Recommend an online community of writers?

http://www.zoetrope.com/
Formed by Francis Ford Coppola, a champion of the short story form, but it’s also a great place to give and receive feedback on all forms of writing, including long form and poetry. I’ve put a few aspiring writer friends onto this site over the years and they report that the people here are incredibly supportive (and brutally honest!)

About 5 years ago, I used critquecircle.com and enjoyed myself very much. It’s a bit difficult to get started, because whatever level of writing you may believe yourself to be at, you have to start in their newcomer’s group.

A writer cannot simply join and start posting written work. You earn points by critiquing other writers’ work, and those points pay for you to post your own writing. Forgive me. I don’t remember how many critiques you had to write before you were eligible to post something of your own.

There are sections dividing the site by genre, so you can whittle away the areas that may not interest you. Also, some people start what are called forums to which they invite specific people to share and critique. Those were very helpful and generally of a higher caliber.

It also doesn’t work to post an entire novel at once. I don’t remember what it was, but there was a word count limit. You can post things one chapter at a time and link them together so that readers know they’re in order.

I wish I could write more about the site, but it’s the middle of the night here. I dozing off as I type.

NaNoWritMo

I like writerscafe.org

Critters

http://www.gather.com/

Authonomy is run by Harper Collins.

This is a great question!

I started joining some of the websites above just to see what it’s like.
So far the feedback I’ve been getting from writerscafe.org is a bit gushingly generic and short.

e.g.,
“Your well developed descriptions take on a good form. I was taken in by the way you tell a story and make the reader believe word for word. ”

(that’s the whole response!)

I haven’t submitted material yet for critiquecircle.com but structurally there’s much more support for how to give critiques (e.g. they remind you if your critique is less than 300 words; they offer a formatting to flag quotes form the material submitted—thereby encouraging you to quote material in your critiques,—and they also remind you if you have not quoted anything), so I’m presuming that the feedback will be of a higher calibre.

(If any jellies join, look me up under “lifeflame”)

Yes!

These are the best writers I have found to date on the net… In some cases the information and talent as well is un matched.

http://forums.about.com/n/pfx/forum.aspx?folderId=4&listMode=13&nav=messages&webtag=ab-poetry

Hee, Hee… See if you can find me!

The only thing I don’t like about it (as everything else is perfect) They don’t generally tend to allow anyone to post more than once a day in each seperate section, meaning one post in each section but that’s it.

Try this one….http://storywrite.com/

I also just joined critters workshop, and I don’t like that one because basically you have to keep up with your critiques (at least once a week) to be in good standing (i.e., be able to get your manuscript on top of the queue). As I’m not ready to submit yet, it seems like a lot of paddling to keep up!

I agree with the person who put NaNoWriMo. It starts next month and you have the 30 days of November to write 50,000 words of a novel. You don’t win anything but they have all kinds of neat things on the site to help you write. This is my first year doing it so I can’t really tell you much more but you should definitely check out the website!

http://www.nanowrimo.org/