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.

You can apply to become a Squillian Journalist by submitting a sample article to SquillsBot today!

1. LETTER FROM YOUR EDITOR IN CHIEF
2. FEATURED MEMBER INTERVIEW: BEES
3. LAST SHIP SAILING: THE MAKING OF PT ONE
4. FEATURED MEMBER INTERVIEW: SOULLESSGINGER
5. A CLOSER LOOK AT THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN ART AND POETRY
6. FEATURED MEMBER INTERVIEW: CHESTACOS
7. SHAMELESS PLUGS
8. SUBSCRIBERS

LETTER FROM YOUR EDITOR IN CHIEF

Written by Brigadier < PM: >

Dear YWSers,

I have an apology to make to all of the loyal readers of Squills. I'm sorry that you haven't seen an edition of Squills on your digital doorstep since the beginning of February.

It's my fault that we haven't had a regular publishing schedule for the past few months. When I retired from my post as a Resources & Community moderator, after many years in the role, I thought I would have time to revitalize Squills.

On the first go around, my assumption turned out to be wrong. Due to person reasons, I was forced to step away from many of my volunteer positions.

Unfortunately, this meant that Squills was down an editor while I was on my sabbatical.

Now, as we approach Easter and begin the season of rebirth, I am hoping that Squills will also experience a rebirth.

For that hopeful reason, I'm putting out a new reporter casting call.

If you want to take a crack at writing articles and contribute to a YWS tradition, make sure to send in your application to SquillsBot.

I'm looking forward to reading community submissions.


Best Regards,

Brigadier

FEATURED MEMBER INTERVIEW: BEESwritten by Liminality< PM: >

Float like a butterfly, write like a bee! If one of your resolutions last year (or this year) was to write every day, you’re sure to have encountered the wonderful @bees. bees is one of the people who run the 21in21/22in22 Support Group . It’s an amazing community that keeps many of us accountable and progressing towards our writing goals! On December 22nd 2021, bees was recognised for their work in supporting this challenge and hosting a monthly chat on the club wall for a year.



bees: Hey! Thank you I'd be happy to answer some questions!



B: So, as a mod, I can still see FM stuff. And even still, I had absolutely no idea (which is something I was sure would never happen because I would obviously be able to see it, but the mods were SNEAKY). I was talking to Feltrix when I found out, so I saw the bee gif on the people's tab under "new featured member" announcement, went to my notifications, saw that I was tagged, and kinda blue-screened. Fel had to make sure I was okay lol but really, I've been super inactive unfortunately (thanks college) and it was really, really heartwarming to see my presence was still making an impact on people through 21in21.



B: Definitely 21in21! As I said, I've really fallen off my activity on YWS, so I haven't had the time and energy to commit to the kind of reviewing and site participation I used to. But 21in21 got a lot of people engaged in writing and it fostered some really good community involvement, and I love being able to help facilitate that.



B: In the background of schoolwork, I've been working on Colonia Heights, which is my magical realism, soft horror novel that deals with grief, growing up, and change, with some slightly...horrifying elements lol but I've also been getting to write some flash fiction for my Introduction to Fiction class this semester, and I've found I've been really enjoying doing creative projects for school (I've also been asked to share one of them for my college's literary arts magazine!) because it basically forces me to actually write with a deadline, instead of just daydreaming or writing notes about it haha



B: Engage! Honestly, just get involved on site with activities, reviewing, etc. Or get creative and work on your own activities or community projects! FMs are members who have been facilitating community and cooperation. This is a website for young writers to really grow in their craft and themselves, so engaging with and helping others is the ticket to getting recognized for your work!



B: of course, and thank you! happy to contribute ^^

If you’ve yet to congratulate them, why not do so here on their FM thread or on their wall?

LAST SHIP SAILING: THE MAKING OF PT ONEwritten by Omni < PM: >

Part One: Last Man Standing, but Roleplay?

Hello, Squills Readers!

2022 started off with a bang with the return of Last Ship Sailing: a collaborative rendition on YWS' very own Last Man Standing (which had its latest Round in 2019 and 2020.) Check out Last Man Standing and Last Ship Sailing Round One and Round Two .

Last Ship Sailing started with a concept: How could we do LMS but with roleplays? The essence of LMS is that you focus on writing with endurance, rather than writing in bursts and then burning out. The original goal of LMS was to write 1000 words a week. One of the issues with roleplays is that it takes a long term commitment to finish a roleplay, which is intimidating and doesn't work out a lot of the times. So roleplays had a lot of risk (in commitment and energy) with low payoff (it's possible roleplays never even get off the ground and the percentage of roleplays that actually finish are extremely small). Naturally, in my head, the concept of an endurance competition mends well with roleplays, because it gives incentive for people to keep writing.

Immediately, I had some questions that needed addressing.

First, how many people counted in a roleplay for this version of LMS?

Roleplays can vary from two people to up to ten, and that would complicate the competition immensely. So I had to make a decision on how many people would be in a roleplay. At first, I immediately went to five. In my experience, five people is a happy medium in most roleplay projects. However, that means that only five people can sign up at a time. What if we had 23 people sign up, or 18, or anything that was not divisible by 5? Some people also might just work together in groups of two or groups of three. Some people also might want larger groups. I didn't feel comfortable with only two people starting because this was meant as a group competition, not just a co-writing competition, but, eventually I decided on groups of three-five. That was just the beginning, though.

How many words should be written per week?

For LMS, it was 1000 words per week. 1000 words was a simple goal to reach. It wasn't too difficult, but it also allowed good progress on their writing projects, which was the end goal to a competition like this. How would a roleplay version approach this writing goal? 1000 words a week in total was just too easy (only 200 words per writer), but 1000 words per writer was intimidating and just too much work. 1000 words by yourself is one thing, but the amount of collaboration, planning, and worldbuilding involved in writing 5000 words per week? The competition would be dead on arrival.

Initially, I thought about 750 words per writer. That would be less stress, but still enough of a challenge that it would keep the competition part of LMS intact. I usually make sure my roleplay posts are at least 750 words, so it might work! However, 750 words is an awkward number, and it would be 3750 words for a roleplay per week? What an awkward number, and that's still a mighty intimidating number to write each week.

So, my next step was 500 words per writer. This was skewing a bit easy for me, but I realized that the major hurdle for this competition wasn't in the writing itself, but in the collaboration. Collaborating enough to write weekly is a daunting task, so the goal of 500 words per person/2500 words in general per week worked.

The second question with this was how would the word count work with different roleplay sizes? It was decided that roleplays could be three-five writers. So, should the wordcount change with the amount of writers?

Initially, I did consider this, but I ended up deciding against it. My reasoning: I didn't want the competition to be skewed towards smaller roleplay groups. I wanted five writers to be the goal, not three writers. If, for example, five writers had a goal of 2500 words a week and three writers had a goal of 1500 words a week, that would unnaturally inflate the chance three writers had to succeed in the competition, even if the writing goal was still 500 words per writer. There was less collaboration, planning, and worldbuilding needed, so the competition would unfairly favor groups of three or four, which went against my wants. So, in the end, the goal was 2500 words per roleplay, no matter the amount of writers.

With that out of the way, I had to grapple with the gritty details.

Words, posts, and ships, oh my!

LMS was simple. The Round One of LSS was anything but that. In my desperation to keep the spirit of LMS with LSS, I ended up having to answer a lot of questions that the original competition didn't have to deal with, and I was lost. For example, how would LSS deal with keeping track of progress between writers. How would LSS deal with what I called "The Group Project Dilemma", aka what if one writer did all the writing? Where would LSS take place in: a club, the Storybook forum, Roleplay Realm, forum, or a mix? How would LSS keep the Warrior/Rogue distinction from LMS (Warriors competed in the competition officially, Rogues just wrote in the spirit of LMS)?

For the first of those problems, I decided to have a goal for each roleplay (at around that time, I would start forming the whole "pirate ship" theme because RP Crew used to be pirate-themed, so it fit), or ship, and have a goal for each person on the ship. I also decided to have a post goal in the first round of LSS, to encourage more posts in the forum.

I then decided that I would keep the Warrior and Rogue distinction in LSS with Privateers and Pirates. This is a decision I would come to regret and thus it didn't make it through to LSS Round II. The reasoning for this was that it made it far more complicated than it needed to be. What if Privateers and Pirates wanted to crew together on the same ship? Would that ship be immediately disqualified from the competition because one writer on the ship wasn't officially competing?

I decided to separate the distinction even further with Registered Ships and Pirate Ships. Registered Ships would have at least one Privateer onboard and would be officially participating in the competition, even if there were Pirates onboard. Pirate Ships were full of Pirates and didn't participate in the competition.

In the end, at the end of LSS Round 1, all of this didn't matter and as long as a ship completed its goal each week, it stayed in the competition. In my pursuit to keep LSS in line with the much simpler LMS, I ended up making the competition overly complicated and confusing. The competition itself was confusing even to me, and thus, it was going through different iterations right up until its release on September of 2020.

Despite all of these questions that needed answers, the complications, and the struggles of transforming LMS into a roleplay competition, LSS launched on September of 2020 and became the largest roleplay event besides Roleplay Month and lasted 10 weeks. It was overall a success, and there was definite interest in Round Two! However, after LSS Round One ended, I knew there needed to be some serious alterations before I would launch Round Two. However, that's not a discussion for this article. Stay tuned for Part Two!

FEATURED MEMBER INTERVIEW: SOULLESSGINGERwritten by looseleaf < PM: >

There are many places you can find @SoullessGinger: the Roleplays Tab, People Tab, and posting incredible poetry! Soulless has been a YWSer since October of 2020 and has spread positivity throughout this site ever since joining. Her short stories and poems are not only well-written but have an amazing range, from funny to relatable to somber. Lately, I had the honor of interviewing Soulless about her experience so far on YWS and on becoming a featured member!


SoullessGinger: Hi looseleaf! I'd love to!


SG: I was really surprised! My impression of FM was you had to be writing like a bunch of reviews, or be a full on author, so it was really cool to see my name in that spot on the home page.


SG: I don't think there was one specific thing. I feel like I've been really active recently, and have interacted with a lot of different communities in YWS. Plus, I do publish a lot of poetry and short stories. But it was probably how active I am in the RP section, honestly.


SG: Definitely the RP Section! I play a lot of dungeons and dragon's offline, and so collaborating online sounded interesting when I first started! It's super fun to explore characters and worlds and get to know others on YWS while doing so!


SG: Yeah! I'm in an LSS RP, Death from the Depths, and I participate in the social month challenges too! I think my favorite social month activity so far was Truth or Dare. I ended up publishing a whole short story/essay for one of my truths! And the Chicken of the End poem was also super funny.


SG: I think it's mostly about putting your energy and love into YWS. You don't have to write a huge amount of reviews, or publish an award winning novel to connect with our community. Just showing up and participating genuinely is what's most important.

If you would like to send a (late) congratulations to SoullessGinger on becoming featured member, hop on over to her wall or featured member thread !

A CLOSER LOOK AT THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN ART AND POETRY
written by rida < PM: >


Dear writers, poets and readers,
As April comes rolling in with the promise of poetry, I’ve been thinking about the relationship between poetry and art, specifically intrigued by Plutarch’s famous quote:






Let’s take a moment to think about what this quote suggests: that somewhere, poetry and painting are very, very similar. If we were to describe painting (or sketching, or other modes of visual representation), we’d discover that it’s all about emotions, ordinary moments, and sometimes it just is.

In a way, isn’t that what poetry is, too?
Visual art and poetry aren’t that different. They’re just saying the same thing, but in different mediums. Sometimes visual art can describe things so vividly we feel it in our hearts, and sometimes poetry speaks so loudly we feel shaken to the core.

Here, my dear artists, is a gateway to something exciting, vibrant and new.
I’m proud to see that even in our beloved community of writers, YWS, we’ve seen such experiments. In fact, it almost became a trend! Poets all around added colours that reflected the mood of the poem, characters that complimented the poem and aesthetic background to make the text stand out.

However, I urge you to do more. You see, in a way, we aren’t exploiting the similarities to their fullest extent. We’re making art compliment the poem, let’s try it the other way around! Let’s take a piece of contemporary art, and bask in its colours.

But even more so, what if we made poetry and art embrace? Colours and textures, words and rhymes! Let us break the boundaries together, explore something new!

Here’s something else to think about:
Did you know that many, many famous poets were once artists? For example, one of my favourite poets, Susan Howe, is both! If you look at her poetry, you’d find it as if she took poetry and painted with it.

She makes you think as much about form as about the words.


[from ‘king’s book’ by Susan Howe]

So, my dear poets and readers, I wish you luck for your poetic journeys,
Yours most experimental,
-rida


Prompts!
Are you feeling stuck this week or would like to try something new? Why not try Salvador Dalí’s famous painting ‘persistence of a memory’ as a prompt?

Perhaps arrange the text as melting clocks? Or delve into the deep wells of meaning in the painting?
If you do write a poem and decide to publish it, be sure to tag me! I’d love to read different creative interpretations of this painting <333


[persistence of a memory by Salvador Dalí]

FEATURED MEMBER INTERVIEW: CHESTACOS
written by Liberty < PM: >

@ChesTacos was the featured member of YWS on the 8th of December last year. He’s an amazing person, with a generally fun and encouraging personality. You can usually see him in a WFP or maybe even somewhere in the Randomosity forums, which has exploded in the last couple of months. If you don’t see him in any of those places, he’s pretty active on the People’s tab.


ChesTacos: Oh sure! I would love to!


C: Hmmmmmmmm......I'm not sure why High Court gave my this title to be honest lol
I think it might be because I'm relatively active lol but i don't really know


C: Yeah I agree! Do you have any further questions?


C: Hmmmm....I'm not sure if this counts but I really enjoy the WFPs!


C: Well I think it's nice to be able to talk to the community and work on your stuff all in one place! Like you can work on your stuff and if you get tired you can talk with other people in the pad.


C: I would tell them to work hard and try to be an active member of the wonderful community!


C: I would like to shoutout the entire lovely community on this site! Especially my closest friends on here who made me continuously come back. I could list them all but we would be here for quite some time lol


C: No worries! Thanks for having me!

That was a fun interview to be a part of. Thanks so much, Ches~!

If you’re interested in his announcement thread, you can check it out over here . :)

SHAMELESS PLUGS

written by SquillsBot < PM: >



We love to run articles and questions, but we also love to advertise for you. Let people know about your new blog, a poem or story you’re looking for reviews on, or a forum thread you’d like more traffic on through Squills’ Shameless Plugs. PM @SquillsBot with the exact formatting of your advertisement, contained in the following code.

Code: Select all

Place advertisement here. Make sure you include a title!

Send us yours~!

SUBSCRIBERS

written by SquillsBot < PM: >

Find an enspoiler-ed a list of our subscribers!

Do you, too, want to be enspoiler-ed and receive a personal weekly notification when the Squills newsletter is posted? Shoot a PM over to SquillsBot to let him know, and you'll be pinged along with the next issue!