After a very busy Jubilee challenge—which resulted in more than sixty fanworks and hundreds of comments—we're introducing a new challenge for the next month that is an anti-challenge.

Dark Matter, just like the substance in the universe that it is named after, involves creating a fanwork around an absence, using an anti-prompt. If that sounds as mysterious as the concept of dark matter itself, it's actually quite straightforward: don't include the prompt or prompts you choose in your fanwork.

The Dark Matter challenge uses a random prompt generator to choose a prompt or prompts across three possible categories: motifs and tropes, literary techniques, and words and letters. You can pick one prompt. You can pick three. You can walk the middle road and pick two. You can reroll the prompt generator as many times as you want, and if you want to try multiple prompts, cherrypick prompts you like as they come up and roll the other categories until you find something you like there too. If you want to take the full Agent of Chaos approach, you can just take what you get and make a fanwork without it.

Because this challenge is a different, unfamiliar approach, we've included a range of difficulty levels in the prompts. After the hubbub of Jubilee, taking low-hanging fruit is fine, but if you are up for creating a fanwork without the letter E, that diabolical anti-prompt is in the mix too (in the Words & Letters category). As always, we never judge what "counts" for a challenge and embrace our challenges' purpose in increasing the number of Silmarillion fanworks out there in the world!

In other news, Mereth Aderthad continues to proceed apace and we have a few updates to share!

First, our program of meta and scholarship presentations has been posted on the Mereth Aderthad 2025 page. We have twelve tantalizing presentations on deck for the event. Watch this space for fanworks to be added too in the weeks to come!

Speaking of fanworks, if you want to create a fanwork for Mereth Aderthdad (the live event, the event's zine, or both!), fanwork sign-ups opened today.

Registration for the even will open on March 15, for both in-person and virtual attendees.

Finally, we will feature interviews with the presenters and creators of Mereth Aderthad in the weeks to come so that we can celebrate their work and let attendees get to know them a little before the event. We're looking for volunteers to help with these interviews. We provide the questions to get you started and you direct the conversation from there. Interviews will be over email or another text-based format unless you and your interviewee prefer differently. We'll handle the rest! If you'd like to help out, reply to this email and we'll be in touch!