Knowledge Base

There are seven public queues on Critique Circle:

• The Newbie Queue - CC's new members
• General
• Fantasy
• Science Fiction
• Women's fiction - Romance - Chick-lit
• Children's - Young Adult
• Mystery - Suspence - Horror

The first story you submit to Critique Circle must go into the Newbie Queue. After that, you can choose to move to another public queue that is appropriate for your genre or to submit again to the Newbie Queue. A maximum of three submissions to the Newbie Queue is allowed.

If you have a YA story you should submit it to that queue, a horror story goes into the horror queue etc.

We leave it up to you to decide what genre your story belongs to so what queue you should submit to but if a story is clearly in the wrong queue the administrators will move it to the right queue. Remember, posting in the correct queue is likely to mean your story is seen by those most interested in reading/ critiquing your genre.

You must have clear reasons why a story that seemingly belongs to a certain queue has been placed in another.

You can have up to 3000 characters in each of your Author notes, both before and after the story. If you write more text it will be truncated when it's displayed in your story.

If you are submitting a novel you are able to have twice that amount in each section of your author's notes.

We recommend your submission is at least 500 words and 5,000 words at the most.

If the text is less than 500 words, it's difficult to write a critique long enough to earn a credit — and if the story is very long, critiquing it will be very time-consuming and you are likely to get fewer critiques.

Your first story, in the newbie queue, can be no longer than 4,000 words. Other public queues have a limit of 8,000 words. Private queues have no word limit per submission.

The credit cost is always the same, regardless of the length of the submission.

In step 3 of the story submission process is a text box where you can enter a "Content Advisory" warning. Here, you can enter the type of content you would like your readers to be forewarned about. If you have, mild language, adult situations, sexual innuendo, etc. here is the place to put that warning.

If you have strong or graphic sexual content (Not Pornography, which is not allowed at CC) or heavy swearing, you can also check the box in step 4 marked "The story contains language/material which might offend readers." This prevents underage member from reading this story. Keep in mind, however, that you cannot use this flag unless your story has explicit material. If the moderators determine that the flag was used simply to disallow crits from members under 18 year of age, the story may be removed.

If you have further questions, or you are in doubt as to whether you need either of these, you can always message the Moderators for a review.

Critique Circle does not support submitting stories directly from your word processor or with any formatting unless you export it first as HTML which you might not want to do as that will not allow you to receive inline critiques.

There is a way to convert some of the most used formatting from MS Word to CC-compliant text.

CC supports bold, italics, underline and centered text, and you can convert such text in MS Word to CC formatted text before copy/pasting your text into CC's "Submit Story" window.

To do that open up your find-replace option in MS Word (Control-H), make sure you are working in a throwaway copy of your manuscript so that you don't accidentally save over it though.

In the find-replace dialog make sure you have your focus in the "Find What" text box (just click it) and then click on the "More" button, at the bottom of the dialog there is a "Format" drop-down button. Click that and select "Font". Now, select "Font Style">"Bold" and click ok.

NOTE: There is an easier way  You can press control-b to toggle bold, control-i to toggle italics, control-u to toggle underline and control-e to toggle centered. Just remember to have your focus on the "Find what" box and clear out previous formatting before entering a new one (f.ex. it might say "Not Bold", which is not the same as not searching for bold text. In this case you should hit control-b again to clear the bold flag)

Under the "Find What" text box you should now see "Format: Font: Bold".

In the "Replace With" text box, enter [ b ]^&[ /b ] (without the spaces) and click "Replace All".

This will find every piece of Bold formatted text and encase it with [ b ] and [ /b ].

Do the same with italics, underline and center (that's in the "paragraph" option group). In every case, make sure that the option you had before is no longer selected, so that only bold, italics or centered is shown below the "Find What" text box.

Even if you have text that is italics _and_ bold you use the same method.

Here are the codes you want to put into "Replace With":

Bold: [ b ]^&[ /b ]

Italics: [ i ]^&[ /i ]

Underline: [ u ]^&[ /u ]

Centered: [ c ]^&[ /c ]

Remember to omit the spaces when you write these in.

Now that you've done these four changes you can copy the text from your manuscript into CC's "Submit Story" window and voila, you've got (some) formatting 

Note: Although this applies to Microsoft Word you are sure to find similar tricks for other word processors.