful to all of the people who made this such a vibrant community and a cornerstone of our beloved group for so many years.

Character of the Month: Ossë

Posted by Dawn Felagund on 5 March 2022. Last updated on 9 April 2022.

Ossë was one of the first characters Tolkien wrote in the legendarium. Neither his name nor his core storyline changed over the course of six decades of writing and revision.

Ossë as a character, however, underwent many changes. Initially a perilous rebel, Ossë was slowly transformed over many decades of revision to a character who was not only more cooperative and constructive but benevolent to the peoples of Middle-earth most closely associated with the sea.

In this month's Character of the Month biography, Dawn Felagund traces the slow evolution of Ossë's character from a god depicted in similar terms and language to Melkor to one who not only aids his friends and peers but yields to authority in a way inconceivable as he was originally writter.

You can read Ossë's biography here.

Our Newsletter Returns!

Posted by Dawn Felagund on 27 February 2022. Last updated on 26 March 2022.

The SWG's newsletter will be returning this week! SWG members can subscribe here or by clicking the Newsletter tab on your member profile. Non-members cannot subscribe quite yet, but we are working on it! Anyone, member or not, can subscribe here.

Why subscribe? The SWG newsletter will deliver a weekly round-up to your email inbox each Saturday. The newsletter will include SWG news and Around the World and Web announcements, so you can keep up with happenings and events in and beyond our group. Need some Sunday reading? The newsletter will include a list of new fanworks added that week and fanworks updated that week. Busy week and didn't get to check the site? You no longer have to worry about falling behind or missing updates!

In addition, we will be offering more original articles and columns, including featured artwork for each. The Character of the Month has been running for years and will resume, and we'll be adding more to the lineup, which will be included in the newsletter.

Contributors Wanted

We are currently seeking feature article writers, as well as columnists for A Sense of History and Cultus Dispatches, as well as backup writers for the Character of the Month. Feature articles explore a Tolkien-related or Tolkien-adjacent topic (i.e., a topic relevant to Tolkien studies, such as history, linguistics, fan studies, et cetera), while columns offer a briefer take on a specific topic related to a broader subject. See our call for contributors for more information.

If you have an idea for a new column or project that would fit in our newsletter, feel free to contact our moderators to propose your idea.

The SWG remains committed to the belief that we all benefit when we welcome more voices to the conversation. If you're a new writer or research, speak English as a second (or third, or ...) language, or have a disability that impacts language use, we are willing to offer the support you need to contribute and have your voice heard. Our editors can help during the writing and research process (including with obtaining references) and with editing. Our call for contributors has more on how we can support our writers.

Please also signal-boost our call for contributors! You do not need to be an SWG member or even a fanworks creator to contribute to the newsletter.

History of the Newsletter

Our newsletter debuted in September 2005 and ran every month until we suspended the newsletter with the opening of our rebuilt site in March 2021, making the newsletter older than our website by almost two years. For all of those years, the newsletter was written, compiled, and coded by hand every month by a team of volunteers. Because our old site made it difficult to compile and share content, our newsletter was how we ensured that our members were able to keep up with happenings in and around the SWG. Former and current site moderators have many emails in their archive that open with, "It's that time again ..."

Over the years, the newsletter expanded from group announcements and the monthly challenge. We added the Character of the Month and, occasionally, other columns and even comics. We started listing all the fanworks posted and updated that month on our site. For a while, we featured a new podfic each month. We started collecting and sharing links and announcements from outside the SWG in a section titled Around the World and Web.

If you look at the site now, you'll see all of that information-gathering has been automated by our new software. Visitors can easily find the latest site news, Around the World and Web announcements, and latest fanworks collected and linked in various places around the site--no hand-coding required! That made our old newsletter format redundant and obsolete. We hope that the energy we once spent every month into putting the newsletter together can now be turned toward showcasing new content exploring the legendarium from diverse and fascinating angles.

Our first edition of the new newsletter will debut this coming Saturday, March 5. Be sure to subscribe so you don't miss it!

Fanfic Book Club: Female Characters Book Club

Posted by Dawn Felagund on 27 February 2022. Last updated on 26 March 2022.

Female characters in Tolkien's universe are often left on the margins of canon. This is our chance to celebrate the imagination of fanfiction authors and how the community envisions female characters.

We will be hosting a book club for female-centric stories on March 26-27, 2022 on our Discord server on the #fanfiction-book-club and #fanfiction-book-club-nsfw channels. Your hosts for this event are @Melesta and @Sidra. While sign-ups are now filled and closed, all are welcome to join in discussing this round of stories. If you are not a member of our Discord server and would like to join, log into your site account and find an invite link in the footer of the site. If you're not a member of the site, contact our moderators for an invite code.

Schedule

All times are in UTC. Here is a timezone converter if you need to convert to your timezone. Please keep in mind that Daylight Savings Time begins this weekend for some locations!

Saturday - March 26th

14:00 - AdmirableMonster‘s i’ll be waiting here till the stars fall out of the sky

15:00 - Aipilosse‘s The Nature of Stone

Break

17:00 - Melesta‘s Politics, War and Love

18:00 - cuarthol‘s That She Might Render Aid

Break

20:00 - elennalore‘s Waiting for Tyelperinquar

21:00 - starlightwalking's elwenya

Sunday - March 27th

14:00 - Idrils_Scribe‘s A Web of Stars (Chapter 4)

15:00 – Anérea‘s In Light Of Dreams

Break

17:00 - undercat‘s Last Year's Words Belong to Next Year's Language

18:00 - JazTheBard‘s You Belong Among the Wildflowers

Break

20:00 - SkyEventide's To die in the light

21:00 - asterisq‘s The answer lies in limbo and the harvest will be hard

Please remember that, while we do not require authors whose work is being discussed to participate in discussing the work of others, we ask that authors make a good faith effort to attend and discuss the work of at least two other authors. If you'd like to know more about how book clubs work, see our book club FAQ.

Current Challenge: Opposites Attract

Posted by Dawn Felagund on 24 February 2022. Last updated on 15 March 2022.

Yavanna and Aulë. Andreth and Aegnor. Gimli and Legolas. You know what they say, opposites attract…or do they? In this month’s challenge, it’s entirely up to you! We’ll present you with a pair of opposites to do with as you choose, whether that’s romance in the air or tragedy in the offing.

If you’d like to receive a prompt for this month’s challenge, comment on our Dreamwidth, send us an ask on Tumblr, or contact us.

As in years past, because February is Black History Month, we encourage fanworks about characters of color and will have a special stamp for them. In addition, we are opening our new Art section, so artwork will also receive a special stamp.

You can find the page for the Opposites Attract challenge here, including a list of the fanworks that have been created for the challenge so far.

Our Art Section Is Now Open!

Posted by Dawn Felagund on 12 February 2022. Last updated on 12 March 2022.

We are so excited to announce that Silmarillion-based artwork and other visual fanworks can now be posted on the SWG! If you are an artist, we welcome you to archive your Silmarillion art with us. The SWG enjoys almost seventeen years of history as a supportive and welcoming space for writers of Tolkien-based fanfiction, and we look forward in the year to come to welcoming more creators of all types of fanwork into our community.

Getting Started

If you want to share a piece of artwork, use the artwork submission form to upload your work to the site. You can find links to this form on the My Account -> Add New Fanwork menu or on your My Fanworks page. If you want to walk through the form step-by-step, check out our artwork FAQ here.

Artwork on our archive can include multiple images, similar to chapters in stories. You will be able to tag your art and add notes, just like you can with other types of fanwork. You also have the option of adding a custom thumbnail, and if you'd like constructive criticism, you can request feedback specific to art. And of course SWG members can leave you comments, just like they already do on stories and other fanwork types we accept!

Remember that we also welcome creators to archive their older fanworks with us. You will have the option to backdate your work, and if you don't want it to appear on lists of recent fanworks, you can opt out of these as well.

What Is Eligible?

We have always tried to keep our site as open to as many fanworks as possible while remaining a Silmarillion-specific site--part of why we have added artwork to the archive is to meet this goal! Artists should be aware of two requirements for sharing art on our site.

First, work shared on our site must have a significant basis in The Silmarillion or related works, like the History of Middle-earth series. We are liberal in our understanding of what that means: any time period not covered in detail in The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings is included, as are multi-age fanworks and crossovers with a significant Silmarillion component. For more information on what we count as Silmarillion-based, check out our "Silmfic" FAQ.

Next, there are some restrictions on content for artwork. Our webhost's Terms of Service does not allow us to use our site to share certain kinds of content. Artwork with graphic depictions of sexual activity, sexualized nudity, or sexual situations involving minors are not allowed on our archive. See our adult content FAQ for more information.

Beyond these two restrictions, all types and genres of art about all characters and relationships are welcome! Artwork is also eligible for our challenges (and we will have a special stamp for the challenge beginning February 15th for any creator who creates artwork as a challenge response).

Finding Artwork on Our Archive

Once artists begin adding work to the site, visitors can find artwork in several ways. First, artwork is included in listings of all fanworks on the site: on our homepage, in the New & Updated Fanworks block on the sidebar, and in the New & Updated Fanworks page. Under the Fanworks menu, you will see that that are also several pages just for art: New & Updated Artwork, an artist directory, and a listing of the artwork types that will link you to artwork of the type you choose. The newest art added to the archive is also shown on the homepage of the site.

The Find a Fanwork page under the Tools menu can help you find any fanwork on our site meeting specific characteristics, including art. Using this tool, you can browse art including or excluding specific characters, pairings, ratings, and warnings, including narrowing down your search to work by a creator or creators. (To include more than one creator in your search, simply separate their names with commas.)

If you enjoy the work of a particular artist, you will find their work collected on their member profile under the Gallery link. Simply click on an artist's name to access their profile and their gallery.

Just like any other fanwork, you can comment on art, and we hope that as artists begin uploading their work, our members take a moment to share their appreciation for artists and artwork that they enjoy.

Also for Artists ...

While we are just opening the art gallery on our archive, we've been working for a while to expand our boundaries to include non-written fanworks. (Astute observers may have noticed, for example, that we've been slowly changing terms on our site like writing and author to fanwork and creator.) On the SWG's Discord, we have a dedicated #art channel for sharing and discussing fanart. We also have an #art-studio channel for artists to create together in real time. SWG members can join our Discord by scrolling to the bottom of this page, where they will find an open invite link in the footer. However, you don't have to be a member of our site to join; simply contact the mods and we'll send you an invite link.

Where to Next?

Even though we are the Silmarillion Writers' Guild, we were not around long before we realized we wanted to keep our group open and friendly to all fanworks' creators working with material from The Silmarillion. It has long been our hope to welcome more than just written fanworks on our archive, and some of our earliest experiments on our original eFiction site were undertaken with this goal in mind. While we were able to add audio and podfic relatively early on, we were less successful with other types of fanworks, including art, though not for lack of trying.

This was part of the motivation in selection a content management system rather than specific fiction archive software for our site rebuild last year. Artwork is the first of several new fanwork types that we will unveil over the next several months. Look out for recommendation lists, playlists, and video fanworks in the months to come, as well as a multimedia option for posting fanworks that include more than one fanwork format.

We are excited to expand what we can offer our members and hope all Silmarillion fanworks creators feel welcome to join us! As always, reach out to moderator team if you have questions or need assistance in getting started with using the site.

Acknowledgements

The SWG moderator team would like to extend our gratitude to our art editor Anérea and beta testers Himring, Gabriel, and Independence1776 for their assistance testing and providing feedback on test versions of the art archive.

Alternate Universe Fanfiction Book Club

Posted by Dawn Felagund on 12 January 2022. Last updated on 2 February 2022.

Have a fic that takes tiny step or a giant leap away from canon? Wrote a fix-it? Changed an outcome? Engaged in a little gender-bending? Decided to fill in the what-happens-in-the-ever-after? Gave Turin a happily-ever-after? Made Miriel Lord (of Angmar)? Created a modern AU where Glorfindel and Legolas are engaged in a merry business war over the largest market share of hair care products (slight edge to the son of Thranduil due to a unique line in beard-grooming products)? Thought of something not listed here? Even better.

The Alternate Universe Book Club will be held Saturday, January 15 and Sunday, January 16. Your hosts for this event are Lilith and Shadow.

Sign-ups for the Alternate Universe Book Club are now closed but all Discord members are welcome to join us to discuss stories in the #fanfiction-book-club and #fanfiction-book-club-nsfw channels!

Schedule

Need to know a time in your timezone? Find a timezone converter here.

Saturday, January 15

Sunday, January 16

To learn more about participating in, attending, or hosting a fanfiction book club, see our book club FAQ.

To join our Discord server: If you are a logged-in member, you will see an invite link in the footer of all pages on the site. If you're not an archive member, you can contact the moderators for an invite link.

New Challenge: New Year's Resolution

Posted by Dawn Felagund on 10 January 2022. Last updated on 24 February 2022.

Every January, we kick off the year with a challenge to nudge us to recommit to our creative lives by creating a fanwork for one of the previous year's challenges. Whether finishing that epic novel for the challenge that ran away or making a sketch or writing a drabble, the idea is to make something fannish during the month of January with one of our challenges as inspiration!

During our annual amnesty challenge, you can complete any of our 2021 challenges. You will receive a stamp on your 2021 collection for any challenges that you complete now*, as well as a stamp for the New Year's Resolution challenge on your 2022 collection. When you post to the SWG archive, please make sure you select the 2021 challenge you're completing and the New Year's Resolution challenge.

*If you choose to complete a challenge older than 2021, we will not be giving out past stamps; you will, however, receive your January 2022 stamp.

For a summary of the 2021 challenges and links to prompts, see the 2022 New Year's Resolution challenge page.

One more thing ... Challenges have traditionally ended on the 10th of the month, with the new challenge announced on the 15th. This gave the moderators five days to update stamp collections, which prior to the site rebuild, were made by hand. Now that stamp collections are automated on the new site, we no longer need those extra days, so challenges will end and begin on the 15th of the month, giving creators five extra days to complete a challenge and claim a stamp.

Holiday Party Challenge Live Reading on Sunday

Posted by Dawn Felagund on 7 January 2022. Last updated on 9 January 2022.

We’re closing out the Holiday Party with a live event on the SWG Discord to give creators a chance to show off works created for the challenge. Artists, we’re also happy to have you show and talk about your work--this isn’t just for the writers. Join us 9 January 2022 at 15:00/3PM UTC to showcase your work. (Find the event time in your timezone.)

Program

Sign-ups are now closed by all are welcome to join our open mic time.

We ask that everyone limit themselves to 5 minutes in the interests of making sure everyone has a chance to share. Please also plan to read or share fanworks that you have created.

To join our Discord server: If you are a logged-in member, you will see an invite link in the footer of all pages on the site. If you're not an archive member, you can contact the moderators for an invite link.