The Cross Timbers are metaphor for our community, for our fiction, and for ourselves.

In 1832, Washington Irving joined a party of mounted rangers on an expedition to Indian Territory. They found arid prairie bounded by dense, forbidding forests. This dark mosaic of gnarled, blackjack and post oaks hunkered close to the rocky ground. Prickly underbrush snagged all who entered and blocked progress. These forests, these Cross Timbers, stood as a barrier and a boundary between the civilized East and the wild West.

Today, these forests endure, stretching from southeastern Kansas, coiling around Tulsa, and snaking along I-44 to Oklahoma City and beyond. These trees are small in stature, usually less than thirty feet tall, but they are survivors. They can live for centuries. Many of the ones Irving wrote about are still around. They survived droughts and blizzards, fires and storms. They even survived human intrusion. The forests are mostly oak, but they are diverse. They include hickory, pine, redbud, and hackberry trees. Vines, briers, and sumac tangle about their rough bark.

Like our namesake, we are survivors. We're diverse. The path to good craft can be prickly, but we'll push through. We're in this for the long term. We're not flashy, but we've got all the basic elements down. We won't let a few crowd out everyone else--every member contributes to the ecology of our group.

We are a diverse group of authors dedicated to the art and craft of fiction. Some of us live in the Cross Timbers, but we are from everywhere.

Our goals are

Our primary strategy is to achieve our goals is through the exchange of professional feedback on posted materials. This has some implications about the kinds of things we expect to find posted here.

We expect members to participate in the forum by posting both fiction and feedback. To maintain active status, a member must post a minimum of one fiction item or one feedback each calendar month.

Members must agree to and abide by our security policies.

First, everything posted should be in-progress. That means that the works are still in the revision stage. By posting, authors are requesting and expecting suggestions regarding ongoing future revisions.

Second, we expect that the author intends to eventually submit the posted material for publication. This has important consequences regarding the security of the posted materials, discussed here.

Third, since the author is soliciting comments, the submitted materials should be short--no more than 4000 words. An author might eventually submit all the chapters from a novel, but not all at once. Members are busy people, and don't have time to evaluate an 80K-word first draft. Authors need to keep submissions in bit-sized chunks, even splitting chapters if needed to keep within the 4000 word guideline.

We expect members to provide professional feedback on the posted materials. We are using professional as an attribute of the feedback itself, not the person providing the feedback. You don't have to make a living writing, or even be a published author to provide professional feedback. You do have to

Helpful feedback means affirming the parts of the fictional work that are effective at achieving the artistic goals, and making specific suggestions, based on good craft and practice, for things the author might consider during the revision process..

Helpful feedback might be an in-depth review, or it might be as simple as suggesting the author foreshadow a critical plot element. Helpful feedback might include copy edits, grammar, or other matters that authors work with during revisions.

Helpful feedback does not mean re-writing the author's work or finding fault with the artistic goals. Helpful feedback means also encouraging the author through reinforcing effective craft and technique. A review that only makes suggestions for improvement fails to meet our expectations.

Our group is members-only. Before joining, all members must agree to abide by our security policies.

In order to preserve rights derived from the copyright, such "first online rights" or "first North American rights," it's imperative that we all respect the above. See this blog   for more information on copyrights and other rights.

We expect that members will protect their works by saving them on Writing.Com with "my-eyes-only" security, and protecting them with a passkey so that members of the group can have access. Members may either post the passkey when posting the item to the group message board, or request in that post that people wanting to read their material write to them for the passkey.