When the SWG was founded in March 2005, it was intended to be a writer's workshop group and a small one. The vision was that ten or so Silmarillion writers would gather and share and provide feedback on their writing to each other, mostly using Yahoo! Groups (though we had a LiveJournal too). My (Dawn's) first post to that Yahoo! Group mentioned an archive as a down-the-road possibility, and it was this—not the writers' workshop—that captured our new members' interests. We never started the writer's workshop, but I did start learning HTML and CSS. Nineteen years later, here we are.

Likewise, when the concept of a character of the month arose, it was in conjunction with our monthly challenges. The idea was that we'd feature a character each month as a writing challenge to create fic about that character. We started including a brief bio about the character to, ostensibly, get people interested. In August 2009, Oshun took over writing these "brief bios"—and she did stick to the original vision at first. Her first biography was of Irmo and was about 560 words long. However, this idea also evolved and changed beyond anything we imagined at first, until Oshun was producing scholarship-level biographies every month—some of them so in-depth that they spanned multiple months—and ended up gifting us one of the most notable parts of our site.

Throughout the history of the SWG, we've often moved like leaves before the wind, following where enthusiasm and interest have taken us. Right now, the Character of the Month is in its sunset phase; most of the major Silmarillion characters have been written. But we are in the process of developing new columns to continue to provide a venue for fan scholarship, a space where fans who want to write nonfiction can learn the craft, and resources for fanworks creators and Tolkien fans alike.

Our next endeavor follows Oshun's Character of the Month (in fact, the idea was hers, when we realized we were running out of biographies to write) and will focus on locations in Arda. You can vote for the name of this new column here. If you want to contribute to this column (or any other!), reply to this email. As a fan group first and foremost, we are committed to welcoming beginners and experts alike and provide support to new authors, so don't let a lack of experience with nonfiction writing dissuade you!

We do have a handful of characters still in need of biographers: Elendil, Gothmog, Yavanna, Eönwë, Marach, Hador, Manwë, Melkor, and Nienor. Likewise, reply here if you are interested in taking one!

We are excited to see where the wind blows and our new column goes and will have more details on it in the weeks to come!