critiquing

Impressions of “A Weekend with your Novel” workshop

I attended an excellent workshop at the University of Wisconsin last weekend with the aforementioned title. Designed to give you a jump-start on your work no matter what stage of creation you are at—just starting, ready to publish, or somewhere in between. I thought I’d share some of my impressions, hopefully encouraging you to attend a …

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Whate I’ve learned from writing 500 critiques

For better or worse, writing 500 critiques (502 to be exact) is a milestone, so I thought I’d ruminate over what benefits I might have received from doing all that reading of submissions and writing of criticisms. First, I’ve typed a lot of words. 311,926 to be exact. That averages out to about 625 words …

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My First Writers’ Conference

I attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s 22nd Annual Writers’ Institute last weekend at the beautiful Madison campus. What follows are some of my general impressions. I may comment on some specific workshops and speakers in a future post. Overall impression: Well organized, informative, good pacing and scheduling, excellent value–$250 cost for Friday-Saturday all day, Sunday …

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A Useful proofreading tool I’ve developed

When prepping a manuscript for submission, whether for an agent, editor, publisher, or even a critique group, I prefer to have my submission as clean and perfect as possible. I was inspired to become a better proofreader and revisor by the Agatha Award-winning book Don’t Murder Your Mystery http://bellarosabooks.com/dontmurderyourmystery/ by Chris Roerden http://crimespace.ning.com/profile/ChrisRoerden . She’s a well-know, highly-respected …

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There’s critiquing, and then there’s editing.

I thought I knew what editing was all about based on more than two years of belonging to critiquecircle.com, submitting almost 50 pieces of my work (mostly chapters) and giving well over 300 critiques of other writers’ submissions. I’m pretty good at placing commas, catching typos, and recognizing ungrammatical sentences. I learned much more from …

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A milestone reached!

I did it!  Finally finished the novel I’ve been working on. Great, you say, when will it be published? Oh, no, no, no. It’s not ‘finished’ finished, as in completed and ready to be printed. I meant the story has been written from beginning to end, in chapters, with some semblance of plot, character development, tension and …

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Observations about online critiquing groups

I’ve written seriously for about 2 years (yet to be published) and joined an online critique group soon after that. On that website I have become one of the more active participants. I mainly read a lot of submissions and critiquing them. I’ve submitted a fair amount of work myself. So, I’ve given and received …

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