While I appreciate this site is only in Beta, am I the only one who's frustrated that we can't create an author's profile or search properly or message each other? And there's no way to raise problems, questions or suggestions with Fictish, no 'Contact Us' and, in fact, no info about who/what Fictish really at all.

So, in the meanwhile, shall I start a thread?

I'm ShortAndSweet. I came upon Fictish by accident as it's not really promoted. I'm female, an early-retired Computer Specialist, an ex-carer and from England - which you may have noticed from my British spelling and my iffy American dialogue - specifically the North-East, Geordieland as we call it.

A decade ago I used to write a lot of fan fiction, so I've done my apprenticeship, but I'm strictly in this for fun only so I don't need any literary criticism just the occasional enthusiastic encouragement if you can manage it. Currently I find I have a lot of time on my hands so I thought I'd give the creative writing another try.

Please feel free to comment. Please also feel free to add your self-introduction to this thread. I don't know whether this sort of 'story' is allowed on this platform but, hey, I might get to hear from a monitor (if there are any).

I'm honestly pretty stoked about Fictish being pretty small right now; the less people there are to read my work and comment on it the more I feel... safe. I don't know, I've never been a social media guy but I will admit I've been putting off all the social stuff for far too long. I do wish to make connections inside of a community with similar interests as mine.

Anyway, I'm Deceased Anew, but it's kind of a mouthful so you can just call me John, a 20-something year old man from Central America trying to regain his love of reading and, most importantly, writing. I loved reading as a kid and spent some amount of time to writing fan-fiction about the video-games that defined my childhood, but that waned rather rapidly as I grew up. During high-school, me and a friend got pretty hyped at the idea of making our own fan-fiction about our favorite pieces of media (and also create our own worlds of fiction), but we got stuck on the world-building details and never actually got to writing any piece of story and, eventually, we both moved on from nearly two dozen projects we were trying to manage at the same time (I know, we were too ambitious and naive).

Also, shout-out to Luuk280 on Deviant Art for doing all the artwork for those unfinished stories. He's a great dude and a really cool artist.

Recently though, I've been trying to get back into the habit of reading —at least one chapter a night, currently going through the first "MistBorn" book (it's awesome)— and trying to push myself in small ways to regain my love for writing stories... and also up a bit my social confidence. Finding this site at the bottom of Word Hippo and its low-stakes format seemed like a good starting point to push myself creatively, too.

Wherever you are right now, I hope you have a good rest of your day or night and I wish you happy writing.

God bless.