Nicole Harper wrote:
Reiyen!
Wow. Being Captain sounds like fun! How much time to you have to spend here? Can you tell me a little bit of history about this place?
An Art gallery?!? Really? I'll have to find it! Which way do I go? This place is very much like a large house or library, so big you can get lost in it!
And it's awesome!
Being a Captain is fun, I suppose. I have had the yellow for long enough that it doesn't feel super special, but it comes in handy very frequently. I didn't always, but I get online pretty much daily these days since some bureaucrat type jobs just turned up and I have work to do again behind the scenes (in the depths of the secret places, far beyond the sight of mortals... or just in another room...).
[Edit: I found the Art Gallery. It's over here:
http://holyworlds.org/artwork/gallery/view.php?id=6. Don't ask me how to use it... but if you do need help do feel free to ask me to find someone to help you
]
Oh, and in answer to the question you asked Elanor about how open we are about regular lives and pennames and such...
It is true many of us here go by pen names. Reiyen is a principal character in the first big fantasy story I wrote. Elanor is not Lady Elanor's IRL name. The way it worked out for me was that some people around here I worked with a lot or hung out with a lot in the chat room I "got to know" by their fake names. Eventually, it just happened that we found each other on Facebook, or needed another way to communicate, or whatnot. Some people guard their identities quite closely (I used to keep my real name fairly secret, but it's not hard to find these days). Some do for a while and then when they adjust to being around they give their real names. Some go by real names. So basically that's a long way of saying the culture here doesn't push people in any direction of being real all the time or having an alternate name and keeping your IRL identity secret. When I joined Sci-Fi it was weeks before I told them I was Reiyen from Fantasy. They even thought I was a girl for a while over there, for a while. So handle your IRL identity as you choose.
There is an official history that I and a few helpers (I do them injustice by forgetting their names) wrote up, but nothing has been added to it for probably a year or more, so it is more like a snippet of Holy Worlds history. That document I could go and dig up, but I am too lazy so I will just give you a brief accounting of it as I know it. But before I do, let me just remind you that time works in a funny way on the internet, as you may know, depending on how many other communities you are involved in. Holy Worlds is unlike social networks in that it isn't (usually) grounded with your real life in any way, so time passes here sometimes very slowly (a normal conversation that could be had in seven minute IRL might take a week here) and sometimes very fast (you get online some day and, lo and behold, the chatroom has been redesigned, or we have an Art Gallery, or whatever). So history is funky here. But enough of my nerdy archivist coming out...
The forum started sometime in 2009 (I have forgotten the date, I believe it to be in September, but that does not stop us from celebrating its birthday in other months...), founded as the personal project of one Sir Emeth Mimetes. Originally a small enclave for his group of worldbuilding friends, Sir Emeth and his notable friends did deep worldbuilding and theory discussing for some time, including his unique invention of "Essence Mapping," a technique fully understood by few, which you can still find being discussed in some room around here I am sure. The forum population then shifted as it became well-known on the Rebelution (
Do Hard Things of the younger Harris brothers) forums, and a bunch of energetic writers appeared. I arrived in November of 2010 (a time otherwise insignificant except for the fact that I am telling this story and so I get to make myself a character in it). Now from there I don't recall dates well, because of that funny way time passes on the internet once you're a part of it. By time I got around, we already had a Science-Fiction sister forum, which had a small population of dedicated writers of its own, many of whom were also here on Fantasy.
As that rush of people who arrived in 2010-2011 "came of age" on the forums and had found their way into leadership positions (time and quality posting does that to people) the ambition of the organization redoubled. We added a Historical Fiction sister forum, which had its own, smaller, set of users. We restarted (again) the Community Story. We had 3 chatrooms (one for each forum, of course). We had a Newsletter (I wrote the Trivia section, go figure). We had an Art Gallery, and a monthly art contest for photomanipulators. Holy Worlds grew very fast in the sense that it started doing a lot more things.
Then all went quiet for a variety of reasons. The simplest of these reasons is that many of those ambitious (
Do Hard Things) leaders got older and had more IRL responsibilities, that kept them from working as much on Holy Worlds, and so projects were neglected. Another is that many of them had grown out of writing some time before, and so there wasn't as much story or worldbuilding discussion going on. And it is the nature of forums to have bursts of popularity followed by quiet. And our supreme leader, Sir Emeth, became unable to continue running the place because of reasons (a long story I would rather not share here; if you go archive diving like I do, it won't be hard to dig up). We attempted to unify all three forums so that you could have on login name for all of them (as we do now) but that didn't go over as simply as planned. As activity waned, we moved all content here onto the "Fantasy" site (as you can see in the web address) so that it would be simpler, leaving three shells of forums elsewhere, to which we could return if we choose to do so later. To be honest even I disappeared from here for sometime, and the long quiet began (or so it seemed to me, since i wasn't around).
And now I have come back to Holy Worlds in its hour of need: Reiyen, Super Bureaucrat, Historian, and Archivist Extraordinaire!
(Basically, I like to make a big deal out of anything I do)
(Oh, and if you are looking for a most amusing story, just search for the thread Green Bar? and read it. Much of it may no longer make sense... but I still laugh inside when I think about it. Then you will know just a slice of what life was like here years ago).
I too am new to the fantasy world and love to read and write (when I have time). What are your interests and goals? What audience are you writing for? We will try to help you and encourage you as much as possible. I am working on my first fantasy piece myself. What I can tell you are the things that I have done, talk to the others on here. Research! ALOT! watch movies and study them both artistically and try to picture how you would word and describe the movie and their scenes in words. Be open to criticism and instruction 
) and I always found everyone really friendly, so settled in pretty fast! 
Does anyone know why it won't work for me?
I guess it gives you time to think about what you're writing as you type, though. How far have you gotten, on the actual writing?