Quills & Ink

For pages with similar titles, see Quill and Ink.
Quills & Ink is a fanfiction archive focused on Lord of the Rings fanfiction and fanfiction about other Tolkien works. It also hosts fanfic from a few other fandoms such as Dark Angel, Firefly, Harry Potter, Star Wars, and The X-Files. The Quills & Ink website included both an archive and forum; the archive was built using eFiction software. Quills & Ink also included a subgroup called Imedhuir, the Sindarin word for "Valley of Dark Dreams," which was "an adult Tolkien/fantasy writers group created by a group of our more bored but talented members."Quills & Ink Homepage, Wayback capture 7 March 2008.
Similar to many other Tolkien archives in the 2000s, Quills & Ink used a splash page as its homepage that warned about potential adult content, including slash fanfiction, and invited visitors to enter only if they were comfortable with such content. The homepage in April 2005 read as follows:
Typical for Tolkien fanfiction archives at the time that hosted a range of stories rather than focusing on a single genre (slash, genfic, or het), Quills & Ink reassures potential readers that content will nonetheless be separated or sortable by genre and that potentially offensive content can be avoided and identified their site as specifically aimed at adult visitors.
== Forum and Submission Guidelines ==
According to a 2005 copy of the site's guidelines, "The main number one Golden Rule of Quills and Ink is to have fun and enjoy yourself."Quills & Ink, Guidelines, Wayback capture 15 April 2005. The forum guidelines and rules for interacting with other members on the site strongly emphasized not stoking drama or bringing personal conflicts onto the site. Flames, trolling, pseuds, religious preaching, and excessive vulgarity were not allowed.
Quills & Ink was a moderated archive where stories had to be approved by a Submissions Panel:
Although relatively open to a variety of stories, Quills & Ink didn't not allow everything. Similar to many archives in the early-mid 2000s, the following stories were banned:
* Stories using an AU label to cover lack of knowledge about the canon
* Mary Sue stories
* MPREG (male pregnancy) stories
* MST (Mystery Science Theater) stories
* Song parodies
* Stories involving underage characters in sexual situations
While rape, noncon, BDSM, and abuse stories were allowed but "will be looked at closely. Those stories using these subjects gratuitously will be rejected. Stories incorporating them sensibly into the plot of the story are acceptable."
The archive did allow several genres that were often banned on Tolkien fanfiction archives at the time, including Girl Falls into Middle-earth stories (though noting that "Those that feature teenagers who giggle a lot and talk about how kewl the canon characters are will be declined"), PWP, crossovers, original fiction, and RPF (real person fiction), though the site stopped accepting RPF sometime before 2007.Quills & Ink, Guidelines, Wayback capture 29 April 2007.
The site's guidelines were originally written with a humorous tone and included rules such as "No peeing on the carpet" and "No feeding the moderators." By 2007, the guidelines had been simplified considerably, which included removing the humorous items from the list.
== References ==
Category:Lord of the Rings Archives
Category:Multifandom ArchivesCategory:2000sCategory:2010s
Category:EFiction