First of all, if you have not responded to our question about next year's live event for our 20th birthday, can you? We will be choosing a venue within the next few weeks and value as much information as possible about what we might expect for attendance. We also appreciate signal boosts if you are able to do so. (A Tumblr post of the announcement is here!)

Thank you to those who have responded already!

This week, we continue as part of our Cultus Dispatches column our exploration of the topic of commenting and feedback. This is often a fraught topic surrounded by a lot of emotion. Creators want feedback, especially comments, but many receive few (or none!) and the silence can be huge and easily filled with their worst fears about their work. Readers and viewers, on the other hand, generally want to keep happy the creators who are making the art, stories, and other fanworks they love, but writing comments is hard. It is not often that guilt, shame, and a sense of failure arise regularly in a Cultus column, but here they do. (Friendship, community, and fanworks barely saved from the dustbin by a timely comment are also common themes, but thankfully, at least the first two are more regular topics for the column!)

This month's column explores the topic through our recent Fandom Voices survey about comments and feedback. Thirtyish participants answered two simple questions: "What has been your experience around receiving feedback on your Tolkien-based fanworks?" and "What has been your experience of leaving feedback (or not) on Tolkien-based fanworks?" Their responses reveal the delights and challenges that leaving feedback creates for all parties involved.

You can read the article "Fandom Voices: Comments and Feedback" here. And if you missed the survey, or did it but want to say more, or answering the question about the live event made you hungry for more Google Forms, the survey is still open for new responses, which we will add to the collection as they come in.

The SWG's birthday is a rather inexact thing. The SWG was established on March 15, 2005, but we did not begin recruiting members until the end of July that year, making it so (just like an Elf) we have both a begetting day and birthday. However, as people trickled into the group across the course of several days, it is hard to pin down just one of them as our birthday.

It is, however, somewhere around this time, nineteen years ago. Nineteen, as a birthday, is pretty unremarkable, sandwiched between legal adulthood at 18 in many countries and the big 2-0 that marks the exit from teenagedom. Nineteen, in fandom terms, is pretty respectable, though. While there are some truly venerable fannish institutions, most do not last this long. In my research on archives, I have found some that lasted only a year or two. Most of the sites that seemed like big sisters to the SWG when it trickled to life at the end of July 2005 are now gone.

Just like a human birthday, we won't treat our nineteenth birthday as a milestone. We'll mark it and be mildly impressed that we've made it this far. But next year? Next year we turn twenty!

We are planning an event for our twentieth birthday next year. It will be hybrid, occurring both in-person and online. Because, as an organization, we have produced both fanworks and scholarship (the latter through a fannish versus academic approach), we will welcome presentations of both—watch this space in the weeks to come for more details on what this will look like, including a call for presenters if you want to share your work as part of marking our twentieth year!

Right now, we are working to secure a venue, and the most important thing we need is to know how many people would like to attend, assuming they are able to do so. This is not an RSVP or any kind of sign-up; we're not even collecting names. It is more of an attempt to gain a sense of whether we should expect a small gathering in a library community room or whether we should rent something larger.

Please answer the one question on this form to help us gather this information. It is also helpful if you can signal boost this survey outside of the SWG in any fandom spaces where it is acceptable to do so. This will not be an SWG-only event, and we want to welcome as many Tolkien fans as want to attend, whether they are SWG members or not.

Finally, thank you to everyone who has supported us in the many ways needed that we have nearly survived our teens! (If you're reading this, that's you!) It has been an incredible nineteen years!

What is your passion in fandom, the one thing you will always click on? Maybe it is a favorite character or pairing. Maybe it is a genre or a type of fanwork. Maybe it's a mix! (Classical music about Fingon/Maedhros? Crafts about Dwarves? Science fiction stories about textual ghosts?)

We are excited to announce a new column for our newsletter that offers a chance to harness that passion (or riffle through all those bookmarks you've been saving) and share it with others. We will begin featuring themed collections of fanworks. What type of fanwork? Anything! All formats are welcome and, no, it does not need to be archived with us. You pick the topic, put together a collection of five to ten pieces, and write an introduction—that's it!

If you'd like to know more the full call for contributors has the details. If you have questions, reply to this email and we'll help you out.

If you want to contribute, you can also reply to this email and let us know what topic (or topics ...) you are thinking about.

(If you're looking for a hint of where to start, we will have SWG events later in the year where themed collections on queens and/or kings and Orcs would be especially welcome ...)

Older than Hollywood, Bollywood—the nickname for the Indian film industry—is the most prolific producer of films in the world. Characterized by their vibrant costumes, catchy song-and-dance numbers, and rollercoaster extremes of emotion, Bollywood films draw from Hindu scriptures on aesthetics and sometimes capture elements of the great Hindu epics. This month's challenge is based around Bollywood: its tropes, colors, songs, and films.

For this month's challenge, the mods will assign prompts to creators interested in participating. You can request a prompt on Dreamwidth, Tumblr, the #monthly-challenges channel on our Discord, or by replying to this email. Let us know if you have a preference for the type of prompt—a film, a song, a color palette, or a trope—or if you want the mods to surprise you. Likewise, if you request a song and want to be sure it has an available English translation, let us know.

Remember that you can use any aspect of your prompt. This can include—but certainly does not require—branching out beyond the prompt the mods give you. For example, some films are available online or through streaming services. Songs may have music videos, or you may find stills from films or songs, movie posters, and more. We will give a very (and intentionally) brief and vague synopsis of each film, but you may discover characters or subplots that inspire a fanwork. All of these are fair game to use to inspire your fanwork!

Note also that this challenge is being posted two days early so that we could get it into the newsletter now. The Funky 70s challenge is still active too, and you will receive stamps for responses posted on or before July 15. The deadline for stamps for creating a fanwork the Bollywood challenge is August 15.

Finally, with several large fandom events running, remember that if you create for an event and incorporate an SWG challenge, but the event does not allow you to post with us before the deadline, just let the mods know, and we will award the stamp whenever you are able to post.

You can find the full Bollywood challenge guidelines and fanworks here.
New to our challenges? You can find the SWG challenge guidelines here, and reply to this email with questions or to request a Bollywood prompt!

Comments are one of the more perilous parts of the fanfiction-writing experience. I say "perilous" because authors really like comments (as a general rule), and when someone perceives that something they enjoy is being withheld, all sorts of thoughts and feelings and actions can ensue. If you write fanfiction, you have probably compared your comment (or click or kudos) counts to someone else. You have probably entertained dark thoughts about your skill as a writer based on that single data point. You have possibly thought unkind things about the people reading your work for free but not leaving a single word of thanks. Or maybe reasoned why that other person's numbers are higher but not actually deserved.

This month, in Cultus Dispatches, our monthly column about Tolkien fandom history, we begin to explore the world of commenting. The first article in this series looks at authors' perspectives on the comments they do (and do not) receive, using data from the Tolkien Fanfiction Survey to identify trends. Of course, it includes the unsurprising information that, as children like ice cream, authors like comments. (Most do anyway. I was a child who didn't like ice cream, so exceptions are always possible.) However, a deeper dive into the data shows that commenting appears to be bound up with a broader interactive component to fandom, which in turns ties in to shifts in platform use that have occurred across the fandom's history.

You can read "Fandom Chocolate ... or Authors Love Comments" here.

If you have big thoughts and big feelings on commenting (or even just regular-sized thoughts and feelings), we have an active Fandom Voices project about commenting. Fandom Voices is a sub-project of Cultus Dispatches that collects fan experiences and perceptions on fandom-related topics. Readers and creators (of all different types of fanworks, not just fanfic!) are welcome. Responses will be collected and published for next month's Cultus column. You can contribute a response to Fandom Voices here.

The SWG is rapidly approaching its twentieth anniversary next July. We have grown from an email list and LiveJournal community into a vibrant archive and community on the strength of the efforts of volunteers who have helped to grow the site and keep fun and interesting things happening here. If you enjoy the SWG and think we do cool stuff, and you want to help us keep that cool stuff going for another twenty years, you might wonder how you can get involved.

Volunteer Roles. Our Around the World and Web editor role has been vacant for more than two years now. If you scroll down this email and see the announcements we post from other groups, this role manages this section of the site and newsletter. It tends to involve a lot of copying and pasting from the announcements posted by groups and events outside the SWG and tends to max out at about a half-hour of work per week. Reply to this email if you're interested! All open volunteer roles can be found here.

Write for Us! Our newsletter goes out weekly, and we are always looking for feature articles and columns. In the next couple of months, we will be introducing a few new columns. Two of them have calls for articles available now! Lay of the Land is inspired by our nearly complete Character of the Month column but with a focus on important places in the geography of Arda. Like Character of the Month, it is aimed at creating a resource where the major details about a location can be found in one place with a lot of freedom for where the writer takes the column from there.

Our new Master Class column focuses on creating fanworks. Whether creating a tutorial for someone trying a fanwork for the first time or sharing tips and tricks for creators looking to improve their craft, all approaches and media (and of course fanworks!) are welcome. We also welcome recommendations of your favorite creators who do that particular thing amazingly well.

If you might be interested in writing a column, hit REPLY and let us know! If you're feeling nervous about it (but find yourself thinking, yeah, it might be fun to try ...) know that you will have the full support of our editors, who are willing to work with writers new to nonfiction writing. The SWG takes seriously its mission to provide a comfortable, supportive community where creators who wish to learn and try new things are able to do so, and we value expanding Tolkien scholarship beyond the voices that tend to be heard the most. If you'd like to give writing for us a try, we'd love to work with you!

Host an Event! If you are looking for a one-and-done way to get involved, we host member-run events on our Discord server.

• Instadrabbling brings creators together to create and share flash fanworks in real time with each other. You can structure your session around a theme, a particular type of prompt, or you can keep it open-ended.
• Fanfiction book clubs gather to discuss fanworks, usually around a theme, and what makes those works excellent. Book club hosts choose the theme, manage sign-ups and scheduling, and then facilitate the discussion on the day of the book club.
• Live readings can feature fanworks, passages from Tolkien, or both and can be structured or open-mic (or both!) Organizers choose the theme, manage sign-ups, and welcome readers to the "stage" during the event.

For all member-run events, you will have the support of the SWG moderators, who will be available if you run into issues or have questions.

We welcome and appreciate our volunteers, newsletter writers, and event hosts! Let us know if you'd like to become involved by replying to this email!

You may have been asked at some point if you prefer mountains or the sea, an entry in the "would you rather?" category of questions that seeks to dichotomize people as one or the other. I live in the mountains but very much prefer the sea. Part of the reason is the passing ships. I connect to Tolkien's description of Fëanor having hands and mind seldom at rest because that's me too, yet I will sit on a beach or stand on a pier and do nothing but watch ships passing for as long as you allow me. This odd interest/hobby always felt vaguely Tolkienish for reasons I couldn't quite articulate. (It is not as though a container ship poking along on the horizon is carrying Elves to Valinor! Cheap sneakers to Montreal, maybe, but not wearied souls to rest and healing in the Undying Lands.)

Simon J. Cook's latest installment in his series about towers for A Sense of History begins to explain why. For exactly a year now, Simon has been exploring towers across Tolkien's work, focusing mostly on the tower analogy in Tolkien's lecture "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics" but also the many towers that dot the landscape of Middle-earth in his more familiar works.

This month's article, "Passing Ships," is just as the name suggests. Returning to the tower analogy of "Monsters and the Critics," Simon considers why the ability to look up on the sea in that analogy is so important. He considers the exordium to Beowulf, which he describes as a myth "framed by two ships" related to the mythic heathen king Scyld Scefing. Even in these days, Simon claims, the significance of these two ships, coming and returning over the sea from the west, has been lost, the poem offering a glimpse back at that forgotten tradition.

You can read Simon's article "Passing Ships" here.

You don't have to have lived through the 1970s to recognize its style when you encounter it. The influence of its music, film, and television can still be felt today. The color palettes managed to be both bright and use an unexpected amount of brown, the fashions and styles were distinctive, and it was a time of historical and technological change. People ate salads made of marshmallows and Jell-O in sunken living rooms, wore shoes chunky enough to double as fishbowls, and pecked at rudimentary forms of the digital devices that saturate our world today. It's the decade where punk and disco were born. In short, it was a decade that was ... well, funky.

Our next challenge celebrates the decade that is the Funky 70s. You will select your prompt (or prompts) from a collection that includes architecture, color palettes, fashion, food and drink, fun and games, news headlines, literature, movies, music, quotes, science, tech, discoveries, and television. As always, we encourage creative interpretations of prompts. Want to dig up the album art for a song prompt? Find a favorite quote from a book prompt? Bend an event or invention so that it fits into Tolkien's legendarium? (Of course, more straightforward use of the prompts is welcome too!)

If you want to participate in the Funky 70s challenge, your fanwork should be posted no later than July 15 in order to receive a stamp.

Also note that our Tengwar and Crossroads challenges are still accepting responses eligible for stamps through today, so it’s a rare opportunity to meet THREE challenges with one fanwork! (Late responses are always welcome, they just don’t get stamps.)

You can find complete challenge guidelines here, and you can find the Funky 70s challenge and prompts here.

When we first opened our archive in 2007, we called it our MFAQ—Most Frequently Asked Question: "Does my story count as Silmfic?" It seems like an easy question, but it's not. The Silmarillion—as in the published book—is of course but a part of the more sprawling legendarium. People, cultures, lands, and historical events spill from the pages of The Silmarillion into other works and vice versa. Tolkien himself did this, pulling bits from the "Silmarillion" into The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. So at what point does something become a "Silmwork"?

Of course, we have our MFAQ among our FAQs: How does the SWG define "Silmfic" or "Silmarillion-based fanworks"? We've created a checklist there; all you need to do is check one item and you're good to go. But here's a few insider tips from the mods that may also help creators decide if their work belongs with us.

• Characters and groups that span multiple books are welcome as long as there is a strong connection to The Silmarillion. Same with multi-age works: We love multi-age works, but a significant portion should take place in one of the time periods on the list.
• Speaking of: we accept Third Age fanworks! This often gets overlooked because we tend to hear "Third Age" and think "Hobbit and Lord of the Rings," but in fact, most of the Third Age is eligible for our site. If your fanwork takes place in the vast swath of the legendarium not covered in depth in those two books, it is welcome with us—yes, even if it is about people who feature heavily in these books.
• We are all Tolkien fans here. The SWG started at a time when the Tolkien fandom was coming down from the Lord of the Rings films, and most fanworks were centered on that book and those films. Silmarillion-based fanworks were often quickly overwhelmed on other Tolkien archives (of which there were many at the time), so we carved out the SWG as a space for Silmarillion-based fanworks. However, we are Tolkien fans—works do not need to be scrubbed of all mentions of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.
• Fanworks that draw on adaptations of Tolkien are welcome as well, as long as there is a significant basis in the The Silmarillion or a related work. (Looking especially at Rings of Power fanworks here!) Choose Crossover as one of your genres if you're creating based on an adaptation as well. (Maybe consider posting it for our Crossroads of the Fallen King crossover challenge!)
• If you think a fanwork is on the line, post it. The mods are rarely as strict as people think we are, and we favor including more Tolkien fanworks.
• And if you've posted five fanworks or 10,000 words with us, you can post anything Tolkien-based you want in the Beyond the Silmarillion section!

When it comes to fandom topics that provoke big emotions, there are few as fraught as commenting and feedback. From creators' perspectives, feedback can feel like a just reward for the blood, sweat, and tears that go into making a fanwork. In a community where there is little opportunity for rewards or prestige for our work—we cannot be paid or traditionally published, and many of us can't even have our work tied to our names—even a few words from our readers and viewers saying that they like what we did can mean a lot. Why most people who click on our fanworks don't bother with "even a few words" can provoke discouragement and even anger from creators.

On the other hand, readers and viewers of fanworks often express that commenting isn't as easy as it may seem. Various barriers—whether language, skill with comment writing, or mental health—can stand in the way of letting a creator know how much their work means to a reader or viewer. Furthermore, social norms around commenting can feel opaque and even perilous to the fan of a fanwork who desperately wants to avoid pissing off a favorite author or artist.

I've been writing the Cultus Dispatches column about Tolkien fandom studies for more than two years now and have yet to wade into the fraught waters of the history and culture around commenting and feedback on fanworks. But over the next few months, I plan to do just that! To start, I am collecting responses for a Fandom Voices article on commenting and feedback. Fandom Voices is an ongoing project that collects and publishes responses from fans on a variety of fandom-related questions and topics. Whether you create fanworks or read/view them, if you'd like to share your views and experiences with commenting and feedback, Fandom Voices is seeking responses about commenting and feedback from anyone who engages with Tolkien-based fanworks in any way and wants to share their perspective. You can contribute a response to our current Fandom Voices collection on commenting and feedback here.

The SWG is an archive built for a community, and we have always encouraged our members to comment on each other's work. To find more about commenting on our archive:

• Logged-in members can find all of the comments on their work here (as well as the five most recent on the homepage).
• But no one wants to physically go to and check a website, right? It's 2024!! If you'd like to get email notifications of new comments (on your work or someone else's), learn how here.
• Site hack: You can always find the comments on a fanwork (including the comment form, if you're logged in) by navigating to the work and typing "/comment" after the web address, e.g. silmarillionwritersguild.org/node/##/comment.
• Likewise, if you're logged in, you can find the number of comments (and views and favorites) on any of your fanworks on My Fanworks, with a direct link to all of your comments on that work.