The new Claw & Quill intends to be a community site for writers and readers of fantastic fiction. It specifically caters to anthropomorphic characters and themes—there will be no formal content restriction, but contributors are expected to share that interest.
Create an archive and a home page for your work, with personal profiles and easy links to social networking and blogging platforms you’re already using. Do you have pen names? You can create multiple profile pages, with completely separate content.
C&Q lets you mark stories as “drafts,” which you can keep completely private, show just to a select circle of readers, or make available to the general workshop pool for critique. Stories marked as “final” will be viewable to everyone, and may be selected by C&Q editors as “featured” stories on the site’s front page.
With an account on the system, you can track and search for stories in a variety of ways: search based on story content, tags, authors, similarity to other stories you like, or the recommendation of friends or site editors. C&Q will even recommend new stories to you based on the criteria you’ve given. And, of course, you can also block stories based on similar criteria.
Authors (and readers) can maintain journals on their profile pages that others can respond to; readers can have conversations about stories; and users can start public conversations on other topics. All discussions can be tagged and searched just like stories can.
This has been a long time coming, for a variety of reasons. Work is really underway now. If you’d like to send along an idea, comment, or question, please send it to the email address of “info” at this domain.
C&Q will need volunteers in the following areas:
Updated 2009-03-16
© 2009 Watts Martin