Posted by Kerrigan Sheehan

I know that a lot of people have really missed the site in the month or so it's been down. I know I have several thousand words to post myself. The mods have missed you too. Seriously, with no queue, we don't know who to send yes and no letters to. (Landlords don't like it when you point out that they used the wrong homophone in their Christmas letter.) But I'm sure you're all eager to get posting, so I'll try to keep this brief, or as brief as someone who tends to write terribly long novels can make it.

1. Featured Stories. As DG mentioned on the forums, by mod consensus, or the consensus of the mods she could reach immediately at the time, there are no featured stories in this announcement. Suggestions for the theme "Best of 2011" can be submitted on the forums until the end of January and will be featured in February's announcments. The links are in the post below this one, but in case you don't feel like scrolling, the submission thread is here.

2. Queue Delays As some of you might have guessed, it could take a bit longer than normal to get things through the queue right now. This is because the site has been down for about a month, including a few major holidays, and that means that a lot of people probably have massive amounts of things to post. (As always, the one chapter at a time rule applies to unvalidated authors.) Please be patient. The queue is bound to get very long, and it could take up to about a month to return to its normal length.

3. Valentine Fic Trade. I am running a Valentine fic trade. The signup thread is here. I'm leaving it up to the majority of participants as to whether this will be an anon round or an open round.

Let the chapterdumping begin! (Seriously, what else is everybody going to do while Cheezburger Network and Wikipedia are blacked out to protest PIPA/SOPA?)

Edit by Kerrigan Sheehan: A couple of users have reported bugs since the site came back online, so there are a couple additions to the announcements. Please read them.

4. Categories. A few categories were reported as showing up in the archive but not in the dropdown list. If you run across a category that doesn't show up in the dropdown, let a mod know about it or post it in the forums in the category request thread or bug report thread so it can be fixed. Thank you, DestinedXDreams, for reporting this.

5. Story Ratings. It seems that a small number of stories have had their ratings reverted to "All" recently. Please check through the list of stories on your profile and fix any ratings that need fixing. If you find something in the archive that seems to be rated "All" when it shouldn't be, either contact the author directly and ask them to fix it or contact a mod so we can do this for them. Thank you, Zesty, for bringing this to my attention.

Posted by shadowsirenv

Season’s Greetings! Hope you all had a good November, and for those who participated in NaNoWriMo: I hope it went well for you! Now for our regularly scheduled announcements:

The December theme for featured stories is “Winter Holidays”. We had only two winners this month.

Christmas Decorating by NuitNoire (Nabari no Ou, 13+)
Christmas Story by StrawChan (Katekyo Hitman Reborn!, All)

Congratulations to all these authors! Next month’s theme is “Best of 2011”. That means nominated stories must have been first published on the site at some point in 2011. You can nominate stories on the forum in this thread.

We also have some things we’d like to address (prepare for excessive use of bold, italics, and underlines):

1) Working e-mail addresses: We ask that you please provide us with a working e-mail address when you use the site. This way, we can get in contact with you without getting a reply from a mailer daemon and having to hunt you down in other ways. If you provided a working e-mail but are not receiving anything, please check to see that your e-mail address is correct in the Personal Info section of your settings or that our e-mails aren’t getting sent to a spam/junk folder. Also, please, please, please check your e-mail in general! If your story has suddenly disappeared from the queue, it’s probably because we deleted it. Moderators always send a letter explaining why your story has been denied, so if you’re not sure, that should be the first place you check. You guys don’t really know how many “Where did my story go?!11!?!?11!” e-mails we get after we just spent a good amount of time writing you a letter explaining everything.

Users who continue to ignore moderator e-mails will have their accounts locked.

2) Author’s Notes: We think you guys tend to forget that moderators do read your author’s notes when validating stories since we have to check for disclaimers and such. If you have a complaint about the site, please contact a moderator directly or post it in the forums. It’s much more effective than complaining about it in your author’s notes and having us forget as we move on to your actual story. Please be tactful if you do decide to use the Author’s Notes as a place to vent. We have feelings too…

3) Story Quality: We’ve noticed that story quality—by that we mean grammar and spelling and NOT actual content, plot, character, etc.—has declined on part of both non-validated and validated authors. Validation does not grant you immunity from using proper grammar and spelling. We’re going to start cracking down on this, so please do check over your stories and edit them promptly whether you are a validated author or not. We will begin to revoke validation and delete stories if this problem continues. These won’t be random, though; we’re getting in contact with those authors who we’ve noticed have been slacking off with their editing. So, if you’re always checking your e-mail or PM’s on the forum and haven’t heard from any of us, then you’re probably fine, although, it wouldn’t hurt to check over your stories again just in case. There are tons of resources that you can use to help you out: the moderators have assembled a grammar guide which we will continue to add articles to, a simple Google search for grammar guides yields tons of results, free spell check programs are available online, and there are plenty of beta-readers available here who are more than willing to help you out.

Also, if you want to help a fellow author out and notice some mistakes in their stories, let them know politely in a review, through e-mail, etc. It’s a great way to give authors some constructive feedback, maybe even get to know each other and make some friends on the site! You never know when a “Hey, I just wanted to let you know you missed a comma in this sentence” could lead to a beautiful friendship.

tl;dr – Make sure your e-mail address works, be nice in your author’s notes, check your grammar and spelling, and help each other out.

If you have any questions, leave a comment here or in the forums, or contact one of us directly.

Now, enough of me being harsh. I hope you all have a wonderful December, and if you’re celebrating something this month, I hope you have a good one!

EDIT:

Another thing I forgot to mention: there may or may not be another fic trade this month! If you enjoyed the summer ones as much as we did or you'd like to join it this time around, keep an eye out for it. We'll keep you posted.

Edit by Kerrigan Sheehan: There shall be a Holday Fic Trade! Yes, I finally got the threads posted! I'm running it this round because everybody else has tons of schoolwork and finals coming up, and I have free time. It took so long to post because I was waiting on an OK and some information. Anyhow, the registrations are starting immediately, so the registration thread is here. The discussion thread is here.

Posted by Sharp Shiny Pickle

Happy November, everyone! I hope you had a pleasant October~ The theme for November is Summer Fic Trade Favorites.

A Teddy for Your Thoughts by Purged of Sin (Gundam 00, 17+)
Little Dingy Apartment by Mrs_Anonymous (Final Fantasy VII, 13+)
Love Magicially Blossoms by crazydominodragongirl (Harry Potter, 13+)
Misconceptions by Shade (Fantasy, School, 13+)
Of Kittens and Red Herrings by Alastair (Kuroshitsuji, 13+)

Congratulations to the authors of these featured stories~! Next month’s theme is winter holidays. Please submit your nominations on the forum here.

We have a few remarks to go along with this month’s announcements as well!

1.) HTML Tags – When formatting your story, please remember to close your HTML tags by adding a “/” to the second tag. The backslash indicates that this is a closing tag that marks where you want the bold, italics, underline, etc. to stop. We often see stories where a few words were meant to be formatted, but since there was no closing tab, the entire story past these words was affected. An easy way to make sure this isn’t happening is to click the “Preview” button before adding a new chapter or story.

2.) NaNoWriMo – Amongst many great traditions that come with November is National Novel Writing Month! You can enter by following this link and discuss with your fellow Lunaescence members on the forum here. It’s a really fun and rewarding thing to do, so we hope you find time to participate!

3.) Past Rules and Announcements – If you are new to Lunaescence, first off, welcome! Second, please be sure to check out some of the older news posts where we cover our rules about multiple submissions, decorative titles, category requests, etc., so that you are aware of all of our policies. We do not always repeat these rules in the newest announcements, though they still apply!

Please let us know if you need anything to be further clarified and have a particularly lovely November~