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100 Posts in 100 Days: Day 35
Feb. 4th, 2012 10:51 pmAs promised, today was a day off.
It was amazing how cheerful I felt when I got up knowing I didn't have to accomplish anything whatsoever today.
Of course, since I was so relaxed and cheerful, I took care of a bunch of little things that I've been neglecting forever, such as not setting up my voice mail when it got changed from Verizon to Frontier. That's all set up now and all cleaned out and ready to go.
I did another critique and reviewed my story for minor changes and officially submitted it. Probably it won't get critiqued for four weeks, but in the meantime, I'm doing critiques and thinking about what's involved in truly good writing.
Got my first real stinker of a story. I was tempted not to say anything, but then I thought to myself that if it was really a stinker, the writer needed to know that.
One of the things I found was that it was *really* difficult not to pepper the critique with sarcastic zingers a la MST3K. This wasn't all bad because I did share them with Ben and we had a good laugh over the whole thing.
I was much more sedate and sober in my review, and contented myself with a little bit of sarcasm in the opening remarks--nothing that would make the author feel badly, but merely stating the actions of the character in a slightly humorous way. If he sees the joke, it will make him chuckle, if he doesn't see it, he'll just think I used an odd choice of words to restate the plot.
I was really careful to put the review into the review checker to catch anything that might have been less than diplomatic, and I had Ben read it as well. (Ben said that I was far kinder than he would have been.)
The other unexpected result was I had a worst opening line (NOT the story's opening line, something entirely different) pop into my head which was so putrid it was worthy of submission to the Bulwer-Lytton annual contest. It was duly submitted.
Now I'm going to kick back and play my game for an hour or so, enjoy the Saturday evening treat and sulk that Bleach isn't on because AS is showing some Star Wars thing.
*sighs*
It was amazing how cheerful I felt when I got up knowing I didn't have to accomplish anything whatsoever today.
Of course, since I was so relaxed and cheerful, I took care of a bunch of little things that I've been neglecting forever, such as not setting up my voice mail when it got changed from Verizon to Frontier. That's all set up now and all cleaned out and ready to go.
I did another critique and reviewed my story for minor changes and officially submitted it. Probably it won't get critiqued for four weeks, but in the meantime, I'm doing critiques and thinking about what's involved in truly good writing.
Got my first real stinker of a story. I was tempted not to say anything, but then I thought to myself that if it was really a stinker, the writer needed to know that.
One of the things I found was that it was *really* difficult not to pepper the critique with sarcastic zingers a la MST3K. This wasn't all bad because I did share them with Ben and we had a good laugh over the whole thing.
I was much more sedate and sober in my review, and contented myself with a little bit of sarcasm in the opening remarks--nothing that would make the author feel badly, but merely stating the actions of the character in a slightly humorous way. If he sees the joke, it will make him chuckle, if he doesn't see it, he'll just think I used an odd choice of words to restate the plot.
I was really careful to put the review into the review checker to catch anything that might have been less than diplomatic, and I had Ben read it as well. (Ben said that I was far kinder than he would have been.)
The other unexpected result was I had a worst opening line (NOT the story's opening line, something entirely different) pop into my head which was so putrid it was worthy of submission to the Bulwer-Lytton annual contest. It was duly submitted.
Now I'm going to kick back and play my game for an hour or so, enjoy the Saturday evening treat and sulk that Bleach isn't on because AS is showing some Star Wars thing.
*sighs*
