so CKY inspired me to start writing some short stories set on Ossia, the plane on which the block I'm making is set. I've written one so far (findable here) and CKY (ugh, them again?) said I should post it here but I have no idea how this thing works but anyway now I posted it woohoo.

It might help to post it here too, though I'd probably give it a separate thread with the title of the piece as the thread name.
But welcome all the same.
We'll collectively peruse the story (as schedules allow) and comment on it. So... yeah, pretty straightforward.
If you want it to be included in the archive, then you can ask for a vote to be put up, but I'd wait until some feedback came in first.

will do
hi!
seems reasonable. due to the nature of the Ossia project there are some things I can't change, and I'll try to be clear on what those are and why as they come up, but I'm definitely rusty on writing and I'm sure y'all will have plenty to tear apart. I've already made some significant changes from the first draft from just CKY's feedback.

also while I'm inquiring anyway, what's the culture around the open/public/private thing? if I do wind up submitting this to the archives, it's important to me that I still retain pretty much complete creative control of Ossia and its characters. there's a couple exceptions, things I'm more open to sharing, but for the most part I'd want to retain that authority. on the other hand I know this is a collaborative thing, not a Let's All Talk About How Great Razorborne Is club, so I'm not sure how cool y'all would be with most of my work being marked private, especially as a new person who hasn't previously been involved in your community, so if that's not a thing y'all would be ok with then that's totally fair and I just won't submit it, but I wanted to ask 'cause like I said I have no idea how y'all run.

You may notice that most of our works are Public -- that is, I feel, more as a result of the rule that anything voted on that isn't specifically stated to be one or another is given the status Public . Personally, I think most people actually submit works with the idea of them being Open, and most everyone will go and talk to the original authors anyway for tips and such.

As far as your work being Private, that's entirely your choice. We will vote on the quality of the story, not on how available you want to make it. Molcru (and all his stories) was accepted with the Private status from BeastEngine and if memory serves it was his first accepted work.

Good to see you here in our little corner of cyberspace!

For the record, I intentionally put nearly everything I submit for vote into the "Public" category. I want to retain a connection to my work, and I want people coming to discuss their plans for my stuff, so I don't want most of my stuff "Open." At the same time, though, I definitely want people working with my characters in new and interesting ways, and I love it when my planes or characters show up in other peoples' work, so I similarly don't want my stuff "Private," for the most part. So "Public" usually works out best for me.

Honestly, if not for BeastEngine, I would probably have more of my stuff Private. Not a lot more, mind you, and probably not permanently, but the things I'm working on at any given time. But, knowing we have Molcru in our Archive and can never do anything with him always sticks with me, and I wouldn't want to do that to future M:EMbers, should anything every happen where I couldn't be around.

Incidentally, razorborne, I hope to read your story later this afternoon.

I've always put everything of my in as Open because I want to signal as strongly as possible that people should make use of what I offer the group without feeling a lot of pressure from me. However, that hasn't stopped people from coming to me with questions about my stuff--we've got a good culture of courteous collaboration here I think.

We've never voted anything in as having both public and private components (although the voting process for Arbagoth was a little odd because it was in use at the time of its voting) but I don't see any reason why we couldn't do things that way if you wanted to put stuff up as public but wanted to retain a bunch of it as private!

The issue with Beast Engine that Raven and Luna alluded to is basically that his major character, Molcru, was always a private character, which made a lot of sense because Molcru was a very personal character for Beast.

Unfortunately--and I think a lot of this was due to us not having a good sense of how large scale projects should work, back when M:EM was first finding its feet--Molcru was intimately tied to a major early storyline that several people were working on that involved a lot of characters. This seemed really good at the time and really exciting, but then Beast fell out of touch with us for various personal reasons, and suddenly that entire storyline was put in limbo, because no one could touch Molcru... or the other characters associated with Molcru.

So, gradually Molcru has become its own little sort of odd cyst in the archive that everything has since grown around without actually interacting with it. Pieces of the proposed storyline are starting to emerge in other ways now, but for a while that was basically like... well, let's see, that was Molcru, Cara Hollis, Vasilias, Renn Winmore, Ikass, a whole bunch of stuff kinda went down with that ship until people finally decided the hell with it, they were gonna go in a different direction with those pieces.

Anyway that's essentially why people are leery of putting things up as private. Ultimately how you put things in won't count against you though! And if there's some sections you want to put up publicly while other stuff remains private, that seems reasonable to me.

It might make people more reluctant in theory to work with stuff but like in practice there's so much material in the M:EM that it's not surprising that often newer stuff doesn't get taken up by other people. One lesson I've learned is that with a project this big it's important to look at everything from a long term perspective--it all takes time.

if there's generally a culture of people going back to the original author about stuff then I suppose public might make sense. I'm just concerned because I've done a lot of structural work on Ossia, some of which only exists inside my head. it's my baby in a lot of ways and I'm kind of hesitant to just hand it over, but I think it would be cool to see what other people did with it. it's not that I don't want people using it, I just want to be able to dive in and correct things if necessary, including minor details. if that's generally the culture around public pieces then I don't see any reason not to make it public.

actually it might be best to do private for now since the Ossia storyline is still ongoing, then open it to public once it was done.

Yeah, Razor, I see no problem with you going Private if you want. It's what I ultimately did with Arbagoth.

@ Razor -- My two cents (which are worth about 1.28 of Raven's cents, at current market exchange rates) is that we have a Private status precisely so that people who would like to keep control over their creations can do just that. If that's what makes sense for you, and the things that you're working on, then there's absolutely nothing wrong with asking for those things to be Private. Private exists for a reason, and no one should feel like they can't use it. It's just a matter of personal preference.

another question! (I like questions. understanding and evaluating systems is a passion of mine. hi I'm razorborne.) the rules say anyone with a work in the archives is a voting M:EMber, but CKY isn't on the voting M:EMbers list despite having four works according to the index. is the list out of date or are there other restrictions?

There are certain, strange exceptions to that rule, but they don't come up very often. The Anthologies are an exception, and we have one author in the Archive who specifically requested not to be a M:EMber, but otherwise, yes. CKY is certainly a voting M:EMber, so the list is out of date. Thanks for the catch!

Raven covered the basics here:

• There are some exceptions to the rule re: the big anthology projects, mostly because a number of writers for the Alara and Innistrad anthologies were completely unaffiliated with the M:EM (I believe some of them may have even come from tumblr).
• At least one author has requested not to be a voting M:EMber, to my knowledge the only one to have requested that is Arcades Sabboth
• Some M:EMbers have been phased out because of inactivity, though that isn't kept track of as often because generally people are around to vote and 3 months is a long grace period. Thrull_Champion (assuming he still is around) has been phased out because he hasn't posted to the M:EM since its infancy on the mothership. The shared Archivist account can see who voted on polls for these purposes
• The list doesn't get updated very often because a)thing stay static for long periods of time; and b) it's kind of a pain to update that thing every time. Every new work must be formatted, reviewed for typos, uploaded to the shared Archivist google Drive, given a new thread in the Archives, then added to the Index thread, so updating the rules thread just adds to the work and tends to get neglected.

All that said, the entire rules thread is in need of some cosmetic lifts which I have never bothered to sit down and ponder.

QUICKEDIT: and now, I've also taken to giving every newly accepted creative canon work not only its own wiki page, but sub-pages for planes and characters involved in it as well, which only compounds the workload.

There was one other fellow who appeared here for about the span of a month. Masked Goblin, I think his name was?

Oh, right! I forgot about him! Man, I really wish he had stuck around.

Yeah, I know what you mean. It's such a shame.

Ironically, I referenced one of his stories briefly in one of my currently-up-for-vote pieces.

Disguised Goblin, yeah. He was fun; I hope he comes back someday.

Arcades was a voting M:EMber for a long time, but when she recently came back she decided that she wasn't able to keep up with voting. So she's one of the lapsed people who can technically retake the mantle whenever she's ready. There's a few others that we hear from very occasionally like that.

In fairness, Arcades had lapsed again. We've not heard from her in a few months. Which is mildly frustrating, because I have books I need to mail to her.

It's always sad to see people go. I was really hoping Trolljuju would stick around, and hopefully will be back again. Yxoque is semi-active in FA&S, so I have hopes that he'll come back over here, too. Also, has anyone heard from Jedi? I know he was going through some stuff. Hope he's okay.