Greetings and salutations to our Nine Lives family! Saturday the 24th marks a rather momentous occasion for the archive – it’s our 1st birthday! One year ago, the Nine Lives archive officially opened to the public. The admin team back then was our fearless founder Ravenesque (then known as Peta2) and her trusty recruits: Fairies Masquerade, atoizzard and Spikeslovebite, with some extra support borrowed from our host site, Elysian Fields, in the form of our tech goddess Susan. We put the word out on social media and crossed our fingers for success. We only had a couple of people sign up that first day, but it was enough to put smiles on our faces as we dreamed of bigger things. We thought if we hit 500 members by year's end, that would be pretty darn swell. 

Fast forward a year: with over 1,400 members and close to 1,000 stories, Nine Lives has already surpassed our wildest dreams for our first year.  We’ve made some changes along the way (new admins and new ratings), started new traditions (Featured Story and Member of the Month - click the links to see the complete lists for both) and engaged in some highly hilarious shenanigans (The Summer Survival Challenge Series) and wonderful tributes (CarylBYOB). Most of all, though, we’ve succeeded so far with the site’s mission as posted in our inaugural news post by Ravenseque:

With this site I hope to foster that sense of safety within our own community, support for writers and readers with the inclusion of the chat box and chat room, a beta service, a moderated service that helps those entering the fandom to improve their work and thus improving the reading experience of all Carylers that want to read quality fanfiction. What we are about is acceptance and support, love of Carol and Daryl, Melissa and Norman, and hopefully a place where our detractors can recognise that this is not their space to impose upon.

If you want an idea of what you guys have accomplished, check out the final tally for 2014:

And that's just the first year! Just think of everything we'll manage to accomplish this year!

Tomorrow, we’ll present a special Fanfiction Challenge for our birthday! In the meantime, everyone bask in your awesomeness and share the love.

We really do believe that we’re on the path towards making Nine Lives the ultimate safe haven for Carol and McReedus fans alike. Really, it all boils down to each of you. YOU are what makes Nine Lives tick. 

Thank you, all of you, for choosing to be a part of the Nine Lives family and making us what we are today.

-Fairies Masquerade, Ikkleosu and subversivegrrl