Hello.  I’m still dealing with major technical issues on my end that will keep me from adding new moderators.  I’ll let you guys know when I have resolved these issues; I expect it will take us a week or two.

1. We’ve resolved most of the technical issues about volunteer moderators and we will begin inducting them on Friday.   The volunteer mods will have enhanced HTML access and comment-editing powers from the very beginning.  We’re still working on providing access to our comment search-engine.
2. I will be leaving within a week or so.  I hope it’s been as fun and rewarding for you as it has been for me.

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Our overriding goal is to provide a friendly and professional meeting place for aspiring authors.  Please keep that in mind!

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My goal is to provide high-quality writing advice for adults and teenagers.  With that in mind, I have some restrictions on what can be posted here.

1.  No R-rated sexual content.

Sexual content tends to scare away other authors even more readily than other mature elements.  Anything more graphic or creepy than a James Bond movie is probably not a great fit for this website– for one thing, about 40% of our readers are younger than 18 and many of the rest are teachers.

2. No gratuitous self-promotion.

I’d love to see your website, but contribute something first.  For example, if you’d like to link to your site, connect it in some way to what previous comments or the article itself.  If you’d like to market yourself without contributing something, please go somewhere else, okay?

3. Don’t give too much information.

In particular, please don’t ever post your phone number or address online, especially if you’re a minor.  It is not the best way to convince a professional to reach you.  Personally, when I see someone post a business proposal with a phone number in an open forum, I’m more likely to think “Good God, what’s he thinking?” than “Wow, he’s really making himself accessible!”

4. No fan-fiction.

Is your main goal as a writer to have a good time?  If so, serious reviews listing 25+ possible revisions for a chapter would probably be more emotionally overwhelming than fun.  If not, why are you writing fan-fiction?  (If your main goal is to develop your writing skills, I’d highly recommend building your own stories/premises/characters/settings from scratch rather than starting with a story somebody else has already written).  For fan-fiction reviews, I’d recommend fanfiction.net instead.  No, you probably won’t get many reviews more helpful than “this’s really good!!!” or “this sux!!!” , but I think that’d only be a problem if you wanted to become a professional author.

Thanks!