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Welcome! This is Liberty Hall! You can spit on the mat and call the cat a bastard!

The people who hang out here are published and unpublished writers of all backgrounds and skill levels. We're dedicated to teaching and learning from each other, with the goal of improving our skills in writing, critiquing, and self-editing. For the most part, we do that by means of writing challenges.

Liberty Hall grew up around the idea that challenges were the way to get people writing and to keep them writing. It seems to work; we’re at over 170 200 220 consecutive Flash Challenges with at least 1500 1800 2,000 stories written.

Liberty Hall consists of a Wordpress front end (ie a blog), forums, and a Dokuwiki wiki (you are in the wiki, right now). Most of the activity takes place in the forums; most of the notifications take place in the blog.

Well, first of all, poke around the forums for a while. Get a feel for the rhythm of it, and see how people interact. You'll notice that there's not a lot of chatter going on around the boards; we're usually pretty task-oriented, and we trend professional in our interactions. There's certainly place for chats on random topics, but we like to keep stuff like that to designated forums. You'll notice that people type in complete sentences and don't use much online jargon.

Above all, please notice that people are polite and courteous to each other. Trolling, personal attacks, and general unpleasantness are not considered amusing or clever, and will not be tolerated. We're all adults here, and we do our best to act like adults. If you have any questions after you familiarize yourself with the site on your own, feel free to ask anyone; we're very open and welcoming to new faces!

At this point, I'd like to direct your attention to the section that says, basically, don't piss Mike off. How To Get Along. You may be wondering, “Who is this Mike person, and where does he get off talking to people like that? Why does he think he can talk to ME like that?!” Well, let's put it this way. The playground where you're currently running amok belongs to Mike. This is his backyard. He puts an unimaginable amount of time, effort, and money into the Liberty Hall site, while receiving little to no personal gain and often a lot of distress and frustration. This is all just so we can have a place to practice our writing and learn from fellow writers. This is his gift to us; the least we can do is follow his (rather reasonable) rules and requests. If you don't like it, it might be best to find someone else's playground.

Ok, so that's the basic “how to play nicely with others” speech. With any luck, I haven't scared you unnecessarily. Now that we have an understanding, what does LH have to offer you? There are a lot of different types of “challenges” that compose this forum. Some are geared toward Flash, some towards short stories, publishing, etc. There are also discussion areas, and this Wiki is dedicated to providing easy access to different kinds of writing resources. A little browsing should tell you what each section focuses on, and what kinds of discussions people like to have there.

News that affects all of Liberty Hall or all of the forums or wiki is posted here.

The most active part of this forum is the section entitled Flash Challenges. This is a weekly, friendly competition in which everyone who chooses to participate writes a flash fiction (a story typically under 1000 words) based on the same writing prompt, or trigger. The trigger can be anything from a song lyric to a photograph. Participants are given 90 minutes to complete and submit their story, and then critique and vote on aspects of the other stories the challenge generates.

You may be shaking your head at this point and saying to yourself, “I don't write flash fiction. I'm a short story/novel/poetry kinda person. Why would I participate in this challenge if it's not my preferred style? It would just ruin the other stuff I'm doing.”

We'd probably respond by saying that you'd be hard-pressed to find a successful Olympic athlete who doesn't do any cross-training. Flashing is really good for generating new ideas and getting you to arrange your work into cohesive, solid stories. On top of that, there's some time pressure built into this competition to help you refine and focus your skills. Some people take the stories they come up with by flashing, rewrite them into either tighter flashes or longer works, and submit them to magazines and other markets. A few have even been published! Basically, don't be concerned that flashing will affect your writing negatively. If anything, the combination of writing and critiquing will help you hone skills that you can use to improve your other works in progress.

Another popular forum is the Short Story Challenges. This is a longer challenge in which people use triggers to generate short stories. There is less time pressure in this challenge, but it basically works the same way as the flash challenge on a larger scale. Again, participants critique and vote on aspects of the stories generated by the challenge, and can take the results and submit them for publication.

The Story Polish Challenge runs once a month and is the only challenge that doesn't involve creating a new story from scratch. Instead, writers enter stories that have either been submitted previously to another Liberty Hall challenge or have gone through some other critting process such as the Crit Me Words forum, another forum, or a private crit group, and have been revised or 'polished' as a result. The aim of this challenge is to work on editing and rewriting skills with a view to preparing writers' submissions for market. As in the other challenges, participants again critique the other works and vote on various aspects of the stories.

Need info here. To be created by Mike.

So you have a story you've just written but you've missed the latest Short Story Challenge deadline and can't wait for the next one to come round? Or perhaps there is a market deadline fast approaching that means you can't hang on for the next SSC or Polish Challenge? If either of these apply to you, then the Crit me Words forum might just be the solution. Here, writers are free to post any story they might have for critique at any time without having to worry particularly about time, date, previous crit, or word count restrictions. Simply post your story with the title and word count in the topic line and wait for passing critters to take the bait.

If you've cast more than a cursory glance around the Hall, you might have noticed that there are no challenges geared towards poetry. That's not because we have anything against poetry particularly, rather, it's more of a reflection of the fact that we are primarily a site geared towards the production of fiction stories. However, we don't want to pretend that the market for poetry doesn't exist, and are proud to number several published poets among our members, thus the Crit me with your rhythm stick forum. This forum works in much the same way as the Crit me Words forum. Simply post up your poem here with the title in the topic subject line and the critters shall come.

We want to know your writing successes! Use this area to tell us where your story or poem is being published. Share your joy and let us celebrate with you.

And let's not forget the Submittals Club. Although the primary purpose of Liberty Hall is to get people writing, we're proud of our writers and want to see them published as well. So, if you want a kick in the pants to make yourself submit, join the club!

This is the area for discussions other than writing. Find something amusing in the news today? Come across and interesting fact? This is the place to share.

A word of caution that applies to all parts of Liberty Hall. Don't expect to receive feedback if you're not willing to spend the time critiquing other people's work. With older water pumps, you had to pour in some water to wet the leather before the pump would work properly, and give you water back. Same concept here. Don't take if you're not willing to give, too. Otherwise, everyone would be sitting around waiting for feedback forever, and wondering why it never shows up. The experience of critiquing others' stories also helps you learn what to look for when self-editing your own work. When everybody participates, everybody wins!

This brings us to another question you might be asking yourself (depending on your background): “I don’t really know much about the craft of writing; I don’t think I’m qualified to critique anyone else's work.” Nothing could be further from the truth. Any impressions that you get as a reader will be useful feedback for the author. It doesn't matter if you can't use the scary-looking writing terms you see people throwing around here; tell the author if anything seemed like it didn't fit in, or if you particularly liked a certain turn of phrase, or where you got completely lost, or anything else you notice when approaching their work as a reader. These pieces of information will bring things to the author's attention that he or she may have missed otherwise. As time goes by, you'll learn more about the critiquing process from the other members, find out what types of feedback are most useful when you receive critiques on your own work, and maybe even learn some writing jargon to impress your friends with. My point is, jump in! If you have questions, ask them, but mainly just come right in and start participating. The only way you'll learn is by doing.

There's a lot of original work on the forums, and a lot of people reading it. It seems like that would mess around with publication rights, no? Well, you don't really have to worry about that. Since LH is a private, password-protected site (the forums section where the writing is placed), you won't lose any of your publication rights. It's not considered a “publication” if you post your work where only a limited number of people have access to it. However, there are a limited number of public forums here and if you were to post your work there, your rights are at risk. It's not a big deal, though. Just make sure to post any of your writing in challenge forums or your personal writing forum, and it is protected.

So, now that you know how things basically work around here, you can start participating! You may notice that people who post have constructed avatars (the pictures that appear when a person posts) and follow their posts up with quotes, signatures, and other tags. You can do the same, if you wish; all these tools can be accessed through your personal profile. It's not compulsory, though; don't feel like you have to use them if you don't want to.

Thanks for sticking with me through all that rambling; now go have fun! See you around!

Thanks to Jeraliey for drafting this! Any mistakes are mine.

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