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Hello to all my fellow writers out there!

I have some major news regarding the Story Embers forum. It’s not bad news, but it may come as sad news to some. Seasons come and go, and we will be making changes to the site, so I wanted to let you all know in advance.

When we launched the forum 5 years ago, we dreamed of making it a thriving community where we facilitated important and engaging conversations, but very soon we realized we didn’t have the energy to keep the forum as active, fun, and deep/productive as we wanted it to be.

For years, we fought to keep it alive because we have personally experienced the value of an online Christian writers’ community.

Despite this, we recently decided that it was time to retire the forum.

Our reasons mainly boil down to two issues.

First, we on the Story Embers team have been trying to narrow our focus, keeping Story Embers sustainable while best serving our audience. To make time to do the /best/ things, we need to sacrifice a couple /good/ things.

Four key initiatives that are taking our time and energy right now are:
. Bringing in Christian novelists for live Q&A panel discussions.
. Honing the focus and depth of our blog articles.
. Continuing to make our summits amazing.
. Making Story Embers more sustainable for those of us running the ship long term.

Secondly, we believe forum members may have better experiences on other online Christian writer communities. Over the years, activity has dwindled some, while other online communities have grown. While this may be an uncomfortable transition, we hope it will be the impetus to land you somewhere even better for you long term.

We are not closing the forum right away. We will gently close the forum down in one month.

There are other Christian writing communities both online and in-person we would encourage you to join. If you know of a good one, please post about it below! You can search for online forums, social media groups, and best of all in-person writers groups. You could even start your own writer’s group or forum. (However, I would discourage anyone trying to start an unofficial SE forum and moving everyone over there, because a good forum needs a trusted public person to moderate it.)

Three online forums we would recommend are:
. Authormedia.social – This online forum is run by Thomas Umstadtt, host of The Christian Publishing Show as well as The Novel Marketing Podcast. It is a more “serious” community and welcoming for writers across generations and genres.
. ACFW (American Christian Fiction Writers) – This is a premier paid (but relatively cheap) community. Benefits include, but are not limited to, access to online groups as well as local chapters.
. Realm Makers – Realm Makers is a faith-based conference for writers of speculative fiction, but more to the point, they have a very active Facebook group.

That’s all for now.

Thanks everyone for making this an amazing forum!