I'm looking for some people to critique my short stories. I have my writer's group, Writeous Writers, but I don't want to overload them with critiquing both my novel and my stories (we meet once a month, and I hope to have three stories done within a month). Since we have this fancy 'internet' thing nowadays, I thought I'd look online for critique groups and skip the hard part of finding like-minded writers in person. Here are my impressions of some of the groups I've come across. These sites are ranked from most to least helpful for providing short story critiques.
Scribophile
Okay, my first impression of this site was somewhat negative, due to difficulties navigating and sacrifice of functionality for Adwords (some of the ads are actually disguised to look like navigation links). However, the users are friendly (after one day as a member, I've already received two welcomes!) and it looks like the site is pretty heavily used. I'm in serious need of critiques for my work, so perhaps I'll get over the ads and this site will prove useful to me. I'll keep you posted.
Critique Groups for Writers
This is one of the first sites I looked at. It appears to focus more on book critiques than short story critiques. I wasn't sure what sort of a group I should join, as my short stories don't fall into one set genre. Also, navigation is somewhat clumsy.
Short Story Writers
This critique group seems to have been closed for a couple of years now, although I'm still finding references to it across the web. Latest update as of 4/16/2006. It still has some useful information for writers, however.
Writesville
Another defunct site, last updated in 2006. Again, some useful information, but I couldn't find anything resembling a critique group.
Last but not least, How To Critique Fiction is not a critique group, but does offer good information for how to go about critiquing someone's work.
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