Council of the Eternal Hiatus logo featuring an hourglass with sand filling the bottom half

Council of the Eternal Hiatus

About Us

The Council of the Eternal Hiatus (COTEH) is a queer inclusive Discord community for readers and writers of webserials created on March 12, 2020. As a reader community, we focus on sharing our enjoyment of webserials and other media, including traditionally published books, films, TV shows, anime, and manga. As a writer community, we focus on craft and uplifting newer writers in the webserial community across all platforms.We're roughly 1,500 members strong and growing. Come join us!

Contact us:

Publishing Guides

Our community believes in providing resources to uplift other writers. Since the road to self-publishing and/or indie publishing starting from Royal Road can feel opaque, our community has worked on creating guides to make the process more transparent. These guides are subject to random updates, and we hope to offer more guides in the future.

Self-Promo

So you want to Self-Promote in COTEH? You've come to the right place! Authors benefit more from self promotion when there are more readers, and so the more readers we can invite to the server, the more readers there will be to see your work.

Here is what we ask:

  1. Shout out the server in either your latest chapter or the backmatter of the work you're shouting

  2. Complete this Self Promo Approval Request form to get the Self Promo role

  3. Once approved, you can promote your work once a week in #✨︱promotion

How to shout out the server:

In your author's note at the beginning or end of a chapter or in the backmatter of your published book, please introduce the server and include this invite link: https://discord.gg/nw9GNE2Qjb

  • You can also use this COTEH logo

  • We also recommend including a pitch about the server that describes your experience as a writer and/or reader

How to self-promote once you have the role:

  1. Include a link to your story

  2. Provide a short pitch about your story using one of the following categories without repeating the same one in the same month (and we encourage you to write a new pitch each time):

  • General

  • Themes

  • Tropes

  • Characters

  • Inspiration

  • Worldbuilding

  • Story Lore

Critique Partner LFG

Critique is a valuable tool for refining our writing, seeing things we've missed, and gaining confidence when we're feeling down about our stories! This is a chance for you to bring parts of your story to a partner or small group of people, with specific questions or concerns, and to get meaningful, constructive feedback from them. Having a monthly team for looking over a story is only going to make that story stronger!

Here's how it works:

We assemble teams of between 2 and 4 people to work together, with a minimum commitment to critique around 8,000 words/partner over the course of a month. In the spirit of good critique, we’re focusing on positive feedback, an environment where you don’t need to defend your work, and an emphasis on how a section makes us feel rather than trying to rewrite someone else's work.We follow Mary Robinette Kowal's Guide to Manuscript Critiques and aspire to have critique groups like the one discussed in Season 9, Episode 37's Writing Excuses Podcast titled "Training A Critique Group, with Kathleen Dalton Woodbury." It's a 20-minute podcast worth listening to if you want to give and receive solid critique from the perspective of moderating critique groups. (Warning: There is a spoiler for The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern, so if you're planning on reading it, skip the book of the week.)

Here's how to join:

  1. Grab the role for critique groups from #📝︱role-assignment

  2. Fill out the Google Form linked in #information for July when available

  3. Check back once the critique partners/teams are released to find your House

  4. Read and critique each others’ work in your House Forum or Voice Chat

  5. Do it again the next month if you liked the experience!

Sprints & Spirits

Sprints & Spirits is a scheduled sprinting period where we run back-to-back 15-minute writing sprints using the Sprinto bot for anyone to join along. We also invite the spirits of dead authors to do the writing for us, but they never seem to show up.

Here's how it works:

A writing sprint is an exercise with a set amount of time to write. You report your word count at the beginning of the sprint and then again at the end of the sprint to compare how much you wrote with other sprinters. The idea is to foster writing camaraderie and competition!For Sprints & Spirits, you can step in for one or two sprints, or you can stay for the whole time. Let the spirits guide you on that one.

Here's the schedule:

None scheduled for 2024 so far.