This past week was the Thanksgiving holiday in the US, which is a good reminder to me to pause and reflect with gratitude on the many people who make the SWG possible. A group of this scope would be impossible for one person to run; the SWG would have folded years ago, by necessity, if not for the ongoing support of our moderators and volunteers.

First, I want to recognize Saelind, who after six years as a moderator on Discord, is stepping back to pursue other exciting opportunities outside of fandom. Serving as a Discord mod is a role with unique challenges. Our moderator channel looks rather like the stereotypical firehouse, where the firefighter-mods are mostly playing cards, cooking chili, and throwing a ball for the firehouse Dalmatian, until ... fear, fire, foes! Discord allows us to interact in real time, but this also means that conflicts kick off in real time too, and our server mods often must drop what they're doing to handle situations that, in the moment, can feel a lot like a house on fire. Saelind has spent six years helping us through these moments and has always given wise counsel. We wish her the best in her new endeavours!

Also on our mod team, Grundy is a server and challenge mod. She is the person who gives out the challenge stamps! Anyone who remembers the stamp collections on the old site knows I was not so timely as she is! Shadow, also a Discord mod, has stepped up as a third challenge mod in Lyra's old role, as Lyra is on hiatus, and I am grateful for their willingness to take on this new role. Challenges are one of the aspects of our site that keeps it vibrant and lively, but twenty years in, coming up with fresh and new approaches to making fanworks is, pardon the pun, a challenge. Thank you, Janeways, our final Discord mod and the creator of many of the beautiful banners that are featured for our newsletter articles. I am grateful for your willingness to share your artistic talents and to jump in wherever you're needed!

Russandol is my co-admin in running the site from a tech standpoint. She manages much of the backend of the site. She and I have spent many white-knuckle hours in DMs, trying to figure out why the site is broken or running updates that we hope won't break the site. "Why, Drupal, why??" is our motto. I always appreciate her willingness to share her tech skills with us to keep our site secure and running!

On our newsletter staff, our art editor is Anérea, whose vast knowledge of the art side of Tolkien fandom means we have diverse and lovely artwork to accompany newsletter articles. Varda delle Stelle is the assistant art editor and also helps source art and with gaining permissions. Elrond's Library is our Around the World & Web editor, who keeps the announcements in our newsletter updated so that, we hope, SWG members can connect with events and challenges that enchant their muses.

Also assisting on Discord are our Istari, Ettelenë and Nienna, who help to welcome newcomers and answer questions. Anna (IdleLeaves) has been running monthly instadrabbling sessions on Discord as well for the better part of a year, and these are always a highlight of the month! (One is coming up next week.)

I want to note as well something that I've observed about volunteers in my two decades of running this group. Everyone here does much more than what I recognized them for. Despite what is already on their plate as volunteers, theirs are the hands that raise first when something needs to be done, and many of them run events outside of the SWG as well. Much of this work goes unseen and unsung.

Tolkien fandom has existed for many decades now. Thank you to ALL of the fandom volunteers, past and present, who have given their time, energy, and talents to keeping the gates of Middle-earth open so that we can return again and again.

In many temperate climates right now, we are in what we call "stick season" in Vermont: either waiting for winter or waiting for the trees to realize it's spring. At this time of year, evergreen plants are the only color in the landscape in some parts of the world. These trusty trees are always there, always available!

We also have evergreen volunteer roles on the SWG, and so this time when evergreens are so prominent for many of us seems a good time to remind about them. These are volunteer roles that are always open and accepting new volunteers. First is our inclusivity committee. Making the SWG an inclusive space for all Tolkien fans is one of our priorities as an organization. Our inclusivity focus group serves two roles in advancing that goal. First, they consult with our mod team when we are making policies or addressing issues where inclusivity plays a part. Secondly, the inclusivity focus group is available for members to consult with, if they have concerns about inclusivity on the group that the mod team has not be able to satisfactorily resolve. Any SWG member who belongs to a group that has ben marginalized in fandom is welcome to join. You will be able to participate when you can and input is needed, so there is no regular obligations for this role. We meet on Discord but are willing to make accommodations for fans who are unable to use this platform.

Next, we also are always looking for scouts: people who run fandom events and want to post about their events on our site, as part of Around the World & Web. If you run a fandom event and would like the scout role, or if you'd like to join the inclusivity focus group, just reply to this email!

All open volunteer roles can be found here.

Finally, we have updated our Site Etiquette and Terms of Service to better address bot registrations, which due to the ubiquitous creep of AI, have gotten better at outsmarting the barriers we have in place. The addition to the SE/ToS reads as follows:

Once an account is approved, if six months pass and the account is never logged into, we will contact the member using the email registered with the site to confirm their interest in keeping their account open on the site. If we do not receive a reply within two weeks, the account will be deleted. Note that this applies only to accounts where the member never takes the next step after account approval of logging into the account. Once a member logs into their account for the first time, the account will remain open with no requirement of minimal activity. If a member's account is deleted because it is never logged into and that member wishes to set up an account at a later date, they will be able to register again.

As always, reply to this email or contact a moderator with questions!

Today, we are excited to unveil our November/December challenge, the Great Beleriand Bake-Off! Traditionally, we offer a challenge that spans November and December to meet both sets of needs that tend to arise around this season: Those who want to participate but are swamped with holiday-related commitments, and those who lay low from the world of fellow humans and want to lose themselves in fanworks. The Great Beleriand Bake-Off is a daily prompt calendar spanning November 15 through January 15. If you want to immerse yourself in fanworks-making, you can try for as many prompts if you want. If you want the stamp but could use a reprieve from a high-pressure anything, you only need to complete a single prompt to receive the creator stamp. You can complete prompts at any time; you don't have to do them on the day they are featured. Full challenge guidelines can be found here.

Grundy has done an amazing job sourcing baked goods from around the world, some contributed by our members, with a sweet and savory prompt for each day. Prompts are baked goods, each with a description and most with a recipe (or a few!) As always, you can use any part of the prompt to inspire your fanwork, including the linked websites (which often contain interesting historical and cultural tidbits about the featured food), and we welcome offbeat interpretations of the prompts. Fanworks do not need to be about baking or baked goods or feature the foods from the prompt.

Finally, Sundays will be done a little differently with a comment challenge. You can comment on any fanwork on the SWG site, not just fanworks created for the Great Beleriand Bake-Off. Make sure to tell the mods for each challenge you complete, as there is a unique stamp for each comment challenge!

Since we had many newcomers to the SWG during 2025, we also want to note that January 1 through February 15 is our annual amnesty challenge when you can complete any challenges from 2025 to receive stamps that you missed. Yes, that means that although the Great Beleriand Bake-Off prompt calendar will end on January 15, fanworks for the challenge will continue to receive stamps through February 15.

This is not the most exciting title but if you opened it anyway, thank you for reading! Whenever possible, we seek the input of our members on policy changes. These conversations often bring perspectives and considerations that we would have otherwise overlooked. (You can read more about how we govern the SWG here.)

The SWG mods are requesting public comment on a proposed change, intended to help us eliminate bot registrations, on how we manage accounts that are never accessed. When a newcomer registers for the SWG, the account is locked until a moderator can review it. This is not a gatekeeping strategy, and all Tolkien fans are welcome and approved as quickly as we can. However, we cull obvious bot registrations at this time, which based on our most recent registration data, is about 15% of registrations. After moderator approval, the new member is notified and can log into and use their account fully.

Currently, about 20% of those newcomers never log into their account once approved. Some of this is life: Most of us have registered for a website with best intentions of using it and discovered that time or inclination withers away quickly thereafter. This is a normal part of running a site like ours and in no way a concern or problem. However, thanks to the ever-growing creep of AI, we are also aware that bot registrations are likely to become more sophisticated. Unfortunately, my recent attempts to contact a few never-accessed members about their accounts and getting no response confirms that we might have arrived at this era.

It is in the best interest of everyone to not have bot registrations on the site that can potentially use their access to features like fanworks, comments, and member contact forms to bother SWG members with spam or malicious content. Given this, the SWG moderators the following change to our Site Etiquette and Terms of Service:

• If six months pass and a new account is never logged into, we will contact that person using the email registered on the site to allow them to keep their account.
• If we receive a reply, we will keep the account open. There is no obligation for the member to log into the account or use it or maintain any minimum level of activity.
• If we don't hear a reply within two weeks, we will delete the account.
• Note that this applies only to new accounts that have never been logged into. Once a person logs into their account, they can keep it forever and use it as much or as little as they like.

We are interested in input on this policy change. You can share your thoughts by replying to this email or joining the discussion in the #town-hall channel on our Discord. Thank you to all who have shared input so far!

And finally, a reminder that our current challenge, The Only Thing to Fear, has one week remaining during which to post fanworks if you'd like to receive a stamp for your creation.

First and foremost, instadrabbling is happening TODAY on our Discord server (scroll down to the #instadrabbling channel). If you've never instadrabbled before, we'd love for you to join us and give it a try! Instadrabbling is a casual virtual gathering of fanworks creators. Using prompts, we create flash fanworks and share them with each other in the moment. You can learn more about instadrabbling here. Can't make it today? Mark your calendar for our next session on December 6, 2025 at 6PM/18:00 UTC (find this in my timezone). Many thanks to Anna (IdleLeaves) who hosts this monthly event for us!

Our current challenge is The Only Thing to Fear, where the task is to create a fanwork about fear using one of the common phobias from our prompt list. If you want to let fate decide your prompt, Elrond's Library has made a picker wheel that will randomize your prompt for the challenge.

We are approaching the end of 2025 and therefore beginning to think about our final challenge for the year, which always spans two months, November 15 through January 15. The intention behind having the final challenge span two months is to accommodate the various ways people celebrate the winter holidays. For some, this is the busiest time of the year, full of travel and celebrations with friends and family, so we aim for a challenge that can be completed relatively easily. For others, the holidays brings time off and relaxation, so we also aim for a challenge that can occupy a creator who wants to use this season for a lengthier, more involved challenge.

Without giving away the upcoming challenge entirely, which will debut on November 15, we are looking favorite baked goods, sweet or savory, that are made where you live or are important to your own family or tradition. You can send a photo or recipe if you want, but just a name or link works too! Simply reply to this email with your ideas!

Fans engage with their source text in many ways, one of which is collecting. Collecting, however, is typically seen as different and separate from reading, viewing, and creating fanworks. In fact, some fan studies research points to fans who collect and fans who create as occupying completely different niches within the wild, diverse fandom ecosystem.

Where they overlap is bookmarks. How many of you reading this right now have a collection of fannish bookmarks? Favorite fanworks, inspirational art pieces or music, or resources that you return to again and again? Perhaps they are sorted by character, pairing, topic, or theme.

On a related note, how many of you can immediately think of five fanworks—fiction, art, music, meta, and everything in between—for your favorite character, subject, genre, or pairing in fandom that you would immediately recommend to someone looking to get started reading about that topic?

If you are an inveterate bookmark collector, we'd like to invite you to share the gems in your collection as part of our Themed Collections. Themed collections typically consist of five to ten fanworks centered around a particular subject. While not intended to be comprehensive or authoritative, they offer the chance to share your favorite works about a subject that interests you and get other Tolkien fans excited about it too! Themed Collections are shared on our archive and featured in our newsletter.

If you'd be interested in curating some of your favorite bookmarks on your favorite fandom topic, simply reply to this email and let us know what you're thinking! As always, we welcome creators of all ability levels to contribute to the newsletter. All you need to bring to it is a passion for the topic you choose, and we'll help you do the rest!

And don't forget to check out the three Themed Collections on our archive already:

• The Ruling Queens of Númenor by Himring
• Alliterative Verse for Arda by Rhunedhel
• Orcs Are People by cuarthol

Also, remember that our monthly instadrabbling session, hosted by Anna (IdleLeaves), will take place next week, on November 1. Join our Discord if you'd like to participate!

For many of our members, summer is winding down into winter. Leaves fall from the trees to rustle in the wind, and bared branches scratch the sky. The harvest comes to an end, and the long, bitter specter of winter looms. It is a time when fear and the macabre looms large in the imaginations of many creators.

This month's challenge, The Only Thing to Fear, plays on that theme. The premise is simple: create a fanwork about fear using at least one prompt from our list of common fears.

Of course, this challenge lends itself readily to the spookier genres, like horror, suspense, or mystery. However, this is a good time to issue the reminder that not only do we allow but encourage creative interpretation of our challenges and prompts. Fear can take many forms that invite genres and approaches outside of those that come first to mind. For instance, how many romantic comedies center on a fear of commitment? How many dramas are driven by a character trying to overcome the kinds of everyday worries and fears that plague us all as we move through life? Humor, too, can explore the side of fear that is ridiculous or even silly.

As we are in the season where many fandom events are underway, remember too that if you use one of our challenge prompts in a fanwork for another event, and you cannot post the work with us right away due to the other event's schedule, just let the mods know, and we will be happy to award your stamp to you when you are able to post.

A good beta-reader is one of the unsung heroes in fic fandom. They are the person brave and diplomatic enough to provide the feedback that helps you to grow your craft, who reminds you that you're not the worst writer in the world when you need to hear that, and who ruthlessly roots out every last comma splice. Betas give the time they could be using to read fic for fun or work on their own fanworks to help others improve their work.

Did you know that the SWG maintains a directory of beta-readers? If you are looking for the help of one of these wondrous humans, this can be a great place to start. You can view the whole list or search for a beta who specializes in what you write or your biggest area of need as an author.

This is also our semi-regular reminder to members who are or want to be beta-readers to update your profiles!

Any SWG member can be listed in our beta directory. Simply go to My Account, click Edit, and choose the Beta tab. You can provide as much or as little detail as you'd like.

If you already in our beta directory, we appreciate if you can check your profile to make sure it is still accurate. Go to My Account, click Edit, and choose the Beta tab. Note as well that if you need to take a break from beta-reading and don't want authors reaching out to you, all you have to do is untick the "Activate this profile" box at the top of the beta form, then click it again when you're ready to rejoin the listing. The site will save your information, so you can activate and deactivate your profile as often as needed.

We also have a #beta-finder channel on our Discord, which works well when you need help with a specific project or something with a faster turnaround (not that we're in the season where many of us may be finishing big projects at the last minute or anything ...)

And finally, a big thank-you to all of our beta-readers past, present, and future for helping to populate our archive and fandom with so many wonderful stories to read!

Today is spooky instadrabbling on our Discord server. (It's not too late to join!) Right now, at this juncture of the SWG's history, our Discord server is one of the thriving corners of our community, along with our archive. But given that the SWG is a decade older than Discord, this was clearly not always the case.

The SWG didn't originate as an archive but as a fandom community, hosted on Yahoo! Groups and LiveJournal. Yahoo! Groups, which closed in 2020, was a semipublic email list and formed the cornerstone of many early Tolkien fanfiction groups. During the heyday of the Lord of the Rings films, some Yahoo! Groups received dozens of messages a day and allowed fans to talk Tolkien using their email. LiveJournal was an early blogging platform; again, active LJs would sometimes have posts with comments numbering in the hundreds. Pre-dating Facebook and Twitter and Instagram, these early social media platforms tended to require you to opt-in to a community (versus seeing content from communities shared by others you follow or content recommended by an algorithm).

From these social communities, fanfiction archives arose. The fan scholar and archive expert Abigail De Kosnik calls them community archives because they become the more public, formal face of fan communities that were often highly informal. The SWG followed the exact trajectory De Kosnik described (as did many 2000s-era Tolkien fanfic archives): our Yahoo! Group and LiveJournal were active spaces for discussion, the foundation of the SWG, and the archive grew from there.

Fan-unfriendly decisions by the leadership of both Yahoo! Groups and LiveJournal eventually led us to move away from those platforms, and neither are officially in use any longer (although the LJ community is still open for historical purposes and any SWG member who wants to use it). There was a time in the 2010s when there was no active community space for interaction and discussion on the SWG. On my endless list of fandom data projects is to trace how archive activity aligns with the moments in our history where community was vibrant and when it was essentially nonexistent.

Right now, the pendulum has swung back toward community spaces with the use of our Discord as a central meeting place for SWG members. Just like the Yahoo! Group email and LJ comments of old, discussions range from silly and irreverent to serious discussion of the texts and their implications ... and from all of this, fanworks continue to grow.

When we migrated the SWG site from eFiction to Drupal now almost five years ago, one of our goals—if we were to go through the ordeal of migration—was to be able to host just about any kind of fanwork. Drupal, because it is basically a giant box of digital LEGO blocks that can be assembled to make whatever you want with it, was particularly well-suited to that aspiration. (And even though Drupal sometimes becomes a four-letter word when Russandol and I are trying to squash a particularly troublesome bug, it has not disappointed in many regards, including this one!)

This week, I want to show some love for some of the lesser-known fanwork types that creators can share on our site (just as a reminder that the playlist you made for Celegorm/Maeglin doesn't have to disappear into the depths of Tumblr hell but can be archived for the wonderment and delight of generations of fans to come!) If you're feeling really ambitious, maybe try one out for our Jumble Sale challenge?

Link Collections are a way to gather all of the links about a particular anything in one place. It might be favorite fanworks or rec lists, resources, or all of the music and art and everything that inspired a fanwork you made. You can link works within the SWG but also outside the SWG. (The key difference between a Link Collection and a Series!) If you really, really love a topic, character, pairing, or whatever and want to do something more formal, we feature Themed Collections periodically as part of this newsletter. Hit REPLY if you'd be interested in putting one together for your fandom love! (And check out the three Themed Collections already in our archive here.)

Playlists focus on audio, such as music or podcasts. (Both of which we host as well!) Fandom and music have always gone together. Many of you reading this right now may have one or more Tolkien-themed playlists in your own music collection! If you want to share them more widely, the Playlist fanwork type allows you to link individual songs or whole playlists that you've stored on other platforms, like YouTube or Spotify. Again, the focus of your playlist, while it should be within the parameters of a "Silmarillion fanwork," can otherwise be whatever you want it to be: a soundtrack for a fanwork, songs about a character or pairing, songs that inspire you to create "Silmarillion" fanworks, or wherever your creativity takes you!

Finally, Series are the old friend in the group, having been around since our eFiction days. Series are how you collect fanworks on the SWG site into a single fanwork. Most people use series to collect their own fanworks that belong to the same arc or universe, but you're certainly not limited to your own, and Series can be used to collect favorite fanworks or resources posted to the SWG or make curated lists of SWG works. Because the series a fanwork belongs to is listed in the fanwork information, this is one way to lead readers and viewers to others of your fanworks in the same arc or universe.

Some final reminders:

Our next instadrabbling session takes place on our Discord next Saturday, October 4, 2025 at 6PM/18:00 UTC. Find out more about monthly instadrabbling sessions here.

The Shopify store will be closing on October 1, which means we are in the final days to order a print fanzine from Mereth Aderthad if you want one! Put in your order before October 1 here.