July's theme of the month is Unvalidated Authors, but there's a twist. Because authors can't view the validation status of other authors, there is no nomination thread. Instead, the moderators will choose the features from our favorite stories written by people who, as of the feature, are not yet validated. Think of it as a surprise.
There is a fic trade going on this month. Signups are open until June 6th and can be found in the forums.
The other exciting news is that the queue is now open to submissions again. Thank you for your patience while we gave our new moderators a crash course on the mechanics of the queue.
Now, the painful bits. While emptying the queue, we discovered a few issues that we'd like to address:
Inappropriate Ratings: Please rate your story correctly. If it has swearing in it, it should be 13+ or higher. If it has explicit sexual content (yes, this means you, lemon writers), it should be Adult or Adult+.
Inappropriate Content: We don't allow Harry Potter or real-person lemons. We also don't allow lemons involving children. (These rules aren't new, and we don't want to censor you. We just wanted to remind everyone to cover our butts.) We also don't accept fanfiction for certain properties where the original copyright owner has explicitly banned fanfiction. (It's not personal. We swear. We're just covering our butts.)
No Means No: When a moderator tells you that your story is not appropriate, that your rating needs to be changed, or that you need to fix certain errors, please do it. (Please also look for more errors of the same type. We typically only list a few.) If your story was denied once and is resubmitted without editing, it will be denied again, and it slows down the queue for everybody when we have to deal with the same story with the same issues two or three times.
I know, I know. Wut r u doin, it’s too early for a monthly announcement. But we have exciting news~ We are pleased to announce two lovely, new moderators~ They are dark_wing19 and perfect-to-stay! Congratulations to you both, and welcome to the mod team! Please be patient with them, everyone~
Now that we have two new hands on deck, you can expect to see your wait times for story validations decrease if you are unvalidated, but it’s still going to take time for the queue to shrink! As of now, the queue will be temporarily closed until further notice for the convenience and education of our two new modlings~
Please don't ask them about stories in the queue for the next month or so. They have been instructed to ignore such emails while they’re learning how to process things in the queue. If you need to ask about the status of a story, refer your questions to DragonSilk, Kerrigan Sheehan, Penguiduck, or myself, or post in the story validation forum thread. Repeatedly poking the new mods may result in a temporary ban. (Though sending them congrats is fine, of course!)
Also, if you have any concerns or questions about our decision on the new mods, please email one of us (DragonSilk, Kerrigan Sheehan, Penguiduck, or Alastair)privately to discuss it.
That’s all for now~ I hope you all have a wonderful rest of the month!
June’s theme of the month is “Underappreciated Stories”. Stories that fall under this category have an unbalanced review to word count ratio. These are stories that you adore but can’t understand why they don’t have more reviews! For example, a story that has up to 20,000 words but less than five reviews. Or a story that has 50,000+ words but less than ten reviews! You can nominate over here in the forums.
Now, we have one other announcement: Lunaescence now has an official tumblr! It is run mainly by two mods: myself and Penguiduck. It mostly features writing advice and articles, funny writing/reading related reblogs, and perhaps in the future, fun activities like writing prompts and weekly events. We may also use it as another source for information like updates on the queue, intermittent announcements, and a place to ask questions for those of you who need answers. Though we warn you: don’t ask us for love advice or anything related to math. The latter mostly for my sake and yours. Alastair is bad with math. ...But I suppose you can, though who knows how much help we’ll be. You can find it by following the link here.
That’s it for now, and I hope you all have a lovely May! (Summer is almost here, guys! ♥)