This week, we were very pleased to be able to host The Fëanorian Zine, a gorgeous full-color fanzine with fiction and art from thirty creators, which can be read and downloaded for free on the SWG. At over 150 pages, it promises hours of enjoyment if you're lucky to have time off during the December holidays. The SWG moderators would like to offer our congratulations to editors JoeTamy and StarsOfArda and all of the zine's contributors for their achievement! We hope you will check it out and share your appreciation if you enjoy it! (Note that you must be logged in to our site to comment. If you're not an SWG member and want to pass along your compliments, you can reply to this email too, and we will forward it to the editors.)

When JoeTamy and StarsOfArda first contacted us about hosting the zine, this nudged us to get the Special Projects section of our site back up and running. Since the first special project in 2007 (Seven in '07), special projects have taken a variety of forms and are sometimes, like The Fëanorian Zine, done in collaboration with other fandom groups. When we migrated the archive from eFiction to Drupal, the formatting broke on many of our special projects, which were sometimes housed on custom webpages. It has been easy to put off the work of getting these back up and running again, but we've begun to do so, and if you visit the Special Projects page (housed under the Extras menu), you will see The Fëanorian Zine now keeps company with Mereth Aderthad 2025 and two historical special projects, Akallabêth in August and Back to Middle-earth Month 2008, which are in the process of being restored.

Special Projects is an area of our site we hope will continue to grow, including supporting projects outside the SWG that benefit from the infrastructure we can provide through our website and archive. When the SWG was founded in 2005, we were committed to collaborating, not competing, with other fandom groups and projects, and that value remains important to us. If you're considering a special project or know someone who is, we'd love the help support your project if we can!

Finally, tomorrow (Sunday, December 28) we will host a live reading on the theme of celebrations on our Discord. It's not to late to sign up if you want to be on the program, but if you're not sure, there will be an open mic session at the end. Fanworks, excerpts, and passages from Tolkien on the theme of celebrations are all welcome! Find more information, including the program so far, here. The reading will begin at noon Eastern Time (find this in my timezone) on the #live-readings stage channel on our Discord, found under SWG Events. The channel will open a half-hour early to provide the opportunity to tech and sound checks from participants. We hope you can join to listen in or read!