The first thing you should do is register. It's free, there will be no charges, EVER. This will allow you to choose favorite authors, receive email notifications when those authors update, vote on challenges, and host of other items that will make your reading experience that much more enjoyable.

To register, simply click on the "log in" link on the navigation bar. Click "register." Make sure you read our terms of service. If you agree, then input your email address, username, and password. You may add whatever additional information you choose, but we need those three items as a minimum to register you.

Your Account

The first thing you should do is view your account. Click on "Account information" or "Personal information. Here you can edit your profile, submit a story to our archive, manage your existing stories, view and respond to reviews, manage your favorites, and view your statistics. Leaving story submission alone for the moment, we'll take the smaller functions one at a time.

Edit Personal Information: Add whatever amount of information you're comfortable with. You can let people know that you chat on AOL, MSN, or Yahoo instant messenger; change your password, add to your biography, and add an image that suits you. The image for your bio only should be no larger than 150x150 pixels. I'll get to other images momentarily.

Images: To add an image in your bio, see "manage images." You use the code given there to add an image to your bio.

Age of Consent: You are advised to IMMEDIATELY click the age of consent agreement. I check all members periodically, and if you have not, I will contact you to ask why. If I find out you are under eighteen, I will have to ask you to leave Cipher. This is purely for our legal protection.

Beta Reader: You may click yes or no. If you are confident in your command of the English language and in its correct usage, then you are encouraged to be a beta. You will NEVER be required to beta someone else's work, but it would be very helpful to have as many willing and able betas as possible. Other authors will be able to find you if you click "yes," and if they admire your work, they will likely ask for help with theirs.

Manage Images: This allows you to add images to your stories. I advise you to be sparing with this function. One image per story, and not too enormous. I won't set a max size unless I have to. To use this function, all you do is upload an image from your computer. Click "browse," choose the image, and click "submit." You will be given a code. Copy and paste that code into your story wherever you'd like the image to appear.

View Reviews: Here you can see how many reviews you have, and how many you have responded to. You will need to go to "manage reviews" if you would like to actually respond to a review.

Manage Favorites: Here you can see your favorite authors, stories, and series. You may choose to remove them, but you cannot add an author, story, or series here.

Statistics: An overall look at your bio, status, the number of people who have chosen YOU as a favorite, the number of reads each of your stories has gotten, and so forth.

Submitting a Story

Before submitting anything to Cipher, please read our Submission Rules. Know them. Become one with them. We do not bend or break them for anyone under any circumstances.

When you decide to add a story, go to "Add Story" in your account info section. There you will see the submission rules again. Beneath that are your submission options. Fill out the form as completely as possible. Cipher's Administrators frown on stories without warnings, so be sure to add all applicable warnings to your submission. We will add whatever additional warnings we feel are necessary.

Any author's notes you have should go in the text box provided for the purpose.

Your story itself can be copy/pasted from your home computer, or uploaded. Accepted formats at this point are .txt and .html. If you have questions on how to save your story in one of the accepted formats, please ask in our Forum.

Once you've filled in all the information, make SURE you preview your story. Check it over for spacing and overall appearance. You can use the text editor OR HTML code; both will work. To quickly outline the essential items:

Text formatting: Simply highlight the word or words you want formatted, and click ‘b', ‘i', or ‘u'.

Copy/Paste: You can cut, copy, and paste your text as plain text or directly from MS Word.

Once you have checked over your submission, click "add story." The story will appear in the administrator's validation queue. They will read it, and if it passes muster, validate it. Your story will then appear in our archive.

Cipher's Validation Standards

As has been stated numerous times all over our site, Cipher has very strict guidelines for accepting and publishing fiction. Our first recommendation is that you get a beta. A beta is a proofreader. They check your stories not only for grammar, spelling, and punctuation errors, but also to see that it flows, that the plot is strong, the characterization consistent, and a host of other concerns. A good beta is not your best friend. They will give you honest feedback, even when it hurts your feelings.

We will not restate our submission guidelines, suffice to say: it is not always easy to be validated at Cipher. We do not make judgment on content, pairings, warnings, or plotline, so long as the story contains none of the elements forbidden in the Submission Guidelines. We will NOT accept stories that have many errors in technical writing, toxic Mary Sues, or are rife with passive language and tense shifts.

Technical writing is the quantitative aspect of writing: grammar, spelling, and punctuation.

Every character has the potential to be a Mary Sue, but toxic Mary Sues do little more than irritate your readers. They are guaranteed to irritate the administrators. If the phrase, "But you're so beautiful, how can he resist you?" appears in your story, and the speaker's not being sarcastic, chances are you have a toxic Mary Sue.

Passive language is a pet peeve of the Webmistress. Passive language distances your reader from your story. It happens in every story, on occasion, but if your entire story consists of passive language, we will not validate it.

Tense shifts are the mark of an amateur. If your story is told in past tense, it should not shift to present or future unless your character was reminiscing and has stopped.

A word that should never be used in your submission: cum. Cum is NEVER used except in the Latin sense. Look at this as a foible of the administrators.

If your errors are few and far between, the administrators have no problem with fixing them for you. No one is perfect, and we don't expect perfection. If your errors are numerous, continuous, and you don't seem to be learning to catch them, we will send your story back for you to correct. Our validation process is not intended to be a beta service. We fix small, infrequent errors. Nothing more.

That said, the Webmistress reserves the right to edit or delete any story as she sees fit, with or without notice. She will very, very rarely do anything more than fix a technical error, add a warning, or fix formatting that the administrators missed in validating.

Drabbles, Round Robins, and Series

A drabble is a small, generally plotless submission. It is usually short, and simply put, a scene, a clip of what might be a larger story. A love scene, an action scene, conversation-it does not need to be part of a larger whole, but it should be well-written for all its brevity.

A round robin is a story which all authors can add to. It generally has specific requirements: a word amount, a setting, a snippet of a plot. "Shower Sex in 100" is an excellent example, in which the submission must be exactly 100 words and involve sex in a shower.

A series can be a couple different things. First, it can be a mini-universe within a fandom, where the first author outlines the rules which must be followed. It can be as long or as short as the author wishes. As an example, we could have the "Die Micah Die" series from the Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter fandom. The series will be death scenes in which the character Micah dies. The author of the series can designate it so that other authors can add to it, round-robin style, or keep it as their own so that no one else can add to it. Second, it can be the author's own series, where they continue the plotline from one whole, self-complete story to the next. The functions for adding round robins and series should be intuitive, but if you have difficulty, please ask in our Forum.

Challenges

Cipher's definitive challenge is the Red Reign Challenge, which begins every couple of months. We choose among the submissions for a first-place entry, and award a prize banner as a minimum-depending on the scope of the challenge and the number of entrants. There are occasionally some very nice surprises for our winners.

Anyone may issue a challenge, however, simply by clicking "Challenges" on the navigation bar. Click "Issue a Challenge" and outline the terms of your challenge, then click "submit." Please note, you must fill out the form completely for the challenge to appear.

To respond to a challenge, you first write and submit your story as usual. Make SURE that you add in your author's notes that this story is designated for a challenge, and which challenge it's meant for. For the Red Reign Challenge, Cipher's administrators will either accept or return the story, but we will make no corrections to it whatsoever.

Once it's validated, go to the challenge and click "respond to the challenge!" Choose your story, and click "submit." The story will appear under the challenge.

About Cipher

Cipher began in March 2005, and started with a small group of writers who initially wanted nothing more than a place to write and archive their favorite stories. In May it was decided to go public, and our stringent submission guidelines were put in place.

Our goal was to archive and accept only truly fine fanfiction. There are few sites on the web that are not rife with fangirl appreciation of Tom Felton, non-existent language skills, and generally poor writing. We wanted something better. We wanted our own favorites safely in an archive, and we are constantly inviting new authors to join us, or asking permission to post their work.

As we developed, we found a few formulas to make Cipher stand out, in addition to our demand for quality. We began the Red Reign Challenge, we selected Author of the Month, and we added a forum to aid in our growth as writers.

Our secondary but no less important goal at Cipher is to constantly strive to improve our writing, and help each other improve. We focus on the elements of writing: technical correctness, plotting, description, characterization, and all other facets of a good story. We review honestly and thoroughly, and we encourage more than the standard "I liked it, it was good," in our reviews.

We also defend our author's work to a degree unusual on most sites. Fanfiction and original fiction is always the exclusive property of its author. We may play in the sandboxes of the great published authors, movie-makers and television creators, but we write our own plots, and we take our stories places that are products of our own imagination. As such, anyone found copying, distributing, or publishing work archived on Cipher without the express consent of the author will be punished to the full extent of the law. For original fiction, there are some very real and very frightening legal penalties involved. For fanfiction, the Webmistress will make it her mission in life to make your life exceedingly unpleasant. She's articulate. She can rant beyond all your nightmares. And she knows exactly who to go to if it becomes necessary to complain to your host. We hope, as we continue to grow, that our philosophy and passion for quality will continue to make Cipher stand head and shoulders above all other fanfiction sites. Thank you for joining, thank you for reading, and welcome!

--The Cipher Administration Team