My English proficiency is very poor, so I have to use translation software. I really like the atmosphere of the website and hope it can help me improve my English grades. Thank you to everyone for their assistance and tolerance.

My signature section features a classic poem by Chairman Mao Zedong, which expresses the pursuit of achieving ideal goals, the elimination of enemies, and the unity of the people.

First, some stats:

We had about 450 new members join the site this year.
We had 212 new entries posed to the site this year.
In terms of site events we had the Wing Two contest, and introduce the Writprompt rotation.

To get to the point, this is a downward trend for the Library. In addition to the decreased posting and join rates compared to previous years, I am pretty sure the typical ratings a new piece can expect have gone down (I haven't run the numbers on this myself because Wikidot is terrible for gathering statistics, but it does seem to be a noticeable trend to me eyeballing it). We have had staff members leave. We have had major users leave or step back from activity. Large chunks of the website's work have been self-deleted by their authors. New authors aren't getting attention on their work.

Looking at all this, I want to say: Don't panic, and don't doom. Action needs to be taken to reverse these trends, but these trends are reversible - the site has recovered from far lower periods of activity. Now isn't the time to get caught up worrying, but to try to figure out what concrete steps both staff and users can take to get the site back on a growth-track.

There's been a lot of excellent discussion about what to do about these problems both on the site and in the discord, and the passion and care so many of you have for this place has been evident. While a lot is up in the air right now, and I don't want to make any promises, some of the broad areas staff have been discussing include:

• Improving processes for getting feedback on works
• Increasing awareness of WL with non-users
• Navigation and organization changes to help with discoverability
• A renewed focus on events and collective ways for the community to organize writing

Putting together a timeline for everything here is difficult: This is a hobby for us, and we're all pulled in many directions by life. With that said, we are doing our best to implement what we can, when we can. For better or worse, our two sites do not have a "move fast and break things" culture - we tend to move slowly, through long discussion which can seem like it leads to delays, but is also important for making sure changes are put in place correctly.

In the meantime, there are actions all users, not just staff, can take to help the site grow again. The thing you can do is to be active on the site. Read and vote on new works. Leave comments when you vote. Check the crit forums and give feedback to works that haven't received any yet. Share works you like in the discord, and in non-WL spaces as well: whether it's SCP, or with other people you know. No matter what staff does or implements, it will do very little if new users coming to the site do not feel that their drafts or published works will be read, or if they see days with no new activity in recent posts. If we ourselves are not active on the main site, not reading works, not giving feedback to members, why would anyone else want to come?

With all that said, this still is, in fact, a wonderful website. We have great writers, great users, and great amount of passion for this project we're all engaged in. While we have had hiccups in the past years, I am certain that, looking back, we will find them to be bumps in the road as we continue to expand and develop what we're building here. Challenges and setbacks are inevitable, but it's through them that we're forced to strive forward and become something even better. Thank you all for this past year, and I'm looking forward to seeing what we can do together in the next one.

Author: Ray Bradbury

Genre: Sci-fi, Post-Apocalyptic

Author: Ray Bradbury (again)

Genre: Sci-fi

Description: stregnth! Circus.

Critfreaks-in-making: none

-Styg

Congratulations to our winner from the last WritPrompt rotation, UncannyClown, with the entry patchwork warrior!

For general information on this contest, see the hub page: The WritPrompt Rotation

The Promptening

UncannyClown has delivered our prompt for this coming month of February: Strength: what it is, what it means, what it should look like. A nuanced and timely prompt for where in the world we all find ourselves. Bring us your inner strength, Wanderers!

Important! New this month is a full week of time to gather critique and workshop drafts, entering into the collaborative community on site. And to that end, for all months of WritPrompt going forward, we will be offering a shiny new month-long Discord role to the person with the most critique credits in WritPrompt author posts for the month! Additionally, we will also give each month's CritPrompt champ the ability to select a second prompt for the following month, as a big thank-you for entering enthusiastically in the collaborative writing process. Please see the contest page for further details.

Go forth and WritPromp strong-style! We can't wait to see what you come up with.

Our posting schedule is as follows:

• Writing Period: 2 February 2026 10:00 AM CST (UTC-6) until 16 February 10:00 AM CST
• Critique Period: 16 February 10:00 AM until 23 February 10:00 AM
• Posting and Reading Period: 23 February 10:00 AM until 2 March 10:00 AM

short description: in this debut novel a young woman searches for god and brushes against catholic mysticism while illicitly learning to read and interpret scripture among outcast women in late-13th century flanders. i wont say more but you should read it because it's awesome

Author: John Bois

Genre: Sports, sci-fi maybe

Short Description:

Three sentient satellites watch an evolved version of American Football in a far future where everyone is immortal and nothing but the sports ever changed. A wonderful reflection on entertainment and evolution (or lack thereof). And football.