If knowledge is power... why in hell did you think it was a good idea to piss of a Librarian?
It doesn't matter, because now you have to deal with a

Librarian's Outrage

And the only way to make things right is to write like there is no tomorrow.

So, how did it come to this? Is the librarian super? Did a super piss her off? What lead to the super ending up in front of a furious librarian?

All these questions can help guide you through this workshop!

Here are the rules:

1. This workshop has a 2K word limit. It’s fine if it goes a little above, but try and stay within the 2K limit.
2. More than one entry per person is allowed, but try to be reasonable with the amount.
3. The story should contain at least one angry librarian. Everything else is up to you!
4. The admin team/Librarian can veto a story at their discretion if it doesn’t follow the general rules, or doesn’t adhere to the spirit of the site/workshop.
5. The deadline is at March 31st 2023 at 23.59 GMT. As usual, the entries will go online on the following Sunday (April 2nd).

The votes are in, the counting is over and, even after considering the idea of pooling together the votes for Zuperfriends 1 and 2, we have a definite winner:

In Dreams by DKC

Congratulations to get another notch into your belt.

As a personal note, I'm really happy that this pretty unusual workshop brought in a few new talents.

Happy writing to you all.

The stories are here.

The cold is ever bitter (at least here).

It's time to cast your votes for your favorite story in the Autumn 2022 workshop.

The pool will run for two weeks, from November 5th to November 19th 2022 at 23.59 GMT.

Thsi time, each one of you can cast two votes.

The order won't matter, but you have to cast all of them, no more no less.

Please, leave any comment, compliment and feedback under the individual stories or in the forum. Meanwhile the votes goes down here.

See you on the other side.

Autumn is coming and it’s getting darker outside.

For ages, we have huddled together and told stories of the fantastic.

Of the arcane.

Of practitioners and guardians of magic.

Now... this power of our imagination is free!

Welcome to the Magic Unleashed - Ubergirl Style workshop.

You can craft any story.

It doesn't matter if your characters are practitioner of magic, champions empowered by the arcane or villains abusing it for their own gain. As long as it's magic everything is fair game.

• Each entry MUST work around the theme.
• No entry can be longer than 10,000 words (give or take a few).
• All characters must be over the age of 18.
• SWM reserves the right to withhold and/or disqualify submitted entries based on their sole discretion of the content.
• Entries must be received no later than October 30th, 2022 at 11:59 pm GMT.
• Once submitted, entries will be voted on by the SWM user via an online poll.

The votes are officially in and the winner of the Spring 2022 Workshop (with pretty significant margin) is

Building Beaches by Robo

Congratulations, you've won the prize of a free render from... well... Robo.

Huh.

We'll let Robo handle how they are going to sort this one out.

(I'd like to remind you all that Robo has a page on DeviantArt, one on Patreon and one on Gumroad)

Meanwhile, if anyone has an idea for another workshop, you can contact Woodclaw and Rjjt via private message or drop a line on the Discord Server.

The stories are here.

The stage is set.

It's time to cast your votes for your favorite story in the Spring 2022 workshop.

The pool will run for two weeks, ending on Monday 16th May at 23.59 GMT.

Due to massive influx of storeis and new writers, we decided to allow you peopl to cast three votes this time.

The order of the votes won't matter, but you have to cast all three of them, no more no less.

Please, leave any comment, compliment and feedback under the individual stories or in the forum. Meanwhile the votes goes down here.

See you on the other side.

Spring.

Heat.

It's that time of the year when you start to feel a bit more relaxed.

And we all start dreaming of going on vacation. Maybe just for a few days and just relax in the sun.

Well, it's not just us.

Sometimes, even superpowered people need to cool down and take it easy...

Or maybe they have to be there to prevent a disaster... or cause one.

Whatever the case, let's take a big dive and see what happens when we have:

"A Supergirl at the Beach"

A 2000 words short-format workshop to celebrate spring.

Here we got the rules:

• Each entry MUST work around the theme.
• No entry can be longer than 2,000 words (give or take a few).
• All characters must be over the age of 18.
• SWM reserves the right to withhold and/or disqualify submitted entries based on their sole discretion of the content.
• Entries must be received no later than April 29th, 2022 at 11:59 pm GMT.

The workshop start toda, to you all, happy writing!

For any further question you can ask the Admin staff via PM or the forum thread.

Great News Everyone:

Our friend Robolord123 offered to make a custom illustration for the winning story.

If this doesnt' wet your appetite to write, I honestly don't know what will.

One would think that writing this spotlight is easy, but the truth is that, as time went by, you either have to change the parameters or start to lose steam.

Then, out of the blue, a question comes that help you reframe and realize that there are more stories that you completely forgot about.

I have to thank tSuper who, on the Discord server, asked: "Has there ever been an alien abduction story where the lady taken gets turned into a superheroine?" This immediately clicked several buttons in my brain and I remembered one story I really liked when I first joined this community... but I didn't remember the title.

It took a while to finally zero it down, but here we go:

Lady Nyx Part 1 and Part 2 by Jabbrwock

What I really enjoyed about this story is how Jabbrwock mingled elements  of two very different genres to create interesting interactions. Nyx doesn'tt have the frame of reference to imagine or comprehend what is happening to her, which makes for some really interesting writing. We can literally see the gears in her mind turning as she tries to understand the events and put them in a context that makes any sense from her perspective.

At the same time her "antagonist" (I use this word in a very broad sense) is so dispassionate, distant and alien that I hesitate to event call them "cynical", because they don't seem to follow normal pattern of thinking. In actual fact in the first draftt of this brief introduction I described this entity as a "it", almost an object rather than a living creature. Hats off to the autthor to be able to pull such a writing stunt, which eludes even some professional writers.

Now, on to the negatives... the story is unfinished. Like many others tales, we never got a really satisfing conclusion. Part 2 provided some much needed context and some really great bits of Nyx interacting with the world, trying and failing to adjust to her new body, but this was not enough. Part 1 ended on a great cliffhanger, teasing a great conflict to come and, evern after 11 years I still hope to see it one day.

There are stories that are long-winded epics, with so many ideas, situations and novelties that you simply don't know where to start looking... and there are tiny stories that hit you right on the head with exactly the kind of content that you love and you can't help but re-reading them time and again without ever getting tired.

The Night Before The Big Day by JKIJ

is one of those stories.

First of all, I know I'm a minority, but I'm a sucker for "slice of life" kind of stories. Big events, epic scale battles and superwomen taking over the world are great, but I think they require a lot of preparation, a significant and constant build-up to get a really satisfying pay-off. Slice of life stories, on the other hand are little, self-contained (often charming) moments that show us the human behind the superhuman. For comics aficionados among you, yes, I'm a huge sucker for Roger Stern and Mark Gruenwald's work on Captain America.

Of course this a small story, written for one short format workshop aptly titled "A Superwoman Walks in a Bar", and I'm really struggling to keep this presentation spoiler-free and shorter than the actual story. JKIJ freely admitted that the original version was much longer and much more detailed, but he was forced to cut it down to fit the word limit of the workshop. Even so the characters are well defined in a few lines, the action has some really impressive moments and the ending uses one of my favorite twists ever (no, I'm not going to spoil it).

The story has a prequel, published roughly a year later called "A Healer's Origin", which presented the main heroine in a much more complete way. I consider these two stories to be inseparable (albeit perfectly readable on their own) and this brings me to one of the point of interest. It's an open segret that we, as readers and fans, often cater to a very small subset of powers we love. Super-strength is one of the usual suspects, invulnerability and flight are close behind, but the focus of this particular character is on one of the most underused powers ever: healing.

Think about it for a minute: how many supers can fly? How many have super-strength? But how many can heal?

It's truly refreshing to see this power displayed front and center (mostly in the prequel I admit) and I still hope to see another chapter of this character somehow, someway.

The spooky season is over and now it's time to cast your vote.

Which of the entries for our "Becoming the Costume" workshop is your favorite?

The pool will run for two weeks until the 23:59 PM (GMT) of Tuesday the 16th of Novemeber 2021.

After that the publication of our usual Spotlight feature will resume.

Please, leave any comment, compliment and feedback under the individual stories or in the Workshop Feedback thread. Meanwhile the votes goes down here.