In which I post about various random, unrelated things

[sylvia_rachel]

1. Having a great time with the Commendable Crit Contest over at OWW. I've gotten to read some very cool stuff, and have had some extremely useful (if occasionally slightly painful) crit and commentary on some stuff of mine, and also several fun and thought-provoking side conversations. And have been revising like a mad thing. Writing ... well, not

Comments

[sylvia_rachel]

Basically, on OWW you post your story (or chapter, or whatever -- the word limit for a single post is 7500, but most people seem to post between 1000 and 6000 words) and then people read it and post critiques. For every substantive critique you post (i.e., something more useful than "Great story!" or "I don't get it!") you get one point, and when you have four points you can post another thing, but I think you can only have three things posted at one time. They have some guidelines for writing critiques, and a pretty good FAQ, but people do it a lot of different ways; some crits focus more on the big picture, some are very detailed, etc. When you review someone's submission you can choose to make your e-mail address available to the writer, and a couple of times someone has e-mailed me to follow up on one of my reviews (to clarify something, or to answer a question), but I'm not sure how often a real conversation develops.

You definitely need to have your thick skin on, and apply the La Leche League rule ("Take what works for you, and leave the rest behind"). I've got two things up at the moment -- the first two chapters of MQ as one entry, and about 4000 words of the new project (which now has a working title, The Book of Josephine, because I had to call it something) -- and have had seven crits so far. No one has been derogatory or mean-spirited -- nothing like the flaming that sometimes happens on FF.net -- but people are pretty frank, and sometimes I have to go back to a crit the next day to really see the justice of it ;^). Several comments indicate to me that the reviewer in question just didn't get it, which is fine; no piece of writing is going to appeal to everyone. What's most interesting, though, is how often two reviewers have diametrically opposite reactions to the exact same thing. One reviewer of MQ finds the dialogue "affected" and can't understand why I would write Sophie's lines that way; another thinks the dialogue "sparkles" and is one of the best features of the text. (My first guess is that person B has read more Austen and Trollope than person A, but who knows?) But although I've found some of the crits more helpful than others, every one of them has pointed out at least one genuine and fixable problem.