Thank you for the emails.  You've got questions about insider information, and periodically I'll choose from among your questions to address within my blogspace.  There are some good ones, like this one.

"What's up with the International Violet Wand Guild?"

Firstly, its an amazing and very highly knowledgeable organization and worth your involvement.  They do the research that makes it possible for us to play.  They have worked on and perfected new techniques that you and I may not even know about yet.  If it weren't for them, we would still not know about reverse or internal techniques, violet wand cupping or caning or advanced branding.  We'd still be using old myths, and old terminology (like the outdated term 'lightning hands'...don't use that word, please..it like calling a refrigerator an icebox..get with the times...). The Guild is worth your while to be part of it.  

But...

...that said, if you were already part of the Guild up to 2006, its not going to be quite the same organization that it was.  Up to then, its primary mission was training violet wand event demonstrators and certifying them, then training and certifying masters up from demonstrators.  And as part of being a violet wand master you had to be able to repair or even build your own violet wand, and you were required to send your completed piece in to the board to be juried before being awarded your Mastership.  I doubt we'll see that again, as the principal players who could train the guild's certified event demonstrators to do repair, have been rendered mostly silent.

They were made to 'disappear'.  Sometime in 2006, the then-Chairman and owner of the site (Dan McFeyden)  known in the scene as Murlach, got into some personal difficulties.  Personal and financial stress and disaster, while no excuse, can contribute to doing unpredictable or unexpected things. Thus during 2007, McFeyden starting having issues with the Guild's principal officers and contributors who had been around the longest.  He locked up the website, deleted passwords, banned IP addresses, trashed shopping orders, etc. No one knew what was happening. 

The guild's people still existed, even if the site was inaccessible.  In early 2008, one of the old officers got in touch with McFeyden.  McFeyden wanted money to release the website and its databases.   The ransom was paid after pulling some of the old officers together, and front end admin access turned over.  However, damage had been done to the backend databases as well.   Finally, in 2009, the extant old-timers regained full front and back end control of the guild's sites.  They could not repair the old sites' databases, and so are..at this very moment..building a new website offline.  Hopefully, with increased security and more simplified administrator access that would prevent one person control and such a thing from happening again.  I suspect we may even see the relaunch within the next month or so.

What direction the Guild will take as an organization. is still not known.  McFeyden's lockout caused many hard feelings, and as a volunteer organization, its harder to regroup after such a treacherous cause to restructure.  There may not be the same level of interest in teaching repair again.  Many old-timers who thought they'd just been kicked out of the organization by new incumbents without cause, understandably moved on. 

My advice is to keep an eye on them and watch for this relaunch and register with the new website as soon as you can.  The Guild knows things about violet wands that you won't ever hear at your local events, and if you want to be really up on vw techniques and information, that's where to go.    You can't fully master the art of the violet wand without this organization's valuable information.