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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 2,000 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.

Writing Resources

Our community believes in sharing resources because what might have helped one writer may help another. Here are some writing resources that members of COTEH contributed to the community.These resources are subject to random updates.

In addition to our Comprehensive Resource Document, we keep resources that members of our community have found helpful organized in our 📁︱coteh-wiki:

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:

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

How to self-promote once you have the role:

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!Joining our Critique Houses 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 as a reader rather than trying to rewrite someone else's work as a writer.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:

Spirit Sprints

Spirit Sprints 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 Spirit Sprints, 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:

Every Friday and Saturday October–December 2024 in #👻︱spirit-sprints. Please check Events for exact times.

Team Leaderboard

Our community leaderboard is a team-based tracking sheet so that you can get into a daily writing routine and have fun with your writing friends at the same time.You can join an already existing team and make new friends, or you can start your own team. You can track your word count by month and over the course of the year. If competition works for you, then this leaderboard should have your name on it.

Here's how it works:

Note: Please do not remove or move your name once added - it's fine if you don't write anything on a particular month!

Want one for your writing community?

Grab one here from Marrow. Credit where credit is due!

COTEH Writing Month

Every month in COTEH is a writing month, but in the spirit of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), November is especially about starting and/or finishing your story.Do you have a project that you've been wanting to start but haven't yet? Do you work better with a deadline or extra external motivation to finish your story?COTEHWriMo is for you.

Here's the goal:

This challenge is meant to be an opportunity to finish a draft of your story in one month alongside other people who are also finishing a draft of their story.Once your draft is finally finished, receiving feedback by moving into our Critique Houses is a solid next step.

Here's the challenge:

Here's how it works:

Here's to join:

Add your name and project title to the COTEHWriMo Tracker linked in #📇︱coteh-wri-mo to get started.

Infographics

The COTEH team has been working on a series of infographics to cover the writing journey into being a career author (at least the most common one in this space): getting your book out there, first on RoyalRoad and then on Amazon.We realize information on this is pretty limited, and knowing all your options is the first step toward getting a fair deal, so we're looking to make available all the information we can.

Feel free to share these outside of the server.