Submission Guidelines
New members must attend a meeting before their first submission! Make sure our group is right for you first (see our About page and Meeting Rules for a description of how meetings operate). Then follow these guidelines on Formatting, How to Submit, What You Can Submit, and our policy on Resubmissions:
Format
Word limit: 3000 words.
A maximum of 2 poetry submissions per writer per meeting.
Content warnings, where applicable, should be clearly presented on the first page.
Word documents or PDF files are the preferred medium.
How Do I Submit?
Send your submission to gwgsubmissions@gmail.com, with a title, word count, and any relevant content warnings (see below for more info).
Your piece will be circulated to the group by one of the organisers, manually, so please allow time for a human to process your file before it is sent out.
Please specify in your e-mail the date of the meeting you’re submitting for. Deadline is 23:59 on the Saturday before a given meeting.
Once a submission has been received and circulated, we will not accept a revised version. Please edit first until you’re satisfied before submitting.
If an author, without giving notice, fails to show up at a meeting for which they had submitted a piece, they must attend at least one meeting to give feedback before submitting again.
During meetings, authors must remain silent while receiving feedback. They will be given a chance to respond once everyone has had a chance to share their thoughts on the piece. Of course, any feedback that is openly hostile, or excessively harsh without being constructive, will be stopped by one of the organisers.
What Can I Submit?
Anything that you can write, we'll probably read. The group is focused on helping all writers to improve their writing style and/or story-telling techniques.
If an author has any particular points they would like members to consider when reviewing the piece, these should be made known in the submission e-mail and will be relayed to members for consideration.
We ask that all writers provide content warnings with their work when the piece deals with issues or themes which might be distressing to an unsuspecting reviewer. This might include pieces which contain explicit imagery, graphic violence, or discriminatory themes. The Organisers reserve the right to refuse to circulate work from authors who repeatedly fail to provide reasonable content warnings, as well as the right to refuse circulation of a piece to the group if the piece is deemed to be a promotion of prejudice, hatred, or violence.
All members of the group should feel welcome and safe within the group.
Any members who act in a manner contrary to this principle will be asked to leave and not return.
Please make any issues known to the organisers, you can always send these concerns to gwgsubmissions@gmail.com, send us a private message during an online meeting, or speak to us at an in-person meeting.
Resubmissions
Our general rule is that you can resubmit a piece once, but only after waiting several meetings and only if you’ve actually edited and reworked it. We know writing involves lost of drafts, and sometimes works can change a lot over time, or you just want to know if integrating feedback from a meeting actually paid off. So we do allow one resubmission. But to prevent us from getting the same piece submitted over and over, we do have to cap it at just the once by default. Though this, like most of our rules, is open to negotiation.