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.

This month, we celebrated twenty years of challenges on the SWG! Our challenges have undergone lots of changes through the years. They started as open-ended, broad topics to write about. Sometimes people used them; sometimes they didn't. For a while,  thinking there were just too many and people needed more time to work on them, they were quarterly instead of monthly. And when that made things worse and participation in challenges had dropped to nearly zero, we tried in 2017 to reshape them one more time by making them monthly again and with a greater variety of formats, including the occasional interactive challenge. This worked, and our challenges have been a key part of our site since, with multiple fanworks created for each that we've run since 2017.

This month, in honor of twenty years of challenges, we have emptied the SWG attic of all of them, dumped them in our front yard, and let creators take a crack at them ... but with a twist. Prompts for this month's Jumble Sale are created by you, our members, using old challenges to make new prompts. There are currently over forty prompts that upcycle past challenges in inspiring, inventive, thought-provoking, and downright evil new ways. All you have to do to participate is find the prompt (or prompts ...) you want, create something Silmarillion-related for it, and post it to our archive. That's it! (And for the philatelists among us, yes, you get stamps for all challenges involved in the prompt. Pre-2017 challenges that do not have stamps receive a special "ancient history hunter" stamp.)

If you enjoy making prompts, you can still contribute Jumble Sale prompts here.

Speaking of challenges, the mods will be working on the 2026 challenge line-up soon, so if you have any ideas for challenges, feel free to click REPLY and let us know!

Also, there is just over a week left to get a print Mereth Aderthad fanzine if you want one! You can order your copy of the Mereth Aderthad 2025 fanzine here. The zine will always be available as a free digital download here.

Amazingly, we are almost halfway through September. Our new challenge, Jumble Sale, will begin in just two days. As a reminder, this challenge is the chance to create wonderful, inspiring, awful, and evil new challenge prompts using past challenges as inspiration. Maybe there is a prompt that you really wanted to see written. Maybe there is a challenge or past prompt that you think deserves a second life. Or maybe you just like making up impossible prompts and watching your fellow creators squirm. If you'd like your prompt or prompts to be in the challenge debut, make sure you complete the form Jumble Sale Prompts for Offer as soon as you can.

We will continue to accept and post prompts after the challenge opens. And because people will ask, yes, you will get stamps for the Jumble Sale challenge as well as any other challenges included in the prompt. If the challenge is older than 2017 (when we started giving out stamps), there will be a special stamp for you.

Hand in hand with that, our current challenge Kids These Days is active through the 15th, so post your fanwork no later than the 15th to receive that stamp.

Next, there is about two weeks left to order a print copy of the Mereth Aderthad fanzine. We will shut our Shopify store down on October 1, so make sure to place your order before that time if you'd like a copy. You can order your copy of the Mereth Aderthad 2025 fanzine here. If you want a copy but extenuating circumstances prevent you from ordering in the next two weeks, or if our store won't ship to your country, reach out to me directly. (You can reply to this email!) I am happy to work with people to make sure they get a copy of the zine if they want one.

And finally, something new for the months to come: Anna (IdleLeaves) is generously continuing to host monthly instadrabbling sessions on our Discord! The next three sessions are scheduled for the first Saturday of the month, beginning at 6PM/18:00 UTC, on October 4, November 1, and December 6. See our instadrabbling announcement to see those times in your timezone and to learn more about what instadrabbling involves. It's a low-key and incredibly fun way to socialize with other Tolkien fans while creating and enjoying fanworks!

When the SWG started in 2005, there were many, many more independent Tolkien groups, many of them hosted on platforms like Yahoo! Groups and LiveJournal, but others on websites like the SWG is today. There were positives and negatives to this, with a downside that the fandom felt much more fragmented and siloed. And as happens any time you have multiple groups of humans trying to accomplish the same goal, a competitive feeling developed between some of these groups.

We were lucky that, as a Silmarillion group, we were well-positioned to try a different approach. Part of this was the advantage of having no other Silmarillion-only groups to "compete" with, so we could promote and celebrate what other Tolkien groups were doing. In 2008, we adopted the "Connectivity" plank in our mission: "To recognize that we are only a single small group in a vast online Tolkien fan community and to work toward connecting and sharing with the Tolkien fandom at large, as well as aiding members in finding groups and resources that meet their needs where the SWG cannot." Part of this was our Yellow Pages, a guide to other Tolkien groups. (The last updated version from 2013 is still on the site, albeit in very rudimentary form.) Part of this too was Around the World and Web, which we announced as part of opening our archive in the June 2007 newsletter.

Around the World and Web has been rudderless, without an editor, for several years now, minimally maintained by me in between more pressing site maintenance tasks. I am thrilled to announce that Elrond's Library has generously offered to take on this role and want to express my gratitude to her and others who offered assistance when I posted about it on Discord last week. It is wonderful that such a long-running part of our site will be better cared for into the future!

This is also a good time to highlight that section of our site. We try to post about as many events and projects of interest to Tolkien fans as we can, again due to that Connectivity component in our mission. We can't do it all, and don't want to, and want people to know when something awesome Tolkien-related is happening elsewhere that our members might enjoy. After all, our ultimate mission in the SWG is to build fandom friendships and grow the number of Tolkien-related fanworks being created. Whether that is for our challenges or another event, the result is still a benefit to the broader Tolkien community.

If you run an event, you can become a scout on the SWG, which gives you access to post about your event in Around the World and Web. If you'd like to know more, reply to this email! Around the World and Web lives on our website but also goes out in our monthly newsletters. It is a section of our site that I hope to continue improving into the future, but for now, if you're reading this, scroll down to see upcoming events from beyond the SWG that might interest you!

On August 31, 2005, we posted our very first newsletter and, with it, our first challenge as well. The challenge was called Strong Women and was offered by Jenni (digdigil), a founding member of the SWG and one of our early moderators:

Choose a female character from The Silmarillion or related texts. It could be someone like Galadriel, one of the Valar, or someone barely mentioned, such as Nerdanel or Elenwë. Write a story--any length--about this character, developing a strong personality for her. Her strengths could lie in many different areas: Perhaps the woman would be a good mother, perform an act of heroism, or be a healer or a teacher, but she must contribute something of value.

I went on to write about the challenge:

Tolkien is often criticized for the lack of strong female characters in his work. ... The stories of Middle-earth would be vastly different without characters like Varda, Galadriel, Haleth, and Lúthien Tinúviel.

Nonetheless, there are still many women who recieve [sic] only glancing acknowledgment or appear only as "footnote" characters--regardless, their influence on their husbands, children, and the world around them is undeniable.

This first challenge always strikes me as looking forward to what the SWG would become. Tolkien fic fandom, at the time, was not friendly toward writing female characters. The specter of "Mary Sue" loomed large and prevented many writers from venturing into writing about women about whom we know little or nothing or even writing about women for whom there is substantial material in the texts. (Fandom Voices: Women in Fanworks recalls some of these experiences from fans who wrote in the first decade of online Tolkien fic fandom.) But we were, one month into the SWG's existence, still small, with only a couple dozen members and without grand aspirations, and still largely flying by the seats of our pants. The Strong Women challenge feels more significant in retrospect than it did at the time. Still, it prefigures the work of many of our creators over the past twenty years to elevate not just women in the legendarium but other groups of characters who are marginalized in both Middle- and Modern-earth (including Elleth Textual Ghosts Project, which has done much to facilitate the goal of the Strong Women challenge to encourage writing about what we termed "footnote characters").

Twenty years later, challenges are still at the center of the SWG—another legacy of this inaugural challenge. Check out our current Kids These Days challenge, join us for instadrabbling next Saturday, and don't forget we are collecting prompts for the Jumble Sale challenge!