Contructing a Fantasy Super writing group

[Hillsy]

Calling Matt Larkin. Calling Matt Larkin. Come in Matt!

Yo - Brenda mentioned there seems to be a glitch with the livejournal friends thingy....I don't think any of us other than Brenda have got you working on our friends feed yet....

....Soo...on the manage friends page, next to our names have you got a big Green arrow?

[trixie]

Hey guys!

I'm checking in to see how this group has been working out. I realize this makes me sound awfully nosey, but I'm super curious to know how the first few weeks have gone. You were looking at ~1000 words/person per week. Is that still the case? Do you feel that too much text or could you handle more? Do you like the LJ set up?

C'mon! Dish! Enquiring minds (ahem, me) want to know how this is shaking out!

[Hillsy]

Yeah it's been going great.

I think the LJ thing has been a success. I mimics how I imagine a writing group might work, just without the open discourse. And the fact you posts are open to all the members of the group means you can be britical but you don't fall into the trap of being overtly so because of the anonymity of the internet.

Volume wise I think I've been doing around 3-4K a week (1000 per person plus a few hundred each for finding convenient breaks), which translates into about 3-4 hours work (But I'm really OCD and write waaaay to much and over-explain everything). I could probably do either another critique or take a few hundred extra words per critique - but any more would be a struggle. That is until I learn to not write so goddamn much when I'm replying.

Not sure yet how it'll pan out at the end of it all....personally I've not gone into a heavy 2nd edit yet, and so far a lot of the responses have been more detail and clarity issues, so I haven't had much in the way of problems yet. The next month will be interesting though.

But Yes, I'm definately glad we started it up.

[Beethovenfan]

I really like the LJ set-up. It's pretty easy to use and I like being able to see what everyone else had said. But I like to save that for after I've already made my own critique so I'm not biased or influenced by others' critique of the same work. Plus, I love the diversity of the novels even though they're all fantasy. I don't know about you Hillsy, but I'm really digging the story lines!

I could definitely handle more words per week. Right now at 1000, I think it's just a tad small - limiting. It makes it difficult to see the larger picture when you only get little chunks at a time. I guess that would be the only drawback to doing it this way. Otherwise, I really like how it's all going.

Perhaps we should up the word count to 1500? Might help.

[Frederick.williams]

If you are still looking for critters, I am willing.

Please let me know one way or the other.

Cheers