Happy (Early) International Fanworks Day! (Volume 18, Issue 6)

On 15 February, the Organization for Transformative Works celebrates International Fanworks Day, "a recognition of fanworks in all their forms—fics, art, vids, zines, and more—and of their awesomeness and importance for fans across the world." This year's theme is "When Fandom Collide" and focuses on crossover fanworks.

The SWG accepts crossover fanworks, so we certainly welcome takes on this year's IFD theme on our archive if they involve significant Silmarillion content. However, even if crossovers aren't your fandom jam, we want to use IFD as an opportunity to celebrate what each of you do as part of fandom, the Tolkien fandom, and the SWG specifically.

The Tolkien fandom began with the publication of The Hobbit—after all, The Lord of the Rings was written at least partly in response to fan demand for more of the world they glimpsed in The Hobbit. The first documented Tolkien-based fan writing appeared in the late 1950s, and the fandom has been writing stories, meta, and poems; making art; and creating other fanworks nonstop ever since, leaving the Tolkien fandom as one of the oldest fanworks-producing fandoms in existence.

Of course, the richness of Tolkien's worldbuilding accounts for the almost seven decades of fanworks (not to mention other fandom activity) that exist. But none of it would exist without us either: the fans who have cared not just about Middle-earth but about each other and the creative works that we make that keep the legendarium alive.

So this week, whether a creating a crossover fanwork tempts you or not, we encourage you to honor International Fanworks Day in whatever way feels most meaningful to you: create a fanwork, comment on someone else's work, join a discussion, share a resource, or check in on a fandom friend you haven't connected with recently—or whatever else inspires you! We wish you all another year of creativity and connection!

SWG News

New Archive Formatting Options

It recently came to our attention that center- and right-aligned formatting were not available on text fields on the archive. We have fixed this issue, so left-, center-, and right-aligned text should all be available. (Note that the <center> HTML tag, which has been deprecated since the Years of the Trees but has tended to continue to work, finally does not work. For those of you writing old-school HTML, we did try to keep it for you. Alas, the internet Ainur refused to hear our prayer. If you want to center-align text, please use the button on the rich-text editor or add a "text-align-center" class to your paragraph tag.) We've also added subscripts and a Paste from Word button.

For fun, we've also given everyone Font Awesome access, so you will be able to use Font Awesome icons in fanworks. (Why would you need subscripts or Font Awesome icons?? We don't know, but we know our community well enough to be sure someone will come up with a good use for them!) To use Font Awesome, click the flag icon in the toolbar and type the name of the icon you want.

Please let us know if you try to use these new features and they don't behave as you think they should.

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