TO ALL FAN FICTION AUTHORS:

Hello everyone,

It's been a bumpy week or so, but you now see that we have a very smooth running server that is serving up your pages faster than ever (we have 3rd party speed measurements evaluating this). You've probably also found the handy-dandy little tool that allows you to print pages of stories and the equally cool tool that allows you to go to the author's previous and next posts.

We're not done adding fun things. We have two more HUGE and one small improvement coming and a request as well.

Huge Improvement #1 Pairings: YES, finally--you will be able to search by pairings! You will be able to check off which characters you want to search by, and you will get results for whatever combo you put in. Happy day! :-)

Now, for this to WORK, we need each of you authors to go to the "Edit Fan Fiction Story" page and select the pairings for each of your stories. Yes, we realize many of you will need to spend a chunk of time doing this--but readers will be able to find your stories more efficiently. Put on the headphones and pour a glass of your favorite beverage and the time will fly. ;-)

Huge improvement #2 Rich Text Editor: You will be able to format your text--color, bold, font, italics with just a click of a button. You'll see this where you add stories.

You will be able to easily format your stories without html. Think of it as a web-based word processor where you can format your text--color, bold, font, italics with just a click of a button. There is soooo much more. Take a sneak peek of this demo!

We added one small but useful improvement, as well. After reading a story that you found on a search results page, you will now have a link to take you back to the search results.

Lastly, our request.. We think it is imperative to keep this site FREE FOR ALL USERS. To do this, we have to fund all our costs--including all these improvements--through advertising. It's a trade off we have to make, and we'd rather go with the one that costs nothing to the visitors of our site. Therefore, please be patient with us as we will be adding some more advertising to the pages that display fan fiction stories.

One final note: we have set up a Fan Fiction Advisory Team who will help facilitate conversation between the writers and readers and the us--the site administrators. More to come on this in another newsletter

Let us conclude with a BIG THANK YOU to all the talented writers. Your contributions keep many fans happy between episodes and especially between seasons.

Thank you, and enjoy the new tools!

L-word.com Team

PS Please take the "survey" on our site that appears in an ad space, and please encourage your USA readers to do the same. It will be a ***huge*** help with the advertising company and will help us obtain better rates. Thank you!