Author Topic: Email List + Submission Dates  (Read 186431 times)

Chaos

  • Administrator
  • Level 36
  • *
  • Posts: 2170
  • Fell Points: 3
  • The Original Hero of Ages
    • View Profile
    • Eric Lake
Re: Email List
« Reply #30 on: November 17, 2008, 04:26:50 AM »
I like that idea a lot of submitting on the 15th.

 
O.k.~

Quote:
EDIT: Now that I think about it, "double spaced" might be a really good guideline to set in stone right now.

Quote:
1: no spamming.  Send out one copy to everyone, then wait for the thoughts to come in.
2: No replies to comments about your own work.  It's like I heard once: no matter how much you argue or defend, they're mind has already been made.  Just note their thoughts and move on.
3: No wedging.  We all understand that everyone is going to try their hardest to be nice, but sometimes no matter how you word it things will come out harsh.  So, don't preface your comments with apologies.


~For example, don't submit an entire novel of stuff. ~

Word count limit?  1.5 spacing=9 pages@1700 words w/.doc (or there abouts)

You shouldn't reply to comments about your own work, but I think that it is necessary to have the ability to ask follow-up questions. And that's where the line can get fuzzy, because a follow-up question could turn into just another form of response. However, I'm a firm believer that follow-ups are essential.

I am opposed to an explicit word limit, if only for the self-serving reason that the first chapter that I want to submit is 19 pages double spaced at around 3500 words :P. I know it's long, but really, once you read it, it really works as one cohesive chapter. I don't think we should limit lengths of submission, because that could artificially alter the story you are trying to tell.

I think with the length guideline, the point is to just say "don't make it deliberately gigantic". Tell what you want to tell, and then submit that. Don't go fifty pages or something insane like that, use common sense.
www.17thshard.com - The Official Brandon Sanderson Fansite.

Oh SNAP, I'm an Allomancer.

AvalonDreamer

  • Level 8
  • *
  • Posts: 276
  • Fell Points: 0
  • Boy Genius - Grown Up... Kinda.
    • View Profile
Re: Email List
« Reply #31 on: November 17, 2008, 04:57:19 AM »
I'm in:

I've met most of you all on other bits of the forum, and I think it'd be awesome to form up a writing group. I can do two or three evaluations a week, but school and my own writing keep it to about that.

What if we left it to: "One chapter at a time."? If someone is sending out deliberately large chapters, or unnecessarily long ones, it's a problem that can be rectified.

Have we decided on a date for first submissions?
« Last Edit: August 15, 2009, 01:23:23 AM by Silk »
My friends held an intervention, to stop my ridiculous plans to take over the world (Jake ended up in the hospital). I convinced them to let me take over other worlds though.

*Evil grin*

RIP: James Oliver Rigney, Jr.

Chaos

  • Administrator
  • Level 36
  • *
  • Posts: 2170
  • Fell Points: 3
  • The Original Hero of Ages
    • View Profile
    • Eric Lake
Re: Email List
« Reply #32 on: November 17, 2008, 05:04:34 AM »
I'm in:

I've met most of you all on other bits of the forum, and I think it'd be awesome to form up a writing group. I can do two or three evaluations a week, but school and my own writing keep it to about that.

What if we left it to: "One chapter at a time."? If someone is sending out deliberately large chapters, or unnecessarily long ones, it's a problem that can be rectified.

Have we decided on a date for first submissions?

Yeah. "One Chapter at a time" is what I was trying to get at, you just said it much clearer :P

It's either December 1st or December 15th--we haven't quite had a consensus on that yet. However, it will probably be a monthly schedule, so that's one submission per month.
« Last Edit: August 15, 2009, 01:23:40 AM by Silk »
www.17thshard.com - The Official Brandon Sanderson Fansite.

Oh SNAP, I'm an Allomancer.

WEKM

  • Level 3
  • ***
  • Posts: 32
  • Fell Points: 0
    • View Profile
Re: Email List
« Reply #33 on: November 17, 2008, 06:33:11 AM »
I think that the 15th will work well this time around. That also sets up a good point for everyone to shoot for.
I also agree, one chapter per session. Unless of course, it is a short story and can be considered the equivalent of a novel sized chapter or two. Let's just not go crazy and have everyone submit their entire work from NaNo.

Should we break up the discussions into separate threads for each submission once we start? That way everyone knows right where to go to see comments on their work.

firstRainbowRose

  • Level 18
  • *
  • Posts: 867
  • Fell Points: 1
  • So pretty!
    • View Profile
Re: Email List
« Reply #34 on: November 17, 2008, 06:35:44 AM »
I'm for the breaking up thing.  That way, we don't have to hunt through tons of pages of posts to find comments.  Also, I say that at the start of each session we post the title of our piece, so we can just look and say "oh, this is the topic with that chapter".
"The custom of royalty in referring to oneself is to naturally employ the royal 'we'.  We are very happy, we are very sad, we are bored and suffer from ennui.  For a royal prince there's no such word as 'me', It's always 'we'.  So rightfully I should be two or three, don't you agree?"

Chaos

  • Administrator
  • Level 36
  • *
  • Posts: 2170
  • Fell Points: 3
  • The Original Hero of Ages
    • View Profile
    • Eric Lake
Re: Email List
« Reply #35 on: November 17, 2008, 06:51:41 AM »
Oh, definitely we'd want to split the topics up between authors. That would be insane if we didn't.
www.17thshard.com - The Official Brandon Sanderson Fansite.

Oh SNAP, I'm an Allomancer.

jjb

  • Level 4
  • *
  • Posts: 96
  • Fell Points: 0
    • View Profile
Re: Email List
« Reply #36 on: November 17, 2008, 08:34:59 AM »
I totally agree with the separate threads thing, but would it be one thread per author, one thread per chapter, or in the case of short stories, one thread per short story? I personally think it should be one thread per book or short story. So if you're a short story author, you will have multiple threads. If you're writing a book, you will only have one thread and you will be able to look through to see if problems are still the same from chapter to chapter. (There would have to be a clear way to see which chapter is being commented on, of course.)

Another question: How many people we are supposed to send the story out to? I would assume that we send it to everyone who has put their email up. Right now the number of people who would critique the story is 8 (Raethe hasn't added AvalonCreamCorn yet). I don't know how large writing groups normally are, but I would assume 9 is okay, but pushing  the limit.


And yet another question, but this time not very relevant: How many of you guys actually have the same emailaddress as your username, or did you create another account so wouldn't get spammed?

Silk

  • Staff
  • Level 31
  • *
  • Posts: 1798
  • Fell Points: 0
  • ...no room for someone in second place...
    • View Profile
    • Beyond Impossibility
Re: Email List
« Reply #37 on: November 17, 2008, 09:09:31 AM »
No, Raethe has been at work all day and hasn't had the chance to update the email list yet. :P Also, this is the email she always uses, and she enjoys referring to herself in the third person.

Ahem.

It looks like there are going to be a fair number of us doing this, so maybe we don't WANT to submit all at once. We could split into two groups - one group (whoever's ready) submits December 1, the next group submits December 15. That way, people who are ready now don't have to wait forever, and people who aren't don't have to scramble. It will also keep us from dealing with two dozen (or whatever) submissions at once.

A seperate thread for each submission would be my advice. Should we say, each author who's submitting starts their own thread, and title them, say, name of submitter, title/chapter number, date? That seems to me the easiest way to keep things organized. Though jjb's idea of one thread per book/story has merit too...

Regarding length, I think that 3500 words or so is completely reasonable to ask everybody to read in a month. (Particularly if we don't submit all at once. I'm lobbying for that one!) I also agree that we should be able to play a bit of fast-and-loose with the length, though; I'd say if your complete chapter is 4500 words, go for it. If you submit all 50,000 words from NaNoWriMo, though, I will have tomatos ready.

Now, what about people who write really short stories or chapters (many of my short stories come in at under a thousand words long)? Do we allow them to, or request them to submit more than one chapter/story/whatever so they're coming in at the same length as the rest of us? Or do we just allow people to submit whatever they feel needs to be workshopped?

And yeah, I'd say we send it out to everyone who's put their email up.
« Last Edit: November 17, 2008, 09:21:04 AM by Raethe »

Chaos

  • Administrator
  • Level 36
  • *
  • Posts: 2170
  • Fell Points: 3
  • The Original Hero of Ages
    • View Profile
    • Eric Lake
Re: Email List
« Reply #38 on: November 17, 2008, 09:38:15 AM »
"Chaos2651" is my usual internet handle. If you googled it, every single hit you get would be me. So, I try and streamline it and make it so everything I do is with that handle.

Raethe, that idea for submitting in two sections sounds like a brilliant one. I vote for that one :P

For the submission topics, I think the format should be like this. You put which month you are submitting in (for clarity), then the title of your work, and the chapter number. I think, by having each chapter/submission in a separate topic, it makes it much easier to have all the comments on that section in one singular place. I don't know about other people, but gigantic topics are not fun to navigate at all (have you SEEN some of those Hero of Ages theory topics? The Hemalurgy one is beyond 30 pages of posts!).
www.17thshard.com - The Official Brandon Sanderson Fansite.

Oh SNAP, I'm an Allomancer.

firstRainbowRose

  • Level 18
  • *
  • Posts: 867
  • Fell Points: 1
  • So pretty!
    • View Profile
Re: Email List
« Reply #39 on: November 17, 2008, 09:41:52 AM »
I second the two groups thing.

And firstRainbowRose is what I use for EVERYTHING!  I have since I was in 7th grade and people started using "rainbowrose" on me.
"The custom of royalty in referring to oneself is to naturally employ the royal 'we'.  We are very happy, we are very sad, we are bored and suffer from ennui.  For a royal prince there's no such word as 'me', It's always 'we'.  So rightfully I should be two or three, don't you agree?"

Silk

  • Staff
  • Level 31
  • *
  • Posts: 1798
  • Fell Points: 0
  • ...no room for someone in second place...
    • View Profile
    • Beyond Impossibility
Re: Email List
« Reply #40 on: November 17, 2008, 09:45:38 AM »
Yey! Yeah, I think it'd make a lot more sense than all of us doing it at once. So. Are/will some people be ready to submit by December 1st? Do we have any volunteers? (If that's a no-go, we can always do December 15 and 30th.)

Date - title - chapter number? Okay, that works.

Chaos also makes a good point about huge topics. I'm starting to lean more in the "one thread per chapter/story" rather than the "one per book" direction...

Oh. What about content? We're mostly speculative fiction writers. Do we want to keep our content to strictly spec fic, or is literary fiction okay too?

Haha. RainbowRose - Funny, I've been using the name Raethe since about seventh grade, too. She was actually a character from one of my first "novels" (please don't ask me to tell you about it. Ever).

((In other news, I appear to have gone from "wealthy and important" to "penniless and bankrupt". Wth is with these status thingies anyway?))
« Last Edit: November 17, 2008, 09:51:59 AM by Raethe »

Chaos

  • Administrator
  • Level 36
  • *
  • Posts: 2170
  • Fell Points: 3
  • The Original Hero of Ages
    • View Profile
    • Eric Lake
Re: Email List
« Reply #41 on: November 17, 2008, 09:49:23 AM »
I am willing to submit on December 1st. Heck, technically the chapter is already done, I'm just applying some extra polish to it.

Content... well, I don't see any reason why we expressly need to limit it. People should have the freedom to write what they want and get feedback.
www.17thshard.com - The Official Brandon Sanderson Fansite.

Oh SNAP, I'm an Allomancer.

Silk

  • Staff
  • Level 31
  • *
  • Posts: 1798
  • Fell Points: 0
  • ...no room for someone in second place...
    • View Profile
    • Beyond Impossibility
Re: Email List
« Reply #42 on: November 17, 2008, 09:57:06 AM »
Genre would have been a better word for my above question. Oh well.

Hmm. Do we have any young readers on this list? Maybe we should get people to label their work with things like violence, nudity, profanity where necessary...

AvalonDreamer

  • Level 8
  • *
  • Posts: 276
  • Fell Points: 0
  • Boy Genius - Grown Up... Kinda.
    • View Profile
Re: Email List
« Reply #43 on: November 17, 2008, 09:59:25 AM »
I'm ready for a Dec. 1 submission. I support both the two groups and "Title"/"Relevant Section" thread conventions. I think a 1:1 is a little skimpy for turn-around, if it was meant one review per every submission. Depending on what the consensus feels up to, maybe make it three or four.

Since I believe that you, Raethe, started this and are the more-or-less unofficial chair-poster (yay for PC terms) of this group, it'd be up to you to decide who is in which group (1st or 15th); it'd be nice to know who is where for the start of the month.

As for genre, I have no issue, and I endorse the labeling of works. We could use the FCC's notation of Violence, Strong Language, Drug use, and Sexual content, then add where necessary. (I.F. "'Title'/'Chapter', V L")
« Last Edit: November 17, 2008, 10:01:01 AM by AvalonCreamCorn »
My friends held an intervention, to stop my ridiculous plans to take over the world (Jake ended up in the hospital). I convinced them to let me take over other worlds though.

*Evil grin*

RIP: James Oliver Rigney, Jr.

firstRainbowRose

  • Level 18
  • *
  • Posts: 867
  • Fell Points: 1
  • So pretty!
    • View Profile
Re: Email List
« Reply #44 on: November 17, 2008, 10:01:15 AM »
I agree that we should label them.

Also, another idea on how to find your groups is by genre.  I mean, my romance focused book won't be of much intrest, and thus the comments I get back usually won't be very helpful from someone who loves blood and guts work.
"The custom of royalty in referring to oneself is to naturally employ the royal 'we'.  We are very happy, we are very sad, we are bored and suffer from ennui.  For a royal prince there's no such word as 'me', It's always 'we'.  So rightfully I should be two or three, don't you agree?"