Day: June 29, 2009

A year of critiques

~ Scott W. Baker ~ 4 Comments

I just paid for a year membership with OWW, despite my disappointment with the number of reviews my stories have received.  The quality of the stories I’ve read there have been only marginally superior to those at Critters.  I’ve even had a crit-4-crit fail to reciprocate.  But I paid my fare and I’m in.  It’s only fifty bucks (twice what I’m making on my last three sales combined).

So why did I do it?  It’s a way to get feedback, just not as fast as I’d hoped.  Bottom line, I’ll need to do a bunch of reviewing in order to get my stories reviewed.  I have a plan: find writers I like and bookmark them so I can set up a regular crit exchange.  If I review one of your stories, you might feel the need to review mine.  If I do two or three, you’ll probably feel obligated.  Right?

Anyway, it’s an idea.  It will just take more than my free month to get there.  So I’ll try it.  If it doesn’t work out, I won’t re-up.

Not as bad as I thought

~ Scott W. Baker ~ 1 Comment

A while back I startedrevising “Leech Run” from both ends and had a little trouble when those ends met in the middle.  That was when I put it aside.  Going back over it helped me realize that it wasn’t that bad.  I still have a decision to make about Titan’s actions (whether to reveal them or not), but otherwise I think I ironed most of it out.  It wasn’t so bad.  A lot of the fixing I needed to do was fixing my previous fixes.

It wasn’t quite the task I imagined it to be so my revision notes are only half the coup against writer’s block that I hoped they would be.  I’ll hit the keyboard with those revisions tomorrow.  Little by little, it’s all coming back.  I knew it would.