South Sound Speculative Fiction Writers Group-Critique

We’re the South Sound Speculative Fiction Writers’ Group. We’ve been meeting every Friday for the past two years via Slack (no video or audio. only text). We’re a mixed group of writers just starting out and writers who have been writing for years. Our aim is to get better at our writing and advance our careers through honest and knowledgeable feedback, deliberate practice, and community building. We’re open to speculative fiction writers that live in the South Sound (Thurston, Kitsap, Lewis, Mason, Pierce counties).

This Friday @ 6 PM, we’re doing our bi-weekly critique session. Local writers of speculative fiction are welcome to come and share their speculative fiction of 3,500 words or less. Slack link to join is over on the subreddit. Invite link to Slack channel available on our page!

Olympia Speculative Fiction Writers is modeled after the North Seattle SciFi and Fantasy Writers, intensive speculative fiction workshops, and Brooklyn Speculative Fiction Writers, all writing communities with the mindset of helping writers improve as professionals through workshops, exercises, and informed critiques. These groups aim for more than simple critique exchanges like most writing groups and prepare people for careers as writers and authors. Oly Spec Writers was designed with all of that in mind!

Ultimately the goal and aim of Oly Spec Writers is to make writers better so that they can reach their career goals. Our setup isn’t great for hobby writers, journalers, or writers who have generally given up on publishing. We’re writers who take writing and our careers seriously while having fun learning how to make this crazy thing called writing work.

Writers who come to the group and participate are there to learn, grow, and become professionally published authors, whether full-time or part-time. This group is excellent for beginners and pros (we have both!) and all those in-between.

Critique Guidelines:

1. All stories shared must be speculative fiction stories or excerpts up to 3,500-words

   1. There is a 200-word allowance for stories that go over 3,500-words

2. Writers need to give critiquers focus areas for their stories so they have an idea of what state or draft the story is and what issues writers want critiquers to focus on while reading.

   1. Here’s an example.

3. Writers sharing their stories for critique must also include with their focus areas content warnings.

   1. Here’s a list of content warnings.

4. To avoid continuously editing a piece and allowing the writer time to implement changes and make story decisions, critiques should only be given during the critique session.

   1. Only exception is critiquers who show up and have to leave unexpectedly before everyone’s stories are shared. These critiquers have until that Sunday night to get their critiques into the author.

   2. An author can always say they don’t want any more critiques after the session even for people who left early.

5. Sex, violence, and curse words are okay. But listen if someone says something makes them uncomfortable (you’re not writing in a vacuum)

6. Accountability check-in at the beginning and end of each session. Writers will share what they are working on and hoping to accomplish by the next critique session at the end of the meeting, and at the beginning of each meeting, we’ll check in to see how we’ve all made progress on our work.

7. If writers show up to the critique session and no one has a story to share, we’ll do a write-in together and work on speculative fiction creative writing projects. This can be actually drafting, world-building, revising, or anything else that makes forward movement on a project of yours.

8. All writers asking for feedback must give it to others. No showing up just for your story.

9. Be open to feedback, critiques, and comments and understand there is more than one way to approach writing a story

10. No copy editing (our critiques are developmental and content-based)