For Writers of Fantasy and Science Fiction

Chat Room

Dear Guests and Members,

Sun Dec 16, 2007 3:22 pm by Rachel Westwood

Dear guests and members,

I'd like to take a moment to welcome you to our small community. We are a small group geared towards writers of fantasy, horror and science fiction who have come together to share ideas, inspirations, problems and advice in a friendly and secure environment.

The Guild has been around since the end of 2001, origionally starting out on a small proboards forum and moving between a couple of different forum's and websites. The aim was to create an online community where writers of fantasy fiction could gather together to share ideas, ask question and bounce around advice in a safe, secure and friendly setting. The site was a fair success but due to limitations in the proboards forums decided to move to another area of the web.

Whilst a lot of our members followed us over, a few got lost, and a few new ones found their way to us. But in the past couple of years the community has begun to decline, leaving us with only a handful of regular members.

But that is something we are going to change.

We have recently moved from our old home at excoboard to this brand new site as part of our new start and in an attempt to become a more professional and serious community. The main projects we are working on include:

• Brand new forums, on a bigger, better server (which as you can see is happening now).

• A secure chatroom to be linked to the new boards with open chats throughout every hour of the day and scheduled sessions to run weekly/monthly to discuss specific issues, areas and workshops.

• A whole new website with its own domain to include resources for SF writers, member pages, access to articles, stories, writers comunities/libraries and more.

• Monthly writing challenges and excercises designed to help new starters develop their style and skills and longer running writers to beat that writers block and keep up their skills.

• An active critiquing circle that will run with security and efficiency allowing writers to gather together online and share and critique each others work (in progress).

• The possibility, depending on member activity, of creating an online magazine where writers can share their thoughts, hints, tips and possibly stories (this forum has a newsletter function which we would hope to utilise at some point. However this project is just in theory stage at the moment and will depend greatly on member participation and feasability issues).

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Rules and Regulations

Sun Dec 16, 2007 3:20 pm by Rachel Westwood

Please read and understand the following rules. By joining and posting to these forums you confirm that you have read and understood the terms of your membership. Any failure to comply by these rules may lead to you being removed and banned from the forums.

Please read as follows:

1. Please show appropriate respect and courtesy towards other members. If you do happen to have a disagreement, please try to resolve it outside of the forums, it is not appropriate to fill up the boards with intolerant and abusive posts. Respect for other peoples race, gender, background and any other issues must be shown at all times. Treat each other fairly.

2. Please keep foul and abusive language to an absolute minimum. The odd curse is fair enough, but inappropriate posts will be removed immediately.

3. Please make sure the post you are making is appropriate to the forum you are posting it into. If in doubt, ask. Posts placed in the wrong area will be moved or deleted.

4. i: Please do not use this board to advertise products, or anything else that is not related to writing.

ii: Do not post links to pornographic or unsuitable sites.

iii: You may post links in your profile or introduction post to your own galleries at elfwood, deviantart or elsewhere on the web. Tha goes for blogs too. What we object to are random advertisements for promotional and commercial sites. If you want to sell your work we suggest you do it through deviantart or through a publisher etc, not through us.

5. Please be aware of copyright laws. Do NOT steal what does not belong to you. And writers please be aware that if you post sections of writing or completed works onto the web forum, a lot of publishers will class it as published online. I am working on the creation of a critiquing circle which will be designed to avoid this: no work should ever be posted online if you intend to publish it, the pieces to be critiqued will be sent via private message or e-mail to other members of the circle or exchanged in person during meet-ups (more information to be supplied in the near future - under construction).

6. Enjoy yourselves and have fun.


Please do remember people that placing your work online in ANY format that is publically accessible constitutes as work self-published in the eyes of many publishers. We are warning you about this now - if you intend to keep your work for publication we advise you not to post it (even snippets) to these boards or anywhere else - we will be starting up an e-mail run critiquing circle for those who wish to share their work and gain feedback etc. If you do place your work on the forums here, or anywhere else WE WILL NOT TAKE RESPONSIBILITY FOR IT OR ANYTHING THAT FOLLOWS. This is not me simply being 'funny' about the issue, I am stating this for your own protection. Please take heed.

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