Other Worlds Writers' Workshop is for speculative fiction writers only. Spec Fi includes "hard" SF, fantasy, alternate history with elements of SF and fantasy, time travel, dark fantasy, and most other genres that involve twisting reality. We want people who love the genre, who have read in it extensively and don't go "Huh?" when we talk about wards on the door, who don't think wyrd is a misspelling, and don't go to sleep after a few paragraphs of prose. This is an open workshop for adults -- beginners and intermediates, advanced and published welcome! We have a structured program called the Six Keys, for beginners and those wanting to review their skills (you'll be surprised how much you learn), and we're working on an intermediate program called the Seven Steps. They are not required in order to join or participate, although we suggest them as painless, eye-opening and fun, especially if you are not familiar with critiquing. Our objective is to help each other to refine our drafts, improve our writing and storytelling, and achieve or maintain professional publication levels. This means we are all working on having what we submit to the workshop published, and preferably professionally. Those who write only for personal expression, taking an art for art's sake attitude, will find us coarse, materialistic, and uncongenial.

Members may submit works in progress as well as drafts in final editing. There is no word limit on submissions. The point of this list is to allow whole works to be read and critted in a timely fashion, rather than under the restraints imposed by many other workshops. However, writers must critique as well as submit, or be disqualified from the lists.

How the Workshop Works

The workshop is run as an e-mail list in order to best preserve the members' copyrights. Submissions will not be posted anywhere on the Web, password protected or not, so that copyrights like first electronic publishing rights will not be compromised. This is literally like asking a friend to look over something for you and critique it. As such a friend, members are expected and required not to archive other people's work and not to show it to anyone else, however near and dear, without the author's express permission. We may, on request, showcase snippets of works in progress, but synopses or whole works of any length will never be exposed to the general public.

Monthly requirements are as listed at The Rules.