So my question to you is: Will you absent yourself from a potential valuable resource simply because someone wrote something that made you feel bad? I suggest that you continue to use this forum for whatever it can get you, and ignore the occassional negative comments.

quote:

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I previously posted an excerpt that was in the middle of my book. So, here's my first 13 lines. Tear me apart, please.

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. . . some people are going to take your invitation literally. After all, why would you ask to be torn apart if you couldn't take it?

OSC has said that when you are writing you need to believe two mutually exclusive things:

[1] You are the greatest writer in the world, and

[2] You are the worst writer to ever put pen to paper.

If you don't believe in proposition [1] you will never write anything, or at least never finish anything you begin. If you don't believe in proposition [2] you will never be able to work with publishers and editors in order to shape your work into something sellable. Note that believing in proposition [1] helps you maintain a good attitude even when in the throes of proposition [2].

Frankly, I couldn't think of a worse writing community to be a part of than one where everyone knew each other very well and was always friendly and never had a harsh word to say about anything I posted. Hey - the only 13 lines I've posted so far got savaged right out of the gate, and I loved it, not because I'm a masochist, but because I was obliged to take a look at what I wrote from a perspective other than mine.

Writing to please yourself and close family and friends is one thing; writing something you expect to sell to thousands of complete strangers, all of them opinionated closet critics, is another thing entirely.

The only advice I can think of is what I learned when I did customer service years and years ago: Don't ever take ANYTHING personally.

That's one good reason, by the way, not to become overly friendly with the people whose tearing-apart services you are asking; it just makes it harder to hear a hard critique.

So stick around. Enjoy the ebb and flow of opinions, harsh and mellow.

I took all of the posts that I made in a few of the strings and replaced them with *shrugs*. I'll still be around, but I'm not going to participate nearly as openly as I have in the past - just a personal decision.

What I would like to add to this conversation however, is a quick warning. Do not drink lots of Dr Pepper all in one go if, like me, you usually get by on not much else but tea, water, and more tea. Following the advice of ccwbass, given a few days ago on the Writer's Block thread, I thought I'd give it a go and see what it was like so I drank quite a bit. Okay, it could probably be said I got carried away a little and didn't know when to stop - but it tasted so good! Anyway, the jury's out on whether it helped my writing but one thing's for sure, if there was an Olympic event for running round, foaming at the mouth and screaming about the toffee monsters, then I'd have won it hands down on that performance.

P.S. Please don't ask about the toffee monsters. I'd just increased my sugar levels by I don't know how many times and I wasn't in a completely straight state of mind.

And to the gentleman who tried my Dr. Pepper solution, all I can say is: "Hah! Hooked another one!"

Your hands should stop shaking in a couple of weeks. [Evil laughter ensues]

You think I'm kidding, but I'm not. It's a hard cyber-universe out there, and Kathleen keeps this place a lot nicer than other administrators do.

Don't leave on my account. I was about to be take an extended hiatus from this forum, for a variety of reasons, but mostly because it's swallows too much time.

One thing about this forum is that no one can write as much as they'd like. Oh, I suppose they could, but who would want to? So all comments made are usually overly terse, snappy, and too often a bit ignorant -- either in content or in presentation. Another thing about forum life is that no one here is real. I write what I think, come back the next day, and there are a bunch of new entries. It happens so fast that it's easy to forget the human element behind it. Voila! -- a new post to read and to respond to. I once quipped about the soapbox, but come on, everyone member here has a soapbox. We can pontificate all we want, and we do.

So when someone actually reminds us that a real human being is behind each post -- as you have done -- we remember the Golden Rule and realize we have failed miserably to live by it. Thus, I offer a formal apology if I have offended you in any of my terse, snappy, and rather ignorant posts. That was not my intention.

Good luck, and you should stick around. You can learn something.

But I, for one, gotta split. It's been fun, but it hasn't always been real.

I did lot of time arguing in forums like that about 10 years ago. Tell you what, nothing like getting attacked to oblige a person to wonder where he stands on cherished issues. Of course, one rule in those debates is that every apology made equalled a reduction in points, so you learned to just not apologize if you still wanted to have primo button-pushing mojo. Hardcore debate on-line is weird this way: The only people you end up taking most seriously are the people whose arguments are consistantly proven to be of the least value to you.

[shudders]

When you finishing writing a a story or an article for submission, you let it sit around for a while so that when you go back to it you can see the flaws, the mistakes, the lack of logic, the arrogance, and you fix all of that -- sometimes more than once -- before sending it out.

But when you finish writing a web-post, you whack the ENTER key, and your post and all it's flaws are avaliable for all to see. Talk about walking around naked.

The morale? Don't take everything here quite so seriously.

Again, JB, good luck. I mean that. I really do.

JB, now that you've 'shrugged out' your complaint, I'm at a loss how to respond. I'll echo Balthasar's apology for any inadvertent feather-ruffling, but I can only hope you're not treating this site as American Idol, the writers' version.

We're all guilty at one point or another, probably many points, when we think our writing is more than it is, and get hurt, angry, and/or defensive when others appear to be literary Simon Cowells. But, like Simon and the rest of that panel, this site does play a role as a reality check.

And, as Balthasar noted, we're all pretty opinionated, and our discussions can be intense, but aside from some obnoxious drifters who come through now and then, everyone seems to respect one other in the end.

Your call, of course, whether you go or stay or just lurk, but I'll bet you can't lurk too long without joining in again.