MY PEOPLE! I am here-what, Peta? Excuse me a sec, folks. *furious whispering* Ok, fine. *sigh*

OUR PEOPLE! ;) Peta & I are psyched to bring you the second challenge of our Nine Lives Summer Survival Series! It's time to get our Caryl on, folks! *intense dramatic music*

The theme for this challenge is 'What If?' I'm ging to present two scenarios. You guys will have 2 weeks to write a little somethin' somethin' using one of the scenarios. Sounds good? All right, time for the down low:

• THE PROMPT: It’s a Caryl "What If?" scenario! You have 2 options available:
  
  
  
  • Option 1: What if our merry band of heroes never found the prison?
  
  
  • Option 2: What if Carol & Daryl went on a run & got lost somehow?
  
  
  
  


• It must be at least 100 words.


• THE DEADLINE: All entries are due on July 31, 10pm MST. (Yes, I'm making you all work around my ridiculous time zone. I regret nothing!) Everything will be posted on August 1.


• THE RULES: Here is how you enter the challenge:




• Send a PM to myself or Peta stating that you’re going to enter the challenge. This is very important! If we don’t get a PM, you won’t be on the list and you kinda need to be on the list for this one. ;)


• Write your fic!!


• DO NOT UPLOAD IT YET!! Wait until July 31 to upload your fic – we will be suspending automatic validation for that day for all authors who enter the challenge.


• Submission Day is July 31, post your fic. It will not appear on the website, but will enter our validation queue. Make sure you submit it under the Nine Lives Challenge category!


• Posting Day is August 1 – We will post the Master List and post all of the challenge entries so everything shows up at once. That way, we’re all surprised by what we get to read! Any challenge fics that are posted before July 31 will be deleted.

We also decided that, if one of our scenarios sparks something for you that could grow beyond a simple one-shot, just let us know! We will accept new WIPs with at least 2 chapters as part of the challenge submissions, so once the challenge is over you can continue growing your new story.

So there you have it! Get crazy, get kooky, get on it! We've had so much good Caryl news lately and I can feel more on the horizon. Let's celebrate by stretching our imaginations and celebrating our OTP!

If you have any questions, holler at me or Peta. Let's have some fun!

Greetings and salutations to all our members, old and new, young and small, tall and… something else. The days are long and warm, the sun is shining but alas, the lack of The Walking Dead, and more particularly Caryl, tears at our souls. Never fear! We have a solution for all our hiatus withdrawals. The magnificent Peta and I are pleased to announce the Nine Lives Summer Survival Challenge Series has begun! *cue dramatic music*

This will be a series of challenges that we have worked out, designed to amp up our creativity and bring tons more fun to the awesomeness that is Nine Lives. Guess what we picked for our first challenge? The oh-so-popular, always delicious… MCREEDUS!

Here is the scoop: I’m gonna give you a prompt in a minute. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to write something including the details given in the prompt. Easy peasy lemon squeezy, right? Now, to the important stuff! 

• THE PROMPT: It’s ComiCon time! The story must take place at or around a con of your choosing and must include a photo op. It must be at least 100 words.


• THE DEADLINE: All entries are due on July 14, 10pm MST. Everything will be posted on July 8.


• THE RULES: Here is how you enter the challenge:
  
  
  
  • Send a PM to myself or Peta stating that you’re going to enter the challenge. This is very important! If we don’t get a PM, you won’t be on the list and you kinda need to be on the list for this one. ;)
  
  
  • Write your fic!!
  
  
  • DO NOT UPLOAD IT YET!! Wait until July 14 to upload your fic – we will be suspending automatic validation for that day for all authors who enter the challenge.
  
  
  • Submission Day is July 14, post your fic. It will not appear on the website, but will enter our validation queue. Make sure you submit it under the Nine Lives Challenge category!
  
  
  • Posting Day is July 15 – We will post the Master List and post all of the challenge entries so everything shows up at once. That way, we’re all surprised by what we get to read! Any challenge fics that are posted before July 14 will be deleted.
  
  
  
  

That’s it! This is a great chance for us to embrace our random creativity and see just what wild paths we can all take from the same starting point.

This is just the beginning – we’ve got lots of challenges lined up to take us through this hiatus! So if this isn’t quite your thing, stay tuned, because we’ve got more on the way!

A little while back a few members of Elysian Fields made a couple of suggestions for the prompt section over there, so I did a bit of work to fulfill their requests. Megan asked me to bring the changes over here as well. When you look at prompts, you'll notice that at the bottom there are 2 new options. If you see a prompt that piques your interest that you might want to respond to at a later date, just click the first option [Save this prompt] and the prompt will be stored on your saved prompt list, which is accessible on your account info page. If you see a prompt that you don't want to take on, but feel like it's a great idea that you'd love to see come to fruition, click [Second this prompt]. You can see how many members have seconded a prompt on the top row next to the number of responses. In the example below, you can see a '+1' because one member decided that my prompt is awesome and should definitely be brought to life (and they're right!). If 2 members seconded the prompt , it would show a '+2' and so on...

Also, on the prompt browse page, there are new sort options. Before, you could only sort alphabetically or by most recent, but now you can sort alphabetically by the prompt author, by most responses (i.e. the number of stories created from each prompt) or most wanted (i.e. the number of members who have seconded a prompt).

As self-proclaimed Queen of Promotion for All Caryl Events, I have another seriously cool tumblr event to share! However, this one is actually... a McReedus challenge! *cue the dramatic music* This is being hosted by our friends at BetterTogether. Check out the challenge details below:

• Submissions are open from May 7 - May 18. Voting on the submitted entries is open from May 19-24.


• All entries must be based from at least one option of the provided list of song lyric prompts. For the full list of prompts, click here.


• There is no word limit or limit to how many of the lyrics you can use in your entry. The only specific rule regarding content is that the lyric prompt used is to be “quoted" in the text directly.


• You can submit your entry by emailing it to sanja_marie@hotmail.com


• All entries will be posted on the BetterTogether tumblr on May 19th. The entries will be posted completely anonymously for the vote to make it as fair as possible.


• Voting is open from May 19 - 24.

This information is taken directly from the BetterTogether's McReedus Challenge page.

Have fun, McReedus writers!

This is cross-posted from Elysian Fields, so forgive me if you've seen it before.

We now have a new way to contact other members here at Nine Lives. Before, the member contact link had you send an email, and a few people mentioned to me that they were leery of sending out their email addresses. So, after much coding (and a little frustration), we now have a new method. When you click the envelope icon in a user's profile, it will allow you to send a private message. The message will be stored here, and will not force you to include your email address.

When you receive a private message, you will be sent an email notification with a link to the PM (don't reply to the email because the PM sender won't see your reply). Also, you'll know you have a new PM because there will be a little envelope icon in the top menu (the envelope wont be there if you don't have any unread messages):

If you hover over the envelope, it will tell you how many new private messages you have, and if you click on it, it will take you to your inbox. There is also a link to your inbox on your account info page. Once you're at the inbox you can view and reply to messages.

This was a big project for me, so the possibility that I've forgotten something or messed something up is definitely there. If you notice anything not working as you think it should, be patient and let me know about it (with a PM, perhaps ) . If you have any questions, don't hesitate to ask.

Thanks!

When I first went looking for Caryl fanfiction, I was looking for an archive like I’d been used to in the Buffy fandom, that held all the treasures, new and old, of the fanfic world in my chosen pairing. I didn’t find it, and was more than a little surprised to find I could only read Caryl on private blogs, on fanfiction.net and on AO3. I believe there is a great need to foster community around our ship, gathering all our fantastic fanfiction in one place so that anyone seeking it out can find it easily. With this site I hope to foster that sense of safety within our own community, support for writers and readers with the inclusion of the chat box and chat room, a beta service, a moderated service that helps those entering the fandom to improve their work and thus improving the reading experience of all Carylers that want to read quality fanfiction. What we are about is acceptance and support, love of Carol and Daryl, Melissa and Norman, and hopefully a place where our detractors can recognise that this is not their space to impose upon.

So, please come on in, join up, submit your work, read other people’s work, shout out a hello, get to know the place and above all, ENJOY THE CARYL AND HAVE FUN!

Your administrators for the site are Peta2, Spikeslovebite, Atoizzard, and Fairies Masquerade. If you have any problems, please don’t hesitate to contact us. If you find any hiccups with the site, remember we are new and still ironing things out, so let us know if something doesn’t work. You can follow fic updates on Tumblr at ninelives2.

I hope you all seize this opportunity to build the most kickass Caryl archive there can be.

Stay Safe!