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Welcome to the New Year! We are wrapping up the last of the Writing Tips before launching our new weekly article feature. Be sure to check these out and let Comicality know what you think!

It has, yes. The Story Banners are an option for the promoted authors, yes. I'd say more a Publisher (Gay Authors) Standard. Please see the topic in Writing Circle I've made about this.

Only the Author and Staff can see unpublished chapters.

@Timothy M. Thank you for reporting that formatting issue. I'll have the staff work with him to correct the problem as that looks awful. And no, there is already a Story Detail (Table of Contents) page that does exactly that function. Chapter Text is for chapter text ONLY. People that are not following this will eventually be contacted because this is a display quality issue.

I usually use the hammer but you keep telling me to be nicer

A great time to Review the story folks. Read and Review. Encourage the authors to write more... or come back in some cases. (also a great time for authors still around to let us know the description and the tags so we can update the story) @Graeme

There is a chapter title field for the chapter title and the chapter text field is for chapter text only. There is no need for the title to be repeated in the chapter. As a general rule, text sizing and style should be stripped when you paste into the editor. As a side note, there is also a "Chapter Note" and "Chapter End Note" for author notes. Again with these, the Chapter Text field is for Chapter Text ONLY. Please avoid putting anything other than cleanly formatted chapter text in the chapter text field. It's likely that it will cause issues with the chapter text controls and require you to fix in the future.

I thought I'd start off 2018 with a reminder to everyone about computer security. In the past year, we've seen major security breaches that gave away pretty much everyone's personal financial information and worse. It was bad, to put it mildly. So, first, I'm not a security expert but I'm offering some common sense items for everyone. Use different passwords on all of your accounts. Use Strong passwords( 8+ characters, mix of uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers and special characters like $#@!) If this sounds scary to you, use a password manager. I use LastPass personally as it works on all my devices. Use Two-Factor Authentication on your major email addresses and all financial accounts. This could be an authenticator app, using the option to get codes texted to you, or setting up security questions. Keep your computer software up to date! You can change your password in your Account Settings. It shows you how strong your password is as you type it. Go for green! (a password Strength indicator shows up when you start typing) Gay Authors offers two-factor authentication as well. Either questions or the Google Authenticator App. Or both. Further resources from MIT: https://ist.mit.edu/security/tips I also use Secunia PSI for making sure all the programs on my machine are updated. It's free for home use: http://learn.flexerasoftware.com/SVM-EVAL-Personal-Software-Inspector

Me too! But reading on a mobile device is great. And if you want to avoid the ads, get more stories, and keep us updating and open, there is Premium:

Gay Authors uses a responsive web design that works quite well on mobile. Developing a separate app would not be a cost-effective way to spend our limited resources at this time.

Happy New Years Everyone! We'd like to thank everyone here at Gay Authors for a great 2017! Looking forward to the new year, we hope 2018 is the best ever for Gay Authors.

As a big fan of history, this is a great reminder of the past while tying into the chain reaction anthology theme. Great essay!

A good little short story with a great message!

It certainly evokes the feeling of the darkness of winter.

This week, we start posting articles by Comicality. These are in our Writing Tips category in the story system. When we catch up on all those tips, we'll start posting new ones directly right in this blog. Keep an eye out! In the meantime, check out these tips by our very own Comicality:

There is a lagtime and caching thing going on, most likely. Not all of this stuff is live. I'll make a note to check deeper into it when there is time available.

It's never too late to swing back and leave a review for the authors and for people that go to read the stories in the future

@Timothy M. I am glad you liked it

Um... Just scroll down past the ebook.

We hope you had a great Christmas! As we march closer to the end of 2017, did you get the chance to read our previous holiday anthologies? Our 2004 Christmas Anthology: https://www.gayauthors.org/stories/browse/category/7-2004-anthology-christmas/ Our 2006 Winter Anthology Blizzard Theme: https://www.gayauthors.org/stories/browse/category/11-winter-blizzard/ Our 2015 Secret Santa Short Story contest: https://www.gayauthors.org/stories/browse/category/80-2015-secret-santa-short-story/ Also, this story was strongly recommended: We'd also like to remind all authors that we have four anthology themes for 2018 and a novella contest: Contests 2018 Summer Novella Anthology - Due April 15th, 2018 Anthologies 2018 Spring Anthology: Now or Never - Due May 15th 2018 Spring Anthology: Encounters - Due May 15th 2018 Fall Anthology: Fight Back - Due Nov 15th 2018 Fall Anthology: Good Intentions - Due Nov 15th

There seems to be an unwritten rule out there for websites and publications everywhere that the last week of the year is the time to do a year in review wrap-up sort of post. This is the one for Gay Authors. 2017. What a year! This was the year we jumped 50 versions of software to finally break free of the 3.4 version of the forum software and break into the world of 4.1 and then 4.2 versions of the software. We've had hundreds of Stories archive software updates in the same timeframe as we've worked through all the bugs from going through a complete software rewrite and carrying a ton of existing data along. The good news? The biggest part is behind us for now. It took considerably longer than we wanted to get where we are, but the system is mostly working as intended. There are some outstanding notification bugs and quirky language that will be the target of a patch sometime soon. The important thing here is that we made it! We had a much smoother transition this time around. It's time to look ahead at 2018. Just what is coming? Blogs and Newsletters: Sunday Weekly Wrap-ups Blogs - These will continue. Sunday Newsletter -This will continue Monday - No change Tech Tuesday Blogs - I'm hoping to keep this going as a weekly feature to highlight features on the site and new features that will be coming. Wed Blogs - No change Thursday Anthology Blogs - We will be featuring a previous anthology (or two) on a weekly basis. We will also be reminding authors about new anthologies and contests coming up. Friday Prompts - This will continue Saturday - Writing Tips. We will be wrapping up the previously posted tips next week and then we start with new content provided by Comicality, a (20 year!) veteran of writing on the web. We'll also feature other author's tips along the way. Tech updates We are testing the bug fixes for notifications and wonky notification wording now and hope to patch that soon. This version is also going to streamline the story pages so we have a standard listing everywhere instead of the odd front page we have now. Very large advanced search improvements will be added as well to make it much easier to sort and filter stories in the system. This will include being able to do so by author. Example, if you want to look at all of Comicality's Fantasy Stories, the filter bar on his author page will let you do that with a couple of clicks. It will look similar to the filters you see on the Activity Streams. The major update after that will be Reading Lists. This will allow you to have "Favorite Stories", "Favorite Authors", "Reading History", "To Read", "Recommended" and custom lists of stories and authors. The intention is to make things clear and easy for you. The Reading History list, which will be private unless you choose to share, will include the chapter you were last reading to help make finding things easier. We'll go into more details when we get closer. The major update after that will be aimed at authors. We are working to provide far more robust stats on what people are reading so an author can see how they are doing. We'll also be working to provide more stats for authors on what readers are looking for. This will appeal to authors who like writing for the market and challenging themselves to appeal to that market will differentiate themselves. We'll go into more details when we get closer to this one as well. The final currently planned update for Stories is to improve the Story Queue. This will automate some of the rules and let us do mass updates. For example, the plan is for you to be able to post all your chapters at once so they are in the queue, and then you can just click a couple of buttons saying to post weekly on Friday at 9 am. Stuff like that. We know it is a bit tedious posting multiple chapters currently. We'll get a lot more into this later in 2018. The forum software 4.3 updates is also expected earlier in the new year. The only announced features we are aware of right now are Improved search, Emojis support and Club enhancements to make them more visible when they have activity. We'll post more as we know about it in our Tech Tuesday posts. My personal 2018 Stuff: I am planning on writing an entry for the anthologies and novella contest for this year. I am hoping to complete my Harry Potter and the Parliament of Dreams story finally. 16 years is really procrastinating. I am also hoping to spend more time writing in general. And I'm making an active effort to be posting on the site regularly. A good portion of that will be with the various writer clubs. Thanks to everyone for making 2017 so great for us! Here is to all of us having an even better 2018!

It could also be you need a driver update. Go to Settings, Updates and check for windows updates and make sure everything is installed.

Everyone here at Gay Authors wishes all of you and your families the best on this day. Merry Christmas!

Week 3 of our Writing Tips Article Review is upon us. This week, we have an article from Don H and sat8997.