NECROCITY TIMES - Issue #1 - HALLOWEEN SPECIAL

Letter from Editor - @Godhand

Hello, Collective.

And welcome to our humble magazine.

Let's have a brief history lesson:

The idea for ParanormalCommunity started when I was a forum moderator for the Paranormal club. Occasionally someone would ask why there was a Fanfic or Sci-fi profile, but not a Paranormal one? The easiest answer, whenever I escalated the question to the higher ups, was that there wasn't as big a demand.

More and more threads started asking for a paranormal profile. They wanted some place to keep track of paranormal topics, like research on monsters, and lore, and the history, and common tropes and how to subvert them. They wanted contests and reading lists.

Well, we're Ambassadors, it's our job to engage the community, right? Most of the activity on Wattpad happens in on the profiles and in the comments of books, so if there was this much discussion and desire on the forums, how much more was there for the mobile users?

So I thought, "Let's give the people what they want. I'll prove to Wattpad that, like ghosts, we may not be seen or believed in, but we exist!"

I approached the other Ambassadors to see who would be interested and found an enthusiastic response in return, so we built a team and called ourselves the "Ouija Board of Directors", after the main faction in my novel.

We started the profile in May of 2015, and organized it in a frame-story around the "Wattpad Paranormal Research Society", or the WPRS, styled after the British Society for Psychical Research with a mixture of secret society structure for flavor.

In our frame story, the WPRS is a group of 'agents' whose novels and short stories are 'reports' to contribute to the knowledge of the "Collective". We curate them into reading lists of various different genres and types so that if readers are looking for "Ghost Stories" or "Cryptids", they have an easy place to look.

Each Friday we interview a prominent author in the community to learn about them as a person, their novel, and their advice for other writers.

We also feature supernatural creatures in our Monster Manual. Each chapter is written within the frame story as a field report. We've since expanded our books to include the Paranormal Academy series to learn about lore, and the Paranormal Powers book on psionics. We also are hoping to expand our "How to Write Paranormal" book with more and better advice in the future.

These books are written by the Collective, for the Collective, and we depend almost entirely on community contributions.

On Saturdays we post a prompt that explores a paranormal or horror trope that writers can use to write flash-fiction or incorporate into their stories. The prompts expand upon the WPRS universe as if they were a new chapter in a story.

We also like to host hashtag campaigns to get people writing. And if something spooky didn't start with us on Wattpad, we want to know so we can tell others!

One of my favorite things about the ParanormalCommunity profile is the capacity for all the paranormal writers to find a home here.

Every story they write is just a "report" to the Magistra of something true, something real to them. And in that way, they all work together to create this rich, infinite universe that can be understood through each other's reports and stories. Paranormal stories allow for different genres: horror, mystery, thriller, romance, fantasy...

But the absolute best thing about is that everyone is in it together. If no one's truth or experience is "right" then we see so much diversity of thought and beliefs and experience.

Everyone belongs to the WPRS. Everyone is kindred and works to support their fellows in the Collective.

This magazine is the culmination of what we hope to offer. Please enjoy, and join us.

Magistra Godhand, Editor-in-Chief
Ouija Board of Directors
Wattpad Paranormal Research Society