We strive to be supportive but honest and to help each other create publishable work.
We meet twice a month on Wednesday evenings from 7-9 pm. A meeting might be canceled (rarely!), but you will be notified via email if this happens.
Your attendance, even on weeks when you haven’t submitted a piece to be critiqued, is valuable. We have found that as we get to know each other’s strengths and weaknesses, the feedback we can provide for each other improves. This is more likely with regular attendance.
A reminder/roll call is emailed the week before the meeting. Please “reply all” so that we know who is coming, and who is submitting work, and how long the submitted work is. If not sure, please reply with at least a “maybe” ASAP. If something unexpected comes up and you need to change your reply, please email, message, or call ASAP.
Writers with pieces to critique will post them (via Google Docs) not later than five days before the meeting, giving the group a chance to read before the meeting. 15,000 is the total limit of words we can possibly deal with during each session, and more than 5000 words per piece is too much. This means we can critique three writers if each submits 5000 words, five if each person submits a 3000-word piece. You get the idea.
We’ll ask at each meeting who is interested in submitting for the next session. Priority is given to people who haven’t received feedback in a while. We also try to be accommodating of our members’ publisher/agent/application/contest deadlines, or to people whose work we didn’t get to in a previous session.
As time allows, we may have free-form discussions for writers who are dealing with particular problems or questions for a work in progress (or development).
Please silence cell phones during critiques.
If you are new, please attend a meeting or two before submitting your own work. This will help you to learn how we operate and to decide if our group is right for you.