I hang around two forums, now — modest ones, since I’m not much for crowds who like keggers and gossip for their mainstay.  One of the things which just doesn’t interest me much is the coffee klatch, that is talk about anything unrelated to the main reason for the board.  Neither do I like places where:

• there is a great deal of focus on measuring one’s acceptability on whether one agrees with the board’s status quo and super-clique,
• the major players diligently target people, members and non-members, as prey for their verbal castigation,
• the primary discussions seem to be dissing alternative perspectives.

Of course, that rules out the majority of the popular writers and novelists’ boards and newsgroups.  So far, QueryTracker.net‘s forum hasn’t demonstrated any of these tendencies, so I’m happy to work with them.  z7.zentao7.com/forum is another which fits the bill, though I don’t post, but only lurk under another handle.  They critique novels, especially works-in-progress, and I’m just not much for that sort of thing.  I use Beta readers gleaned from their ranks, as well as real world contacts.

Recently:

• Writing Pedagogues
• They Work Very Hard
• Treading the Dangers of Fiction
• Infighting About Grammar & Punctuation
• Scary Writers
• New Novel, Chapter Two
• To the Book Store
• New Novel Amid Chaos
• Raw Gore, Explicit Cruelty, Debased Sex in Novels
• Back from Summer Hiatus