Young Writers Society

Welcome to Squills, the official news bulletin of the Young Writers Society!
What will you find here? Tons of interesting news about YWS, including but not limited to: articles about writing, art, and the world of humanities; interviews with YWS members; shameless plugs; link round-ups; and opinionated columns.
And where will all of this come from? Take a look at our fantastic creative staff!




Of course, our content can’t come only from our staff. We also depend on you to help keep Squills successful. You’re all a part of a writing community, after all. If you’re interested in submitting to Squills, pop on over to the Reader’s Corner to find out how you can get involved by contributing an article or participating in other Squills activities.

Well, that’s all I have for now. So, what are you waiting for? Enjoy!

1. THIS MONTH IN HISTORY
2. WEEKLY RAVINGS
3. A POETRY PERSPECTIVE: SPEAKER OR AUTHOR, PART ONE
4. A LITTLE BIT ABOUT ASMR
5. SHAMELESS PLUGS
6. SUBSCRIBERS

THIS MONTH IN HISTORY

written by alliyah < PM: >

It's October and you know what that means! Spooky avatars, pumpkin-spice everything, and of course another edition of "This Month in History". I'll take a look at what was happening on YWS 2, 5, and 10 years ago during the spookiest month of all.

TWO YEARS AGO: YWS October, 2016

Featured Members
In October 2016, YWS featured two excellent members of the community. @Dracula was featured the first half of the month and has always been a fantastic reviewer as well as novel writer. They wrote 76 reviews in a single month alone! The second half the month @Kaylaa was featured. Kaylaa is a fantastic poetry writer and reviewer, known to host plenty of wonderful poetry jams.

Storybook Highlight
A popular storybook in October 2016 was about other wizarding students who attended school with Harry Potter. The interesting concept was started by @Nike and actually went on for quite some time, in fact people were still posting in it as of June 2018! I suppose there were many students and years to cover! In total it looks like 12 people made characters in the book, including @SirenCymbaline, @Amnesia, and @KiraThePotatoChip. You can still check out, and might even be able to participate in the storybook here: Hogwarts Students and the Years we Lived with Harry Potter .

FIVE YEARS AGO: YWS October, 2013

Featured Members
October 2013 featured another two remarkable users. @DreamWork who wrote many poems and reviews during her time on the site and @dragonfphoenix who has maybe the most controversial username since joining in August 2013, and has been active in many realms of the site - they can still be found on the site from time to time. Both of these users were eventually made junior moderators on the site.

Statistical Comparison
@Nate gave us some lovely statistics back in October of 2013, and it's actually fairly interesting to see where activity has shifted on the site from five years ago to now. According to the October Statistics Thread YWS had 2,270 reviews in October 2013, and 656 literary works. For comparison's sake that is about twice as many reviews and literary works as we had over RevMo this year. A classroom in the Philippines utilized YWS during this period, so there was a little boost in activity.

YWS Radio Show
Have you heard of YWS's recent radio show - Tales of the Airwaves ? Well it turns out that back in 2013 YWS was also doing a Radio Show of sorts, and it ran during October - you can read more about it here:
YWS Online Radio Show .

TEN YEARS AGO: YWS October, 2008

Featured Members
In October 2008 there weren't any "greeters or instructors of the month" as there were previously in 2008 (at least from what my detective skills in the forums could find) but there were two featured members. @alwaysawriter and @olivia1987uk both received the distinction that month.

10 Years Predictions
I thought this was actually pretty sweet, as I was digging around the forums I found there was actually a thread created 10 years ago that was entitled "Where do you see yourself in 10 years?". If you want to check it out you can still do so here .

You remember it... Twilight!
If you were alive in 2008, chances are you might remember the excitement over the Twilight saga. Yep, that's right we're going there. Well on YWS, there were many Twilight related literature discussions, fan-fictions, and everything else in between - one piece worth highlighting is this delightful piece written in October 2008 by @Snoink and @Griffinkeeper it is Halloween themed and is one of YWS's most popular works having 76 likes and 60 comments. Go back in time here Halloween with Snoink, Grif, Edward Cullen, and Bulbasaur.

Well that wraps up our October history findings! If you've got a box of old YWS memories from November 2008, 2013, or 2016 send them my way and they might be featured in our next edition.

WEEKLY RAVINGSwritten by Clarity < PM: >


This week I’ve got a list of books for you that are sat in my ‘To Read’ list, but have been checked off of my ‘To Watch’ list. I have not yet gotten around to these, but I fully intend to and as and when I do, they will be featured in one of these articles!


Hidden Figures

The amazing true story of four African-American female mathematicians at NASA who helped achieve some of the greatest moments in our space program…a group of dedicated female mathematicians known as “human computers” used pencils, slide rules, and adding machines to calculate the numbers that would launch rockets, and astronauts, into space.

Room

Told entirely in the language of the energetic, pragmatic five-year-old Jack, Room is a celebration of resilience and the limitless bond between parent and child, a brilliantly executed novel about what it means to journey from one world to another.

Still Alice

Alice Howland, happily married with three grown children and a house on the Cape, is a celebrated Harvard professor at the height of her career when she notices a forgetfulness creeping into her life. As confusion starts to cloud her thinking and her memory begins to fail her, she receives a devastating diagnosis: early onset Alzheimer's disease. Fiercely independent, Alice struggles to maintain her lifestyle and live in the moment, even as her sense of self is being stripped away. In turns heartbreaking, inspiring and terrifying, Still Alice captures in remarkable detail what's it's like to literally lose your mind...

All three of these movies had an emotional impact on me, and with each one I had no idea there was a book. I think it’s quite sad how often that happens – where a movie is released and so many people have no idea it was based on a real life and adapted from a book.

To go on a slight tangent, I had considered making an effort to read the book to a movie adaption first, but I decided against it. Why? Because too many times I have been disappointed by the adaption from paper to screen. I’d rather enjoy a movie, then be blown away by the book.

I recommend you watch the above if you haven’t already! If you’ve read them, let me know what you thought!

A POETRY PERSPECTIVE: SPEAKER OR AUTHOR, PART ONE

written by alliyah < PM: >

Hi authors, today in "Poetry Perspective" I'll be covering the difference between author and speaker and why it matters for reviewing and reading. This mainly comes up as a issue in poetry, but this advice can be applied to General Fiction prose writing as well.

In a poem the "author" is the person who writes the piece. When you're on YWS, that means the "author" is whoever posted the poem. This is not the same as the "speaker" of the piece. The "speaker" is the persona of the narrator of the poem, or the imagined source of the material being developed in a poem that doesn't have a narrator. They might be dramatic, trustworthy, depressed, imaginary, non-human etc. There might even be more than one "speaker" in a poem (like a call and response).

Now here's the important thing, the author is not necessarily the same as the speaker in any way. They don't necessarily have the same experiences, emotions, may not share the same gender, ethical perspectives, or thoughts. Now in some cases the author might be writing from the their own perspective, and intend the piece to be autobiographical or confessional - so the poem is drawing from their own experiences and emotions - that still does not mean that the speaker and the author are the same. Also just because a poem is "informed" by reality (most are) doesn't mean that it is 100% fact by fact the same - one of the core tenants of poetry is the use of metaphor and figurative language - to say one thing, but mean another - so there will likely be elements in almost every poem that don't quite mesh up with the author's experience of reality, but are from the unique perspective of the speaker.

What I've said so far, might be pretty obvious, but time and time again I receive reviews where the reader has confused the speaker of the poem with myself. Saying things like "I feel the same way as you about X" or "I disagree with you about X" or even "X also happened to me, so I can relate to how you feel". Interestingly, one would rarely find this sort of feedback on a novel chapter - can you imagine someone assuming that J.K. Rowling as the author of Harry Potter Series, also was the same as the speaker? They would be reading her books and saying "I don't believe you really were an orphaned boy who went to a wizarding school", "you were so brave when you fought against Voldemort". That would be ridiculous, but this type of response happens quite a bit in poetry. So how should someone handle the difference? We'll save that for next week!

In next week's Squills Edition, I'll be sharing my Poetic Perspective on how to use the difference between Speaker and Author in reviewing and poetic interpretation.

A LITTLE BIT ABOUT ASMR
written by EternalRain < PM: >

First of all, I’d like to start by acknowledging that I am no expert when it comes to ASMR and what’s included in this article is either information from online or personal experiences and opinions!

I’ll begin by defining what ASMR is because it’s not a very widely known thing , and even if people are aware of it, they’re not quite sure what it is or what it means. ASMR stands for autonomous sensory meridian response: basically, this tingling sensation you get that usually starts on your head and can go down your spine from visual and auditory stimuli.

Most people use Youtube to find ASMR videos, though there are other places (there’s a new app you can download called Tingles). Most videos include common “triggers”, or stimuli, to create “tingles”. Some of these common triggers are whispering, tapping, scratching, and personal attention (could be haircuts, hairbrushing, etc).

ASMR has recently gained a lot of traction with many Youtubers creating videos like “I tried ASMR for the first time”. While I’m glad many of them are spreading awareness of the ASMR community, many are also creating wild misconceptions about ASMR: ASMR is watching people eat honeycomb, ASMR is “weird”, ASMR is something to be made fun of. So, I would like to talk about a few things!

ASMR can be weird to some people - “Why would I want to watch a video of someone whispering in a microphone for 30 minutes?” And some people don’t. I personally find whispering videos very weird and uncomfortable but I enjoy tapping and scratching. It’s all personal preference!

I think most people don’t get past some aspects of ASMR that freak them out (mouth sounds, personal attention, and whispering are all freaky to some people). However, there’s a wide variety that I think people disregard. And that’s not to discredit personal attention videos or the like - many people enjoy these - it’s just that many people don’t , and immediately turn away from ASMR videos because that’s all they know about them.

Now, the question: why do people actually watch these videos? ASMR is great for relaxation, sleep, insomnia, and anxiety! It certainly doesn’t cure insomnia or anxiety, but it works to relax your body and quiet your mind. It’s not some fetish (which some people seem to think, unfortunately!) but rather a way to relax.

If you’d like to see what ASMR is like, here are a few videos you could check out:

ASMR Soap Carving [I personally really enjoy this video]
Kinetic Sand ASMR [visually pleasing]
ASMR tapping in an apartment [tapping sounds!]

Finally, I want to end this article by acknowledging that ASMR is not something everyone enjoys and it’s fine to think it’s weird! If I just introduced the weirdest concept to you ever - I am so sorry. But if you learned something new about ASMR or completely discovered it, then yay! This article isn’t to get everyone to like ASMR - it’s rather a way to explain some common misconceptions about ASMR and bring about a further understanding of a very misunderstood and bashed upon concept.

SHAMELESS PLUGS

written by SquillsBot < PM: >

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Spooktober Poetry Contest



Write a Halloween Themed Poem to celebrate Spooktober and for a chance at these wonderful prizes!

1st Place ---------- 2000 points + Badge
2nd Place ----------- 1200 points + Badge
3rd Place ---------- 800 points + Badge

Deadline for entries is .

For the full guidelines check out the thread Here .

That's all folks~ Now send us yours.

SUBSCRIBERS

written by SquillsBot < PM: >

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