One of the open secrets of the SWG challenges is that January will always be an amnesty challenge for the prior year's challenges, and we will always start the challenge early. So technically, even though this is the newsletter issue that would typically announce the new challenge (which usually begins on the 15th), it is both on time and late because the challenge opened on the first of January.

As in years past, it is an amnesty challenge—a chance to complete the challenges you may have missed during the year or finish challenge fanworks started but never completed—but this year, we've done one better. This year's amnesty challenge, Jubilee, will apply to any challenge from January 2017 onward. (If you're wondering, why January 2017? Because this is the year we started handing out stamps for completing or commenting on challenges.) Challenges never close in the sense that you can always create something for a challenge and post it on the archive, but for practical purposes, we do set deadlines for receiving stamps for creating challenge fanworks. (You can always comment on a challenge fanwork and receive the stamp.) But this month, until 15 February, we are throwing that rule completely out the window, dusting off the years-old stamps in our collection (it did take some work to track them all down), and giving them out to anyone who creates for one of the eligible challenges ... and that's more than sixty challenges, so we're confident that most creators can find something to inspire them!

The larger purpose of the annual amnesty challenge is to start each new year with creativity and community: making new fanworks and interacting with the creators who are sharing the fanworks that entertain and move us. We hope many of our creators will join us in resurrecting some of our old challenges, and we hope all of our members who enjoy fanworks on our site will take a moment to let the creators know.

If you want to try this challenge, you can find the sixty-plus eligible past challenges here. Since many of these challenge involve components that might be hard to replicate in an amnesty challenge, more details on how to collect specific stamps can be found on the Jubilee challenge page, where you can also find fifteen fanworks already created for the challenge.

Happy creating and commenting!