May 5, 2007

Officially we are not doing it through CC anymore because I’m not going to ask Andrew or anyone else to subscribe to the premium account there. It’s not fair to you, especially since this is just starting up and there isn’t a definitive guarantee it will last for a year or forever for that matter. However, I did a little research and found that we can do critiques in MS Word without a problem. It takes a minute to set up some quick keys for the two commands we’ll likely be using–strike through and comment. So, for those that were interested (Andrew for example) send me a direct email so I can tell you how to do these quick keys. And then we’ll start doing it via email and just send each other documents. Would anyone be opposed to having a mailing list that makes discussing stories easy amongst one another? A very low key list. Just something that only the members would send to one another. Not advertised so there would be no spam. So please email me in regards to the critique group. And another post will go up later this evening on the evil semicolon–which I am quite fond of but people tend to use incorrectly on a consistent basis.

I have just discovered that the premium membership at CC only allows me to start a private queue for all of you to use who don’t have premium memberships that will only let me post to the group and not you. This defeats the entire purpose of the group obviously. So I’m wondering now a few things. The reason I really enjoy CC is because of the ‘inline critique’ template, which makes critiquing super easy online. I don’t think it fair to ask people who don’t use CC to go off and pay for a membership, but at the same time I don’t know of any place that offers an easy way to critique. The only thing I can think of is sending things to one another via snail mail, but I completely understand why nobody wants to do that. There isn’t any way I can think of to snail mail without giving away addresses. I don’t have a P.O. box, but I’m also completely unworried about anyone knowing where I live really, at least in regards to a critique group. But, again, I understand if nobody else likes this method.So here are the options I have right now:1) Everyone who wants in gets a premium membership ($34 dollars for a full year, $24 for six months) . It isn’t really a lot of money, but for some of you who are full time students it is. It’s a commitment that I can’t ask any of you to make. That would be unfair.2) We say “screw CC” and go elsewhere. I don’t know where to go that will give us at least some way to organize our critiques, nor where we can get that ‘inline critique’.3) Someone tell me or teach me how the heck they can easily do critiques in word with whatever crazy feature they use. (Someone mentioned this to me. This would mean we could just send MS word docs, or RTF files to one another and do it that way. Perhaps start some sort of mailing list or whatever for it. This would mean not using CC of course, but I probably could utilize my premium membership for doing a real good run through of WISB since I am considering publishing it). And there has to be some sort of quick key for this otherwise it will make clicking around take way too much time.4) Someone give me another idea of what the heck to do about this. I’m a little lost here. So, does anyone have any ideas?