If it seems like the newsletter is early this week, you are not mistaken. It is and intentionally so.

On Saturday, we are hosting an instadrabbling session on our Discord server, and I wanted to make sure that the newsletter arrived before the first session started. This instadrabbling session is in honor of International Fanworks Day and serves as an opportunity to swap prompts for our new challenge, Meet & Greet Matryoshka.

There was a lot of fandom jargon in that last paragraph. First things first: instadrabbling is a collaborative activity aimed at making flash fanworks together. As far as I know, it was invented by Tolkien fanfiction writers JunoMagic and Aranel Took in the mid-2000s. The way it works: A bunch of creators get together on a chat service. Someone throws out a prompt (traditionally four words chosen at random from the nearest book on hand). Everyone makes a drabble or other flash fanwork, posts the results, and everyone squees over the results.

International Fanworks Day is February 15 and sponsored by the Organization for Transformative Works. Every year, we offer an IFD stamp for challenge participants and sometimes we fly by the seats of our pants in putting something else together at the last minute to make it look like we planned ahead. This year, we remembered about IFD in time to actually plan instadrabbling and have it appear in the OTW's news announcements. (Proof, perhaps, that at age 19, the SWG is indeed entering adulthood?)

Instadrabbling also provides an occasion to gather for our current challenge. Meet & Greet is our annual Matryoshka challenge. As far as I know, we invented this challenge format, something that I'm proud of even as I want to apologize for doing so. Matryoshka challenges are hard. The Matryoshka challenge involves cumulative prompts, like the nesting dolls that it is named after, so you never know how subsequent prompts may ruin the fanwork you so lovingly planned and had half-created in your mind. Typically, the mods send a separate email for each prompt; for this one, we will send your first prompt and then you need to find the rest, either by asking other participants (hence Meet & Greet!) or finding them online. Some participants have posted them publicly, and the mods have hidden a few in plain sight to see who actually reads the stuff we post on the site.

The sum total of all of this: fandom is truly collaborative. We are using a social activity invented two decades ago by a pair of Lord of the Rings authors to celebrate a holiday coined by a huge fanworks nonprofit and to support a challenge that we invented and hope will encourage SWG members to talk to each other and visit each other's socials. It seems fitting that this amalgam will result in a bunch of creators coming together to make and celebrate fanworks together.

If you want to join us for instadrabbling, you can join our Discord server here. Full Meet & Greet challenge guidelines (and the participant list) are here. Instadrabbling will occur on 17 February 2024 at 13:00/1PM until 17:00/5PM UTC (see this in your timezone) and again on 18 February 2024 at midnight until 2:00AM UTC (see this in your timezone). We hope to see you there!