April 11th / April 16

An exciting announcement / update!

While this isn't the first time it has happened, it is still a rare enough event that its worth a front page announcement and lots of kudos from the community. Over the past year or so, one of the community members has written several fan fics that have really resonated with both canon authors and the readership at large. These stories, with only a little advice and support from the canon team have been of high quality and merit recognition as being insightful into the sort of people the canon characters are meant to be... beyond their power sets, and the trappings of the setting. In addition to being the sort of author WE want to read and work with, this community member has stepped in and helped in a significant way with the site move; spending dozens (if not hundreds) of hours assisting with the process of moving stories to the new site.

For these reasons, among others, we happily extend official canon status to Phoenix Spiritus. We are also offering official status as "Hank's author" to Phoenix for all the great work on the stories created as fan fic but which now all sit on the shelves as canon (as they should). But this is a full canon position, so Phoenix is not limited to just writing about Hank... we hope to help P-S to develop a new Fall 2007 freshman to work in with the rest of the ongoing core storyline. There's also a possibility for G2 timeline stories (if the G2 crew is willing)... or external (G0) stories. 

I hope to be able to make more announcements like this in the near future and I know there are a number of authors who we have our eyes on, as we evaluate them for not only their writing talent and skill but also with how well they will work with our team, how committed they are and so forth...  especially once we post our 'formal road' to canon authorship and the various ways for authors to get published here. It's always exciting to see what new authors bring to the table. Be sure to congratualate Phoenix Spiritus in the forums when you have a chance!

Evidently I spoke too soon when I said there was little to say today except to introduce the stories. While handling some cleanup/maintenance, the site went down hard and I wasn't even getting in through shell, let alone anything higher up. Fortunately, things aren't quite as erratic as they used to be when it comes to maintenance. And I was able to just start up a new instance of the virtual machine using a snapshot/backup from last night right around midnight PST. So, for those people who had forums conversations or posted story stuff today, sorry about that... but for the most part, we won't have lost much. The biggest nuissance is that starting up from from a snapshot like this counts as a 'new instance' which means a different IP address. So we'll have to wait a few hours or so for the domain name to propagate to the new IP address before most people will actually find the site again.

As to the normal Monday stuff... here's the story release info again: Part 3 of Astrodragon (and the Gen 2 team)'s "New York Comes with Calamari" is now up in the Gen 2 area. While we don't have the final sections of Road to Whateley coming soon, while E.E. gets moved to a new apartment for health reasons... we do have a second portion of his Star Wars fan fic "Prime Time: A Tale of the Star Wars" and that can be found over in the Library section.

Finally, if you are interested in writing for the Whateley Universe and have aspirations above fan fiction; keep your eyes open for some announcement posts in the near future. We are in the process of putting together the 'definitive' announcement on the various existing means that one can publish canon stories or join the ranks as a canon author. This will include the policies, expectations, standards, and so forth for all of our programs/teams including Original Timeline Canon team,  Gen 2 Canon team, the Gen 0 author's list, the canonized story project, and what canon means relative to non-canon. I'll also include a section detailing some of my plans for what I'm going to 'for now' call community written stories vs fan fiction.