On March 14, 2005, I couldn't sleep. Sleepless nights tend to pass unnoticed into the dustbin of the unremarkable and unremembered, but on this particular sleepless night, my restless thoughts took a direction that would mark this bout of insomnia as significant—to be well remembered a decade later—although I didn't know it yet. On the eve of the Ides of March, my exhausted mind shambled as it often did to Middle-earth—to Beleriand, to be exact—to the shores of the silver twilit sea where storytellers gathered to spin the tales Tolkien never got a chance to write. Here, I often listened and imagined my own tales but never spoke them aloud. Tonight, though, in my restless distraction, I felt an urge to speak.

In the year 2005, the Tolkien fandom was just coming off its high after Peter Jackson's film trilogy commanded a heady three years of its attention and culminated with a history-making sweep at the Oscars, including a Best Picture win. The Lord of the Rings films, coupled with the advent of Web 2.0 platforms that would become havens for fandom communities, had encouraged involvement in the Tolkien fandom to skyrocket. But more than a year after the films' Oscar triumph and just as some of the fans brought in by the movies were beginning to lose interest and trickle away, I was discovering Tolkien fandom—and Tolkien-based fan fiction—and wanting to get involved.

In 1937, Tolkien wrote a letter to his publisher, expressing that, while he understood the need for a sequel to The Hobbit, the Silmarils commanded his heart.[1] So it went with me too. Drawn in by the films, I had begun reading the books and, by my sleepless night in March 2005, had developed an unrelenting obsession with The Silmarillion and, with it, fan fiction based on The Silmarillion. It was the rare book that, for me, asked more questions than it answered and left tantalizing lacunae that begged to be filled. I had been trained as a literary writer and reader in a university writing program—even reading Tolkien felt rebellious—and fantasy writing was strictly off-limits in my mind and fan fiction nothing short of undignified, but I could hardly help myself. In true Tolkienian tradition, I answered the questions and explored the possibilities that The Silmarillion raised for me through storytelling. I hadn't shared these stories—no one even knew I was writing them, not even my husband, who loyally read every word I wrote—but I had a hearty appetite for both reading and writing them. That proved complicated: Tolkien fandom was at its peak but the Silmarillion-based stories were like the proverbial leaves on the wind, scattered among myriad sites and archives, often written by authors who didn't talk or even necessarily know of each other. Silmarillion fan fiction writers had a single Yahoo! mailing list, but its sole moderator had disappeared and stopped approving messages.

So on the Ides of March 2005, from my desk at work, I set up a Yahoo! group and a LiveJournal community for a group that I called the Silmarillion Writers' Guild. In my insomnia the night before, it seemed that writers and readers of Silmarillion-based fan fiction should have a single place to gather with other Silmfolk to share and discuss stories. In the small hours of the morning—despite having published no fan fiction of my own, despite having only just begun to comment on others' work and participate in discussions—it seemed that I should be the one to start that group.

The mission of the Silmarillion Writers' Guild as stated on our website is to promote the reading, discussion, and understanding of Tolkien's works through writing (mostly) fiction about them and to foster an open, welcoming environment that encourages growth as both writers and Tolkien scholars. In 2005, these goals would have been viewed by many as almost mutually exclusive. Conventional wisdom tended toward the view that courting high-quality writing and scholarship required gatekeeping measures to keep out the influx of film fans with their fiction that was, according to some, whacky, uninformed, and disrespectful to Tolkien. Groups that attempted to restrict what they would accept were perceived as elitist and humorless "canatics" further attended with accusations of sexism and homophobia, due to the perception that they targeted stories with original female or LGBT characters for their disapprobation. On the other hand, those archives and groups that kept their doors open to all were perceived as hotbeds of genres sneeringly described using terms like "Mary Sue" and "Legomance."

As someone who had missed the peak activity during the heyday of the Lord of the Rings film trilogy that generated these hostilities and, furthermore, as someone who was interested in Silmarillion stories, I found myself in a rather unusual position. I knew people from a variety of different groups and archives, many of whom made no secret of their dislike of certain other groups and archives. In my idealistic and insomnia-fueled dream, I hoped that all of these writers would somehow be willing to come together in the Silmarillion Writers' Guild, forgetting longstanding hurts and animosities—hurts and animosities that, honestly, I didn't even truly understand—and anneal a bond based instead on their love for Tolkien's world and enthusiasm for continuing to build in that world.

Only after I'd established the Silmarillion Writers' Guild did the reality set in that I was ridiculously unsuited for such an undertaking. I hadn't even shared a story, I knew very few people, and yet I thought I was going to wade into perilous and partisan waters and somehow stem the tide of a fandom culture I barely understood to build a happy little haven where only the stories and our shared love for the books that inspired them mattered. For a while, I did nothing with my idea and the groups I'd set up remained, thankfully, undiscovered. Yet I couldn't bring myself to delete them, to forget my idea. I decided instead to go about things a little more conventionally.

First of all, I knew that I had to share my own writing. My writing time had been mostly devoted to an extremely long character-driven novel about the House of Fëanor, set in an uneventful year during the Noontide of Valinor. It had begun as a series of character studies on the Fëanorians and rambled just like one would expect a story to do when written with no plan or audience in mind, but it struck a nerve for some readers, and my weekly chapter postings began to accumulate a small following. And then I was found out. Two readers found my Silmarillion Writers' Guild and joined it. One of them, Uli, who would soon become my first comoderator, emailed me one day: Didn't I think it was time I did something with my idea?

It is only recently that fan fiction has begun to receive coverage in the mainstream media that isn't the wholly negative: coverage where we are a cabal of horny teenagers and undersexed middle-aged cat ladies flagrantly violating the copyrights of otherwise respectable authors with our badly written and very often pornographic wish-fulfillment stories. Mainstream coverage of fan fiction still can't resist mentioning Fifty Shades of Grey, but having a few professional authors cop to writing fan fiction has helped to raise discourse on the subject above the stereotypical and sensational to consider who we really are and what we really do. (Spoiler alert: Most of us are twenty-something women, most of what we write has nothing to do with sex, and many of us don't even own a cat.)

It is admittedly easy to hone in on the sensational. Ten years of running the SWG has periodically unearthed the ugly and the absurd—the woman who faked her own death so that she could then pose as her imaginary husband and soak in the sympathy, the people who won't join because Fëanor's mother is listed on the site's character list as Míriel Serindë and not Míriel Þerindë—as well as the extraordinary: community members who reach out to each other in crises, who swap family contacts for medical or weather emergencies, who cross oceans to visit each other. These occasions punctuate—and in many ways sustain—the everyday, which is far more ordinary.

After Uli emailed me about when I was going to actually do something with the Silmarillion Writers' Guild, she and I rallied our respective fandom friends at the end of July 2005 to join our new group. In my mind, the SWG would function primarily as a writers' workshop, but the direction it took once it actually started was very different. In 2005, Tolkien fan fiction was posted primarily on online archives, and the members of the SWG wanted us to have our own archive.

I loved the idea except for one small problem: I knew nothing about website design. I'd only recently learned to use HTML to add italics to my entries on LiveJournal. So I borrowed a book on HTML from a friend, bought a book on CSS, and set out to learn. Over the next year, I spent many hours experimenting with my new knowledge and many more hours squinting at CSS stylesheets in Notepad, trying to figure out what I was doing wrong, but learn I did, and about a year after I started my independent study, I gave my built-from-scratch website a test flight as a free Yahoo! site, then nervously registered the silmarillionwritersguild.org domain name and paid my first $100 toward a dream that, a little over a year ago, I hadn't even known I'd had.

In 2007, the SWG website and archive was completed and entered beta-testing. The archive is powered with open-source PHP-based archive software that allows members to add their own stories to the site, comment on each other's work, search for stories using criteria such as character or genre, and build collections of stories, including favorites lists. On June 5, my comoderators and I snipped the virtual ribbon to open the site to the public. New authors—mostly members of the SWG on Yahoo! and LiveJournal—began joining and posting their writing and so it has gone since: After the site's opening, we haven't gone a week without at least one new story or chapter posted, and in some weeks, we have a dozen or more. In January 2015, we passed the 2,000-story mark and, in February 2015, we welcomed our 700th member to the archive.

By this point in my career as a website administrator, my fingers more or less fly automatically through the keystrokes needed to answer what I term our MFAQ, or most frequently asked question: "Is my story Silmarillion enough for your site?" Much of the work my comoderators and I do involves helping members share their work on the archive by answering basic questions about the site's rules and the technical workings of the archive. We solve the occasional technical problem—and here, I am lucky to have comoderators whose sole training didn't come out of a borrowed book on HTML—and perform the online version of housekeeping: keeping the pantries full, dusting the lamps, and taking out the trash.

Although we have etiquette guidelines for writers and commenters both, we are rarely put in the position of having to enforce them and, when we do, the cause tends to be a simple misunderstanding or mistake that is quickly clarified and remedied. Despite the fact that the first rule I wrote for the SWG was that the "SWG is a drama-free group," this admonition is almost wholly unneeded. It is notable that, in eight years of our website's operation, we have never had to ban an account from the site, aside those pesky, creeping, proliferative goblins of the online world: spammers. My naively utopian dream of a group that was simultaneously inclusive and open-minded while hosting excellent writing and astute commentary about Tolkien's works seems to have been realized.

The efforts of the moderation team are largely to thank for this. Writing and revising rules and policies is probably one of the more tedious parts of our job, but we ascribe to the view that to make our goals and expectations clear at the outset will save us the kind of conflict that beset some of our Tolkien fandom predecessors. Throughout my years in the Tolkien fan fiction community, I have seen administrators consumed by enforcing or defending emotionally fraught policies—those gatekeeping policies discussed above—and, in some cases, eventually burn out. I did not want to expend my energy in this way, nor did I want a beloved hobby to become a blight to myself or my comoderators. Our basic policies are simple and unchanging: We accept any writing with a significant basis in The Silmarillion so long as it is legal to share and makes a minimal attempt to meet the standards of professional presentation, and we expect all of our members to either treat each other with civility and respect. The worst that the most notorious of fan fiction websites have to offer—commenters who make personal attacks on authors, encourage self-harm, and aim to drive writers from sharing their work—has no place within our virtual borders.

So a few minutes per day is generally all that's required of me in running the SWG—an MFAQ answered here, a technical issue sorted there—which inevitably brings me back to a bored, restless state of mind dangerously similar to that which first gave rise to the SWG on a sleepless night ten years ago: that state of mind in which what we're doing can always be made better, when we can always do something more.

In my early years in the fandom and running the SWG, I often felt like I'd walked into the fandom right as many of my favorite authors were walking out. When I mentioned this once to a veteran author who'd stuck around, she told me that many authors felt like they'd discussed and written all that there was to discuss and write. Having weathered the onslaught after the LotR film trilogy, there was nothing new to be said or done.

After being involved on a daily basis with the Tolkien fandom for more than ten years, having authored over one hundred stories and still flush with more ideas than I have time for, I cannot believe this. Not only does the depth and complexity of Tolkien's world belie reaching an endpoint, but the very purpose of fan fiction is to venture beyond even what Tolkien gives us, to populate the blank spaces on the map and in the annals with people and their tales.

The issue is not that one can reach the bottom of Tolkien's world and come up wanting but rather that, in the absence of a natural catalyst—like a popular film trilogy—fandom institutions must actively generate interest in that world. This is probably my favorite part of running the SWG: coming up with ideas to maintain interest in The Silmarillion, encourage new Tolkien fans to read and master this difficult text, and create fanworks based on it. This is where our moderation team pours most of its energy.

Not even a month after opening the website, we held our first event: Seven in '07, a compilation of story excerpts, poetry, and art about the House of Fëanor, in honor of the prodigious date 7/7/07 and the most popular and controversial group of characters in the Silmarillion fan fiction community. It was the SWG that popularized Back to Middle-earth Month, or B2MeM, an annual celebration held each March in order to keep fandom interest high after the movies. We continue to cosponsor this event with several other fandom communities each year. One year, B2MeM was linked into a role-playing game in which teams worked together in-character to unlock the secrets needed to defeat Morgoth in the Dagor Dagorath by creating fanworks in response to challenge prompts. Another year, we played BINGO using themed cards with a creative prompt per square. We've run a location-themed challenge where completing a prompt earned a stamp in a Middle-earth passport, and we've retold the Akallabêth in fan fiction, poetry, and art. We participate annually in National Poetry Month, the International Day of Femslash, and International Fanworks Day. We are in the midst of producing, through B2MeM, an ebook of stories related to the theme of the seasons in Middle-earth. Through our events, we seek to bring new writers to the fandom and keep our current writers engaged in exploring Tolkien's world, as well as provide opportunities for our authors—most of whom will never have the opportunity to pursue traditional publication with their Tolkien-based work—to see their writing spotlighted as part of a compilation or ebook. As I was writing this article, my comoderators and I were beginning to discuss how to celebrate our tenth birthday this coming July. Nor do we confine our efforts to events or even fiction. We also maintain a peer-reviewed reference library and publish a monthly newsletter, both of which seek to connect our members and newcomers to The Silmarillion with resources about Tolkien's mythology.

"The SWG is my online home."

Sometimes people tell this to me directly. Sometimes I overhear it being said in places where they don't even know I'm listening.

It never fails to startle me. It never fails to move me either.

It is no small thing to build something that others consider a home. It is an honor, and I would lie if I pretended it didn't make the thousands of hours that I have put into the SWG—hours that have very often come out of my own writing time—very much worth the while.

Subcreation is a powerful thing. Tolkien spent a lifetime creating a world so real that many of us feel that we can inhabit it—indeed, do inhabit it through our own (sub)creative endeavors. The SWG is rather like a beach house built on a remote stone outcropping in that world. I laid the foundation and many other hands raised the walls, glazed the windows, and hung the decorations of our online home. Sometimes we build bonfires on the beach and dance beneath the stars in miruvor-fueled capers. Other times, we speak soberly over tea as we take shelter from the rain without. We celebrate, argue, play, and sometimes mourn together. We are a way station for travelers of the kindreds of Elves, Dwarves, and Men, and we cherish the stories they bring. Sometimes, if you listen closely at night, you may hear the songs of Maglor or Daeron, faint upon the wind, or the echoes of the Great Music in the murmurings of Ulmo. We keep good company with a legendarium teeming with storytellers, poets, artisans, loremasters, and musicians who also understood the value of art in making a world feel alive.

We also keep company with Tolkien himself. As I've studied Tolkien's stories in increasing depth over the past ten years, I've come to realize that the same desires that drove him drive us too. Tom Shippey, in The Road to Middle-earth, notes that Tolkien was attracted to the blank spaces on the map[2]; hence, he studied the Anglo-Saxon period, the time of English history about which we know the least. Reading Tolkien's commentary on the works he studied as an academic—Beowulf, the Arthurian legends, the Norse sagas—it is obvious that he very often used story to answer questions about those texts. It is an ancient urge and probably as definitive of our species as any other: to look upon something new, something strange, something inexplicable and think, "There must be a story behind that." In our little house beside the sea, those are the stories we tell.