What Is Your Favorite Non-YWS Literary Site?

So other than YWS, what is your favorite literary web site?

There are tons, so if you put other, please say which one!

I must say, I'm a big fan of NaNoWriMo.org. My favorite part of that site is the section that indexes everyone who's knowledgeable about something (any of the stickied topics in this part of the forum).

NaNo's the only one I know, plus it's a huuuuuuugely helpful crash course in novel writing.

Out of those? NaNo. But for writing tips, I really, really love Fiction Factor.

I'm just curious... I took a look at Writing.com and it looks like a good place to get some more critiques, as well as a wider reading audience. But do think it's worth my time? Is it a site equal to YWS's caliber?

Spam, sorry.

-Kylan

Suzanne wrote:Out of those? NaNo. But for writing tips, I really, really love Fiction Factor.

Till, I'm not so sure how to navigate through Fiction Factor ... it seems like it's "all-ads." I dont know, really.

A tiny forum called FGT. It's awesome, though slightly dead and exclusive. XD

FGT is still around?

Writing.com is terrible. They are better now, but they've long since chased me away when they had ads everywhere on that site.

Slightly, though activity is... um.. slightly dead. But still! It has the first draft of FREAK and Unicorn Killers on it, so therefore it is automatically awesome. ^_^

I started out at Absolute Write Water Cooler

It's pretty massive and has a lot of older writers on there. Some published, some not. Pretty helpful. It was just really confusing after a while.

They have a great bewares and backgrounds check forum for authros to keep tabs on scams and help others find a legit publisher. They saved my butt a few times.

Fanfiction.net, and Seventhsanctum.com ^_^

Fanfiction.net.

And I don't care if you do slaughter me, it's good for getting started.

I voted Writing.com, cos it's the only other one I use. However, it's really poor in comparison to YWS. Here's (some) of the reasons why:

1) You have to pay to get the most out of it. And it's expensive - I'd have thought it'd be around $5 for a year's upgraded membership. But it actually costs $10 for only three months Basic membership (that's the lowest paid-membership you can have, and is only a little better than the Free membership); meanwhile, the highest level of membership costs $1250 for a year. That's ... just not right.

2) The rating system. At first glance, the way in which your stories/poems can be rated seems really good. People give it a rating out of 5 (3 being average), and the piece's average score is worked out. Only problem is: pretty much everyone just rates everything a 4, making the system pretty much useless. And what's worse, a single, spiteful person can give your piece a rating of 1 (this has happened to me a couple of times) which will drag your average rating down.

3) A lot of the reviews are completely useless. And what's worse, some of them are less than useless - the advice you're given will actually make your story worse. I've had a number of people telling me to 'correct' something that is grammatically correct, and their 'corrections' would actually make the sentance grammatically incorrect. What's worse is when they also give your story a low rating because of the 'mistakes' you've made.

YWS is the only site for me I've looked at a couple others, but this one is by far the best. Easy to use, everyone's friendly, and you can get a decent critique. GO YWS!

teenagewriters.com

I tried out writing.com and left in disgust.