First things first: Thanks to everyone who has posted such nice comments about WISB. I really do appreciate them. There’s really nothing that can make a writer feel better than to know he or she has fans, regardless of the medium. Just knowing that there area few of you out there that are completely hooked is enough to make me giggle with joy inside. So, thank you very much. I appreciate all comments on all subjects, but those few on the chapters and such really hit home.
Next: I’ve sold five of my books from my little Amazon ‘get rid of old books’ thing. As of now I haven’t put up anything that wasn’t related to school at some point, but I’m thinking of trying to sell off my R. L. Stine collection on there, perhaps. I don’t know yet.
Now, as I mentioned earlier, I am going to do part two of this critique groups thing.
I want to start a critique group. Nothing big, nothing super or amazing like the Inklings (you know, Tolkien’s little group with C.S. Lewis and what not). I would just like to have a small group of say 3 or 4 people who all write and read in the same general genre (so SF/F and maybe some more fantastical H provided it’s like really wicked stuff and not your typical crazy guy with the knife thing). The number is of course extremely flexible.
So, first, would anyone be interested in such a thing?Now, here is some more things on this idea. First, I can’t provide or critique stuff every week simply because I work full time and go to college full time right now. I think doing once a month would be sufficient enough in my opinion.
Also there are two ways I’d like to try to do such a group. One is by mail, which I understand pretty much nobody is going to go for, for very obvious reasons. My reasoning for liking the mail idea is that I critique and work a million times better by hand. Plus, I like seeing my work with red pen marks on it…I dunno why, but makes me happy or something. I’m sadistic, I know.
The other way was to use Critique Circle and create a small group through it. I don’t know at this moment if it costs anything to do such a thing, and if so I can likely just cover it if it’s not excessive in cost–but donations…*wink wink*…would be most welcome. I like CC as I said before because of the in-line critique form.
So, who’s interested?
5 Responses
If CC turns out to need payment and everyone’s to *ahem* cheap to donate, I can recommend http://www.fmwriters.com as a good place to start one up. I did so about a year ago and while there were a few teething problems, and a lot of people dropped out, we’re now down to four of us who are serious about the whole thing. The group can be made private so only members can view it and you can make up your own rules. It’s worked well for us!
Cool, thanks for the link.
For a full one year membership so that I can start up a ‘queue’ as they call it (which basically is just a personal queue list of work from either just you or others in the group too) it is $34. So, that’s not really that much money when you think about it.
But, I’ll check out FMWriters for the time being and see if that will work too.
I can suggest and, if need be, ‘Host’ an online critique group so there would be no fundemental costs to anyone joining, but then its number would have to be monitored so that it didn’t grow too large, also, I’d even offer the odd critique and other help, if You are willing to be the Moderator?
People could post a chapter and or short story (one a month maybe?) and you would have to do two critiques of other peoples work as compensation. That way everyone wins.
Have a think about it.
Well technically I would be ‘hosting’ a group, just not hosting a website for it. CC or FMwriters would be doing that depending on what people would want more. This is also why I want a small group of maybe 4 people at most. I want it to be where there is no ‘obligation’ to write a certain number of critiques to get your work looked at. Rather I want the group to allow everyone to get a read by all other group members, and having a large group makes that near impossible in my opinion. Small groups are better at writing crits for a small number of works. But that’s just sort of what I was looking for. I’m leaning towards CC just because I love their system so much, but don’t know if there will be a few people joining up or not, so yeah.
I’ll join, especially if it was done at CC. Likewise, I probably wouldn’t be able to critique something every single week, but they’d get done.
I like the small group idea as well, as opposed to a alrge group. It would be a lot easier to keep track of who’s posted stuff recently, not to mention it would mean a lot less critiques that need to get done.