Good Luck, KayTi. Hopefully you sent it in.

And Good Luck, Dan, too--if you got it in the mail.

Couldn't get mine done. The whole "change 1st person to 3rd person" (which I REALLY think was necessary to make it a viable option for a win/publication) put me too far out time-wise to get it done. I'm frustrated, but am planning on polishing it for submission somewhere else. Had a new idea for a short story, and I like it better than this last run. So, I'm going to dive into that one for 2008Q02. Speaking of, are we going to run the same gauntlets for this upcoming quarter? If so, we need some new deadlines. Going off of this last quarter's schedule this put us at:

Feb 7th: First drafts out for high-level crits

Mar 7th: Second drafts out for (hopefully by that point) line edits.

Let everyone take a lesson home from my 2008Q01 story -- don't rewrite your entire story three times and then decide on a POV change. How do these dates sound to everyone? Anyone planning on a swap this quarter let us know. And tell you what, to make things easy why don't we do a running list?

I'm in (WriterDan)

Anyone that wants to swap stories this quarter, list my name and your own in your reply. Next to respond, list our two names and then your own. Etc. Will make initial crit send outs easier, I think. Let's get busy. Later all. And luck!

ANYWAY - long story short, the NIGHT of Dec 30 I rewrote my entire apocalyptic taco mix story. I retitled it "All We've Got Left." Yeah, that was incredibly painful. I'm relatively sure it's a steaming pile of dung, but hey - I made a commitment to myself to write and submit. It definitely was the best story I had in the works.

In case you were curious as to why one would take on the suicidal mission of prepping a story the night before the deadline...well, I got creamed on the crits I received from here and elsewhere in late nov/early dec - sat on them a while to try to figure out what to do. It was good, meaty stuff about character motivations and plausibility of the setup and other things that needed to be addressed - I definitely agreed with all the crits. But procrastinated the work. Then got bogged down by family drama and used other outlets to escape/let my mind be. So I found myself on Dec 30 with my husband out for the night, kids in bed at a reasonable hour, and I worked til midnight and turned out something. <shrug> We'll see.

Clearly I was too late for crits of any sort from anyone, so I'm sure the whole thing is riddled with problems even after spell checks and read-throughs. Oh, and I discovered after I mailed it that I believe I neglected to do the proper paragraph formatting, so it might well come back unread. I prefer to work in a small font, single-spaced, one whitespace between each paragraph, I typically format it for pub immediately before submitting (that's a visual cue to me, too, that I've submitted something.) I remembered to switch fonts, double space, format the cover page correctly, and all that, but I don't think I remembered to indent the paragraphs. We'll see if that's enough to DQ.

ANYWAY - all this to say I think I've got what I need to behind me now, and need to get cracking on a Q2 entry. I need some inspiration, though. I'm thinking of taking a flash challenge from Liberty Hall from the summer that was a pretty good start/interesting idea and working with that, but it'll need to be retooled. I am also hoping to do some more LH challenges now that we're back into the new year, and maybe that will spawn some new ideas for me. My main projects for the new year are non-fiction, so I need an idea mill.

Um, so what does that say for me? Count me in...sortof? I just can't take 30k of critting all at once - I tend to be verbose with my feedback, it takes me a while. That's my only concern/issue. I will try to check this spot more frequently and/or maybe we should trade emails and just do a small email chain for sending stories, so they could be sent whenever drafts are done.

WriterDan
KayTi?
Annepin

If you want to join the crit group please cut and paste the list above and add your name. Check WriterDan's post above for details on deadlines and how-to.

Writer Dan,
Why did you switch to 3rd person? The vast majority of the stories in the latest anthology were in first person. Perhaps 1st is the new 3rd.

#

ChrisO: Needed to move to 3rd person because of a POV issue. I had this guy inside another version of himself, but unable to do anything but watch what was going on and have his own unique thoughts. This idea seemed almost impossible to get across in first person, and most people (I got the general idea) had a difficult time understanding what was going on during those scenes. So, it'll have to be stuck for another time.

Snapper: Always room for another. I'll put you on the list.

[This message has been edited by WriterDan (edited January 08, 2008).]