On the radio the other day, I heard a piece about the number of people who make New Year's resolutions only to break them, sometimes within a matter of days. Anyone who creates knows that, although many of us know those near-magical days when the words and ideas and paint seem to effortlessly flow, there are also days when we have to make ourselves work on creative projects.

For many years now, the SWG has run Resolution as the first challenge of the year. While ostensibly it exists to get us all off on the right foot as creators by encouraging us to start the year creatively, it in fact lets us make up for our regrets and foibles from the previous year. Did you miss a challenge (or two or ...) that you wanted to do during 2023? Did you start a challenge piece that you never got around to finishing? Request a prompt you wanted to use but didn't? During the month of January until 15 February, the Resolution challenge lets you start and finish those fanworks like real life never got in the way during 2023!

A few tips to help make Resolution a more successful challenge:

• There is no minimum word count for challenges. Any type of fanwork counts as long as it is Silmarillion-based.
• You can combine multiple prompts into a single challenge response. Have a couple you missed doing and want to mash them up into a single fanwork? Go wild!
• If a challenge initially required you to request a prompt from the moderators, those challenges are now self-select prompts. You can find all of the challenges listed on the Resolution challenge page, and the prompts listed under the challenge you want to complete. The only exception is Secret Gate, last year's Matryoshka challenge. If you want to try that one, message the mods and let us know if you want two, three, five, or seven prompts. (Replying to this email accomplishes the same thing!)

If you're new to our challenges, the challenge guidelines are here. Questions? Reply to this email, and we'll help you get started!

Finally, our challenges also have a comment component. Comment on a 2023 challenge fanwork to receive the commenter stamp for that challenge. (Challenge fanworks are listed on the page for the challenge.) If you've commented on a challenge prior to Experimental, let us know so that we can add the stamp to your collection. (Again, just reply here!)

Here's to creativity and community in 2024!

(Quick final note that Russandol and I fixed a pretty annoying error on the site this morning that has been impacting pages with /user in the URL for the past several months. Find more about the error and the fix here. If you're a registered member, check your profile and make sure everything looks okay. If it doesn't, you can just ... you know what I'm going to say, right?? Reply here!)