Squills 8/9/23

1. CLEAR THE GREEN ROOM RECAP
2. FEATURED MEMBER INTERVIEW: FOXMASTER
3. PIGPEN
4. CONTEST WINNER FEATURE: ORABELLAAVENUE
5. SOCIAL WEEK RECAP
6. SHAMELESS PLUGS
7. SUBSCRIBERS

CLEAR THE GREEN ROOM RECAP written by alliyah < PM: >

This Summer we've been working towards our Clear the Green Room Challenge. And on July 8th the challenge was officially completed, and the Golden Goose found! @Rook was the lucky reviewer to knock the last 3 reviews out the Green Room and caught the first sight of the Golden Goose. But all of us got to celebrate this victory at the Social Week August 1-7 being hosted by the Golden Goose and the mods.





If you've never experienced a Social Week / Social Month before, it's a week full of different hashtags, challenges, and activities to just celebrate our community together! There were many fun ways to get involved. This year as part of the Golden Goose prize we also featured three days of free-literary work posting (5 per user) - on August 4, 5, 6.

As a last little Goose-Related-Shoutout, be sure to read through the now completed Search for the Golden Goose Tagbook - I think it ends on a heart warming note and features plenty of YWS humor. I think you'll enjoy it!

Overall, I'm really impressed that we were able to complete this challenge, and I'm going to be honest, I had some doubts - I thought we did an incredible job reviewing that first week, but anticipated energy would be cut in half the next week, but instead people just continued getting to the Green Room and turning out reviews. If my calculations are correct (and they might not be!) I don't think we've had the Green Room completely clear since June 2020 though it's been a goal of the last Review Months for sure. That makes this achievement even more remarkable for us as a site! The After Watch also gave it their very best effort and were able to keep the Green Room under 15 works for a full 27 days, breaking our last record! I do hope we're able to at least keep the Green Room from ever having a situation where there's works that are 6 months old still lingering in. Hopefully the energy towards Green Room Reviewing launches us into Review Month this September!

Congratulations to everyone who participated in the Clear the Green Room Challenge.

FEATURED MEMBER INTERVIEW: FOXMASTERwritten by looseleaf< PM: >


There are many, many places you may have seen this FM: the people's tab, in roleplays, the green room.. basically everywhere! They're super active in the randomosity tab and have taken part in several of the games there. They've written 165 reviews since January, many of which were written for the KotGR's Afterwatch, and have published numerous works with the points they've earned. Oh, and they're also super obsessed with foxes. For this edition of Squills, I had the pleasure of interviewing @foxmaster about their time as FM! Read it here:





foxmaster: Well, when I logged on I actually had no idea I was fm. I actually learned about it when I checked out my notifications, and I was like, AWESOME! And then I bragged about it to my friends (they can change the subject pretty quickly, I learned,)





F: I suppose that in that time period, I had been, you know, review leaving, publishing a whole lot of stuff. So you probably have to be on here a whole lot if you wanna be fm.





F: The area on here I am most active on is probably the books page, because 90% of what I write are novels. Buuuut my favorite is probably roleplaying, which I have just gotten into.





F: So, Many Perspectives is based off thus long slideshow-book series I made which was suuuper confusing. It was like this girl and she travels between her planet and some random magical world getting attacked by a giant lizard. Many Perspectives is a slightly less weird version of that. So, like Katy is a kitsune, and she travels between these THREE worlds, and the school she is currently in is haunted. There will also be some elements from Mrs Fowell's school of Witchcraft and Mayhem in here, too.





F: I'm probably going to work on all my works while this is out, too, and most likely start like 100 new ones, too. The thing is, on YWS, I have too many ideas, though.





F: The best review I have written was probably for Strength my FlameCatcher57. I think I really helped out there to the story.





F: My advice for if you want to become FM, is review a lot, write a lot, and be active on here.


If you want to congratulate foxmaster on being a Featured Member, you can do so on her wall and on their featured member thread ! You can also read the first part of Many Perspectives here .

PIGPENwritten by Spearmint < PM: >


The cipher featured today is a fun one! Instead of shifting the alphabet like Caesar Cipher or replacing each character with dots and dashes like Morse Code, Pigpen replaces each character with a symbol. It's still a substitution cipher, though! (Meaning a cipher where each letter corresponds to, or is substituted by, a different letter or symbol.)


Here's the standard version of Pigpen:





The letters correspond to the symbols they are in. So, for example, 'A' would look like a backwards 'L.'

To make it a little harder for others to decode, you can use a keyword! If you did, you would start filling in the grids with your keyword, making sure not to repeat letters, then fill the rest of the spaces with the rest of the alphabet.


Try decoding this message, which has been enciphered with the standard Pigpen cipher.

Spoiler

You should get: "Thanks for reading"!

Happy enciphering and deciphering!

CONTEST WINNER FEATURE: ORABELLAAVENUEwritten by alliyah < PM: >


Last month, as part of the Great Tortoise Race festivities I hosted a "Great Tortoise Literary Contest " for users to participate, with one of the prizes being a Squills feature article! A newer user to the site, @OrabellaAvenue answered the call for tortoise works and won my contest with her lovely and intriguing poem Dear Human NOT a Turtle . So I stopped by Orabella's inbox for an interview! Let's get to know one of our newest YWS members!






Orabella: Hi alliyah! Thank you so much for choosing my poem! In my opinion, @alpacaboss's The Tortoise should've won. To those of you reading this on Squills, please go check it out! It's seriously so good! My inspiration... inspiration... hmm... Well, to be honest, I'm not quite sure? I don't exactly remember what was going on in my head at the time. I might've been thinking about a poem I had read weeks before about a dog talking to its human. (It's by Gail Carson Levine in her book Writer to Writer) Or maybe it was just from the prompt of the contest: write about a tortoise.






O:I don't know if I necessarily have a favorite thing to write about. My likes often change, and so does my writing. At the moment, I'm really into realistic and historical fiction, but fantasy used to be my main. My current writing project is a novel based on a short story I wrote called "Shadow of the Orange Tree", which I'm basically trying to expand on. So far, though, I hardly know anything about what I'm going to do. I don't even know what character/s I'll be following... so...






O: My story isn't very exciting. I've always liked writing, and before YWS I was on Night Zookeeper, which is another writing site for ages 5 to 12. Eventually though, I was more than 12, and it felt wrong to stay there for much longer. So I did searched Google for writing websites, or something of the like, and I stumbled on YWS. I actually discovered it long before I joined, but it took me forever to actually set up an account.






O: The people. Hands down, the people. Everyone I met was super kind and encouraging, and it just sorta felt like I belonged. Here were people that liked to write, that liked to read, that actually cared about what I and others had to say. It was not a chore to them; they were on YWS because they enjoyed it. And I felt safe posting my work here because there would be people that would read and care about it, even if it was horribly written.






O: I want to finish a story. Not like a short, less than 1,000 word story. More like a novel. I never get more than a few chapters in any story I've tried, so this is a bit ambitious for me. But that's why it's on my bucket list. I'd also like to compete in NaNoWriMo, even if I don't get far. It just seems so fun.






O: I've always been torn between owls and hummingbirds. Do I really have to decide? Owls are quick, silent hunters, and I think it's silly and sweet how they're always considered wise, old birds in media. Hummingbirds are fast and love flowers, and their colors are often beautiful. I might choose hummingbirds just because I feel sorry for the creatures that owls eat, but I love both.






O:In my life, my number one writing mistake was that I hardly ever wrote. I thought I wouldn't be able to write it, or it wouldn't be good, or it was a stupid idea. Maybe I even wanted to write it, but it seemed too cliché or it had been done before. This is one of the worst things a writer could do. Yes, sometimes it's nice to review each sentence and make them better, but almost never in a rough draft. Rough drafts are for spilling your ideas onto the page, not to create a bestselling masterpiece. You need to sketch before you paint (or draw or write). My advice? Write as much as you want. Write as much as you can. And never stop writing unless it truly and honestly isn't what you want, and not just because of frustration or writer's block. That's why I end almost every review with "Keep writing!"


Thanks so much Orabella for sharing more about yourself, your writing, and your advice! We're happy to have you as part of YWS and hope to hear from you again soon!

SOCIAL WEEK RECAP!written by IcyFlame< PM: >


After clearing the dreaded Green Room , YWSers from around the world came together to celebrate in the best way we know how – a week long social event!

Social Week ran from the 1st to the 7th of August, and it was full of exciting activities and tags for everyone to take part in.

At the start of the week, we kicked off with some colouring pages from @Spearmint who shared some wonderful doodles with us and gave us the chance to colour them in! We also had a wordsearch, with some YWS themed words. The Egg featured prominently, but #classified was mysteriously omitted… a conspiracy perhaps?

Then we had three full days of free literary work posting! Posting a work usually costs 200 points, so this was an opportunity not to be missed. Eight users took advantage of this limited time offer, and suddenly the Green Room was starting to fill back up. All in time for Review Month later this year.

@Spearmint and @alliyah also shared some hashtags for us to participate in, tagging users for shoutouts, interviewing one another and a truth or dare activity were included amongst others. YWSers took to the people’s tab to share their responses and if you’re looking for some wholesome content, I can highly recommend scrolling through the shoutout tag.

Don't forget you can still participate in all of the week's activities today if you haven't had a chance yet! You can find all the activities listed in the Social Week thread.

SHAMELESS PLUGS

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SUBSCRIBERS

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