Posted by DragonSilk

Happy New Year!

It�s a new year and a new month, and that means it�s time for our monthly announcements. Let's start off with the featured stories! The theme this month's featured stories is Best of 2012.

A Risky Engagement by Mozart (Sherlock (BBC), Adult)
Awesome Peppy Sunshine Hill by Rockinmuffin (Silent Hill, Adult)
Blue Pineapples Are The Best by Rinnu500 (Katekyo Hitman Reborn!, 13+)
Don�t Worry �Cause You Ain�t Alone by animecrazypanda (Durarara!!, 17+)
In Hora Mortis by Little Raven (Original Fiction, 13+)
Right To Life by Mentality_Project (Bleach, 17+)

Congratulations to our featured authors!

The theme for next month�s featured stories is Forever Alone, and you can nominate stories in this thread on our forums.

Onto our friendly reminders~

When you email any of the site's moderators, remember to include your username in the email. It's hard for us to answer your questions and help you when we don't know who you are.

Please do not ignore emails from any of our moderators. If you have any questions about the email, just ask the moderator who sent it for clarification. We�re always willing to work with people who want to improve. If you disagree with something, then be sure to respectfully bring it up with the moderator in question. Otherwise, we just assume that you�re ignoring us.

Ignoring rejection emails is especially bad. You will receive a warning for resubmitting chapters that are completely unedited. (This type of behavior slows down the queue for everyone.) If you continue to resubmit without editing, your account will be temporarily locked.

In a similar vein, if you have any questions about grammar in general, always feel free to ask a moderator. There are many different guides to grammar out there, and we're all perfectly willing to point you in the direction of something that will help you out.

There is the possibility that we might run a Valentine�s Day fic trade. Nothing is set in stone yet, and we�ll be sure to edit this news post with any information about it if we do start one.

Thank you for reading all of that~ May you all have a delightful new year!

Edit by Kerrigan Sheehan: According to Sally, there might be a site outage coming up at the end of the month due to bandwidth. Please remember the following:

-Moderators can't look at the queue when the site is down, so complaining that your story has been in queue for a week as soon as the site comes back from a one-week outage isn't going to result in that story being looked at any faster.

-Site outages can cause issues with stories, especially stories submitted to the queue right before the outage occurs, so make sure that you have everything saved to your computer and backed up on a cloud storage service, USB stick, external hard drive, or disc. You should be doing this anyway, but now is a good time to make sure your backup files are up-to-date.