Email List + Submission Dates

[LongTimeUnderdog]

Can I submit 3 weeks in a row?  Is that allowed?  will my aunt Ruth shave her beard?

[Chaos]

Yeah, it's allowed. We're pretty much "if you want to submit, then submit". In the theoretical day when we get more than eight or ten people submitting, maybe not, but I think that day is a while off.

[Silk]

Considering that the submissinos are an average of 4000 words long, I'd personally cap it at six or seven people. (Ten people would be nuts. Put it this way: do you want to critique 4/5 of NaNoWriMo in a week?)

Anyway, you're allowed to submit as often as you want, pretty much. If we end up getting too many people in a given week we'll give first dibs to people who haven't submitted in a while, but in nearly a year, that's only happened once (and then half the people who'd signed up didn't submit anyways).

[Chaos]

I was just making up random numbers. I never said they were reasonable.

[Chaos]

I'm submitting on Monday.

[Silk]

I never said they were reasonable.

Well then. It's a good thing one of us is.

[Andrew the Great]

I'd say four or five. I'm having trouble looking through more than one or two a day.

[Silk]

I definitely wouldn't want to do anything less than five. There're a lot of us, and otherwise it'll take people forever to push their stuff through. I know it's a lot, but remember you don't have to critique everything every week, or always get to it right away.

[Chaos]

In fact, it's kind of unreasonable for everyone to critique everything every week.

[Andrew the Great]

Well yeah. And I don't (referring both to getting to it right away and critiquing everything).

But now that you mention it, yeah, the whole 'twelve people wanting to submit but it's capped at five' thing could really be an issue. We'd end up backed up for months, and we'd all have new stuff we were working on, but old stuff we were submitting. Yeah, it would be pretty messy.

So, in light of that argument, I think 6 or 7, or maybe even 8 is a reasonable cap.

In the theoretical day when we get tons and tons of people submitting, we could also split into smaller groups, with maybe 2 or 3 submissions (chosen by the smaller groups) going to the whole Reading Excuses group. We'd have to be pretty big before I wanted to do that, though, since it results in fewer people critiquing each piece.

[lethalfalcon]

I'm probably going to put out one on Monday, assuming I can be happy with it by then.  It'll probably be the only one for awhile, though (I'm slow, a perfectionist, and have a job).

That said, I seem to remember reading that you don't have to critique every single one you get. I don't know that I will be able to every week (although I'll try to post something, because I'll at least read them). I wouldn't mind getting up to 10 per week, under the assumption that I'd probably read them all but only review 4-6.

[Chaos]

I'm probably going to put out one on Monday, assuming I can be happy with it by then.  It'll probably be the only one for awhile, though (I'm slow, a perfectionist, and have a job).

That said, I seem to remember reading that you don't have to critique every single one you get. I don't know that I will be able to every week (although I'll try to post something, because I'll at least read them). I wouldn't mind getting up to 10 per week, under the assumption that I'd probably read them all but only review 4-6.

I have a job. It just happens to be one that is extremely conducive to writing

There has never been a rule that you have to critique every piece you get. Officially you just should critique one piece for every piece you submit, though most everyone exceeds that. As always, we want you to be writing as a top priority, not reading, despite our name, "Reading Excuses".

[Recovering_Cynic]

I try to review most everything, and only occasionally do I skip a submission (sorry Flo!  I just don't have time to read 17 chapters!).  I think it has to do with a secret hope that people will then read my stuff

[Andrew the Great]

I'm kind of the same way. Though I feel kind of bad because NaNoWriMo has unlocked this extreme wordiness in me, and both of my next chapters are over 5k words. I thought about trying to split them into smaller chapters, but what ends up happening is that one scene isn't substantial enough, and another scene is way long.

Ooooh, that's a thought. In the hypothetical day when we have bunches of people submitting left and right, we could cap it by word count. As in, we'll accept 30,000 words this week. That would ensure never having a week that was crazy busy and as a result, no one getting critiqued.

[lethalfalcon]

The only thing wrong with that is when you get the hypothetical person who submits a 30k document to be critiqued, and then everyone else has to wait 'til next week.

Personally, I think 5k is a little light. Granted, pretty much anything I write will probably be that or smaller, but I'm not against reading 8-10k, either. I know the emphasis of this place is on writing, but I guess I'm probably going to be a rebel here, too, reading more than writing. I spend all day writing code, so writing more after that is sometimes difficult because my mind is just tired of thinking. Reading, however, doesn't work the same parts of the brain, and is sometimes quite refreshing. I can't speak for anyone else on this, though. At worst, you'll post your long chapters and fewer people will critique them. I probably still will (for whatever that's worth).