Sunday, April 26, 2009

Site no longer down

Edit: HASA is back up.

As you may have noticed already, the site is currently down. This will be resolved as soon as possible. Please check back here for news or check the main site (it may be back before I can update here).
--
Nath

Saturday, April 4, 2009

HASA news - April 2009

HASA news - April 2009

With March, Back to Middle-earth Month, now behind us, it’s time to erm... stay in Middle-earth a bit longer? A round of applause for everyone who took part, whether you wrote just one or two prompts or managed to do them all, and thanks to the organisers over at SWG for their hard work in thinking up all these prompts!

Birthday Cards

If you have a birthday in April and would like a drabble about your favourite character or topic, you can request it here.

Not sure what the birthday cards are about? Have a look at the stories written for the March requests.

Challenges and Nuzgul

Alas, there are no current open Challenges, but the prospective April Poetry Month Challenge needs just two more people joining in to become a Challenge.
And perhaps you also have an idea you’d like to see written? Grab that nuzgul by the scruff of the neck (mind the teeth!) and see if you can get four others to make it a Challenge?
Prospective Challenges can be found here

Reviews

Right now, there are 15 stories waiting for reviewers (remember to log in first).

If you are an active reviewer, why not go and check one out?

If you’re not an active reviewer, but would like to be one... If you've been a member of HASA for thirty days and think this might be an area you'd like to get involved, it's easy to get started. Read the links below, and then click "Reviews Home" and click on the link to "Activate my status now." You'll be taken to a list of stories awaiting reviewers. Click on the title, read it, and enter your review.

(please note: you need to be logged in for these links to work):
--- Reviews Overview
--- Review Policies
--- Review Criteria

As you can perhaps guess, member participation is crucial for reviews. The more people are involved in the review process, the more opinions will be represented. Having more people involved also means that stories pass through review more quickly - which is good for everyone.

Here's a simple thing to try. You're all familiar with the Golden Rule, "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." By submitting a story for review, you are asking nine other members to read and evaluate it. So why not do until other authors in reviews as you'd like other reviewers to do unto you: check out one of the stories already in review and give it a read. Put more simply: put one in, take one out.

Forums

Forums are where you will find people discussing research questions and stories.

A quick overview of forum links:

On Our Minds displays the ten most recent posts in forums open to all HASA members. It’s a good way to catch up on what you’ve missed, though the page can move quickly when lots of forums are active at once.

If you've been out of touch for longer than a few days you might want to use the One Month of Posts page. This page is just what it sounds like: a list of forums that have been posted to in the last month, beginning with the most recently updated.

Workshops are specialized writing communities. They allow you to share stories you aren’t ready to post to the whole site, and many have interesting forums attached to them. Explore workshops to find a group of members interested in similar topics. (You must be logged in to see this link).

March Stories

All of us writers love feedback. It is the lembas and miruvor that sustains us as we write our story, and leaving a few words about a story you read is always a nice thing to do, whether the story is new or old.

Every fifteen minutes HASA highlights a story chosen at random from the Reviewed and General stories in the archive. Why not go to http://www.henneth-annun.net/ and read the currently featured story?

Many talented writers are publishing every day. In March:

--- 10 Reviewed Stories
--- 35 General Stories
--- 7 Beta Stories (Remember, you need to be logged in to view beta stories.)

Thank you for reading at HASA. Enjoy!

-Nath-