East Bay Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers
729 members

What we're about

Welcome to EBSFFW! The group is open to anyone 18 years old or older who is writing in the genre or who enjoys it enough to read other people's writing and provide serious and supportive critique. What kind of writing? Screenplays, novels, short stories, YA...you name it. We share our writing before the monthly critique meeting, so the meeting itself is straight-up discussion. And our members are successful! You can ... browse some of our publications here: Google doc.

Interested in submitting? The first step is coming to a meeting! We want to make sure you're familiar with EBSFFW's style of critique and that you're a real, live human before we accept manuscripts to send on to our members. We don't have too many rules about what you can submit, but we do offer short fiction and novel critiques at different times. Here are the full submission guidelines: Google doc

Have you come to a meeting and are ready to submit? Email your work to becca@thegourmez.com after reading those guidelines above. Our admin team will fit your shorter fiction or excerpts (<7,000 words) into the critique queue, and you have to submit once to our regular monthly session before we'll schedule a critique of your larger work (> 7,000 words).

Lately, we've had a waitlist for critiques - you can see how far ahead we are scheduling them here.

Finally, just how do we critique work at EBSFFW? Take the time to look over our Rules of Engagement:

It's not that complicated, we promise. Any questions left? Just send one of the organizers a message. We are listed right below this box. Or come to one of our Craft Klatsches! Those are just for casual talk about all our writing careers.
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Upcoming events:

5/5/2024 1:15:00 AM

Regular Critique Session

Would you like to have your literary work of 7,000 words or fewer critiqued by other writers in our friendly environment? If you have attended at least one Berkeley Critique Session before, you're qua...

3 attendees       1/3 manuscripts    

5/19/2024 1:30:00 PM

Novel critique from James Hadzess

Please join us to review a novel by James Harzess. It is a LitRPG story of about 60k words. Here is the blurb provided by Jim: Desperate for money, Nick becomes a beta tester for a new virtual rea...

4 attendees       1/1 manuscripts