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.