Preemptively Answered Questions

As awesome as Critters is, I'm really fond of Livejournal workshop groups for critiquing. However, I haven't found any communities dedicated to critiquing speculative fiction. There are good places to discuss it. There are even places to post your work, but none of them require critiquing others as part of the bargain—in other words, they're a showcase and not really a workshop. In short, I haven't seen any effective critiquing communities devoted to speculative fiction.

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Have you read the critique guide list? Also remember that critiquing can point out what you think the writer has done right!

You're going to want to make very, very sure they're actually being a meanie to you, because if there's flamage going on coyotecult will come down on all parties with a spatula regardless of who started it. Remember, a harsh critique isn't a reason to fuss and cry. If someone's actually harassing you, the best course of action is to ignore said provoker; nobody likes a crybaby. If I see something I feel is out of line, I will step in and deal pain. Be civil, be gracious—heated discussions may take place, but use your wits instead of namecalling to make your points and keep personal attacks out of it. Don't be a lol-cow for sadistic individuals.

Not at this point in time.

Some rules are to help keep the community a good place to get and give critique, others are for the ease of the management.

Not really. If you've ever seen the rules of Critters, full credit is only given to critiques above 200 words, whereas we're based on units of 50 to be flexible. At that rate, it's just three critiques to post a decent sized story of 6,000 words. If you have trouble coming up with things to say, check out our list of critique guides.

Go the page of the entry you made and look towards the bottom of the entry. There should be a link named "Edit". Click on it to edit your entry.

With the way LJ's tag system is set up for communities, only maintainers can create tags. If you're trying to use a tag that doesn't exist, there isn't a warning, the tag just doesn't show up.

With the way LJ's tag system is set up for communities, only maintainers can delete tags from posts. I know, I know, it's ridiculous that you can't take a tag off your own post, but that's the way it is. It leaves you adrift if you accidentally added the wrong tag, or if I've put the wrong tag on your post. Contact me and I'll take care of it for you.

If nobody's posted any critiques for the post yet, it will be deleted with a reminder. If anyone has posted critiques, it will be left up for the critiquers' sake, but a warning will be given and no critiques made after the warning will count until the credits are made up, in other words discouraging anyone from critiquing you until you've done your fair share. When the credits are made up, the warning will be lifted.

Stars are one of the reoccuring elements science fiction and fantasy have in common. Science fiction is often concerned with the exploration of space; fantasy often writes of destinies foretold by the stars. The original picture and its background can be found here.

You bet it does. We're not trying to ghetto-ize here.

There's still a lot of debate on this topic and nothing's really set in stone too much. Basically it depends on the policies of each individual publisher. If anyone has found statements from publishers of our genres, let me know and I'll mention them.

However, so far the general consensus is that making your post friended is sufficient precaution to protect you from losing any publishing rights—you'll notice that Critters has something to the same effect, where all manuscripts are members-only accessible, and they talk about the issue here. Considering anyone can register at Critters, I don't see how we're different in that respect.

Also keep in mind that sfandf_critters isn't really for finished pieces—it's for pieces in progress. Changes are you'll be making some changes, even if only cosmetic, to your work after it gets critiqued.

Besides keeping your work out of public view, friending will keep the post out of any search engine indexes besides, although as of January 3rd we've had the "minimum search inclusion" option checked.

If people want whole novels critiqued (although I don't recommend doing a whole novel at once since it'd be a lot of critique points and I don't know how much critique one would get back), I have the capability to host them in a password-protected directory so only members of the group can access it (in lieu of the omnipresent "friend this journal to read my novel" tactic often employed by novelists wanting feedback).

There's a guide to the MPAA's ratings here, but I'm not too picky about the ratings, on my honor. Basically I just don't want people going into a story and being met with something explicit without any sort of pre-warning, since theoretically we're an all ages community. Obvious sexual allusions/mentions, violence? PG-13ish. Sex scenes and explicit violence? R. Really explicit sex scenes and stomach turning gorefests? Maybe that'd be an NC-17. But, like I said, up to R is probably sufficient for pretty much everything except maybe hardcore SF/F erotica (Yes, it exists. It even has its own section, believe it or not, over at literotica.com.) and the most depraved horror. And if you're still uncertain about what rating to slap onto something, pick one and say why you picked it, or do a PG-13/R slash combo or something. Nobody's going to be stuffy about it. Just don't have your people doing the horizontal mambo during a beheading and slap a G on it, y'know?