Anonymous Writing Group II: criticism thread

On the Difficulties of Confessional Art and Turtles

this made me laugh, enjoyed it. felt the ashcroft reference was too much of a leap but other than that it was good spoofery.

'Andrew' i liked. Nice flow, good riffs, tight.

Fragment- ok. decent teenage satire kinda vibe, small piece obv hard to say much more about it but stylewise consistent with similar stuff ive read and certainly no worse than much of that.

Grendel, im afraid i didnt like at all. Tripping over phrasings from the start, characters imo not much more than ciphers for an overarching Point, some of the language was nice and it kept a nice consistent level of seedy tone from entering pub til the re-entry of our heroine but not my cup of tea, sorry anonymous writer xxx

First one- its boiled-down but without, imo obv, obv, the snappiness or style that makes for good boiled-down...it's a bit 'these things happened' fin.....

xps idk i think its fine to have it all in the one thread tbh...

Yeah, the first one was too on the nose for me, like it didn't have any points of view, there were parts where it could have expanded and said something more.

The fact it's called Har De Har Har makes me think someone is taking the piss though.

The genie's out the bottle now anyway xp. Depending how this plays out, I'll maybe revert to daily postings from now on (and depending on length of piece).

'On the Difficulties of Confessional Art and Turtles' - has a genuine sense of being in a realistic setting, despite the slightly fantastical events.

'Andrew' - in the first half it's difficult to work out if the reader is supposed to sympathise with the title character or think of him as a bit of a dick. The second half is better and actually made me want to read more.

'Grendel' has a good seedy pub atmosphere, twist at the end was intriguing.

btw any authors can out themselves and explain/respond on-thread - anonymity isn't a hard-and-fast rule.

Alternatively if you want to remain anonymous, drop me an email and I'll post your response for you.

I'm not really sure what the first piece is supposed to be either. If it's meant to be an excerpt from a crime story then it's very forced and I wouldn't want to read much further - the slang feels dated and sub-Eastenders and there's a lot of tell-don't-show going on. It reads almost exactly like a cops-and-robbers subplot from John Lanchester's Capital, which isn't really a recommendation.

But then the last sentence undercuts that, so maybe it's a parody, but in that case I'm not sure the intention is that clear. If it is a parody, it could perhaps be sharper.

Well turtles was an ilx post so no pretence here tbh

on phone atm so sorry if thoughts on other pieces are too brusque btw, will prob have more to say on grendel when i get a chance without it being a headline 'rave or pan' restriction

re: word choice

i remember delillo once saying something to the effect that he spent a long time on the SHAPE of his sentences, they way they actually sat on the page, and that consideration of this very often conditioned the word choices he made - like picking a less obvious word for the sake of symmetry or typographical neatness.

think some of the writers above might profit from this approach - give it a go!

I liked the Turtles piece, nice George Saunders-esque quality to it, I hope it's an introduction rather than the entirety of the piece, as I would like to see something more happen to the character. There's definitely the kernel of a really enjoyable story there.

xp to ward, yeah my first post hammering against ik's dictatorial opener touches on that i think, that the 'right word' impacts descriptive, mood, consistency, rhythm/cadence, i dunno a dozen things, its a very blunt instrument to use 'word choice' in a set of analytical tools. A 400 word piece is 400 word choices, no more than that, if one were so inclined to critique.

first piece is baffling

'andrew' is effective fare. i haven't read 'the catcher in the rye' but this is kinda how i imagine it to be (except with more computers)

feel that too many have been posted at once but idk we can handle it

Re: Andrew - cracking first line, to the extent that I was actually a bit disappointed when it turned out to be a first-person narrative. Presumably the writer is making a point about their narrator's character by starting off like that, if not, you need to reconsider the word 'relentless', but I hope not, because that's a great start.

i remember delillo once saying something to the effect that he spent a long time on the SHAPE of his sentences, they way they actually sat on the page, and that consideration of this very often conditioned the word choices he made

Not just the shape on the page, but the rhythm of the sentences themselves - most great writers are great at prose rhythm and it's a difficult thing to get right. The second sentence in Andrew is very long and unwieldy, all those subclauses, it could be broken up a bit. No reason why you can't write long sentences, of course, but you have to be absolutely on top of the rhythm and flow of them and I'm not sure this is.

I hadn't talked to Andrew for nearly four weeks when I received a message from him on Facebook chat around 2am one night in early March.

Likewise this would benefit from being reshaped and reworked, you can convey the same information with almost exactly the same words, but give the sentence a lot more shape and momentum, just by reordering it a bit. As it is it's a bit flat.

Still, I'm intrigued as to where this is going and would like to continue reading. Taking a character to an abandoned boathouse in the middle of the night in the pouring rain is full of potential - if something terrible is about to happen, you can probably take more time and have more in the way of description and atmosphere to build the tension. You might not need to, depending on what's going to happen next.

That said, I don't know what a sarcastic sense of panic would be, or even a half-sarcastic sense of panic.

Good post, that. Had a nice punchy feel, the words did the heavy informational lifting while still keeping a good clipped stacatto tone, 7/10 would def like to see it as part of a fuller analysis

I think the Andrew piece could afford to leave more things unsaid - it chews through analyses (usually psychological) of the titular character where it can perhaps show rather than tell. It's quite stodgy in its rhythm (as Matt says), even if the ideas are well-considered and the characterisation sensitive

Fragment - really like the first line once again, but it veers a bit quickly into self-conscious wackiness. The humour misses the mark, there's enough comic potential in the premise that the writer shouldn't have to resort to wacky names.

Also, why is the alien running a used car business? And if so, why are they drooling and talking about world domination, rather than trying to be a bit less conspicuous? I know you've written this:

The fact that she drooled profusely and often spoke of devouring all of humanity did not raise any suspicion among her employees that their boss was an extraterrestrial; they thought it was some new sales motivational tactic, and it wouldn’t have been a bad guess since those behaviors were exactly the same as those espoused in the recent bestseller, “How to Increase Your Sales by Drooling Profusely and Threatening to Devour Humanity” by Beatrice D’xzgrx-Andromeda-Strain McCloskey

... but that reads a bit like a jokey way of getting yourself out of the logical problem you've already created for yourself.

Sorry if this sounds a bit harsh, but there isn't really much to go on here. What is here is quite Douglas Adams, and I don't really like Douglas Adams, even less so fiction that is going for the same thing.

For me the first one would be massively improved by developing different plot seeds that are already there.

The detective/bust scenario is a generic story that we've seen a thousand times, and so is naturally going to generate cliches. On the other hand, two small-time crooks crashing a music industry party to try and sell sub-par cocaine to drunk celebrities.... better. Potential for lots of mayhem, conflict + characters.

I like "Andrew" – you want to know more about the character and the situation pretty quickly. And the basic premise of a guy who can't live with himself because he's too positive... great.

Grendel - reading this you get the sense that the writer isn't very comfortable with the basic skeeziness of the character they've created, and it shows in the bluntness of the interior monologue here.

The sight of a creepy bloke chatting up a girl in the pub is universally recognisable enough for you not to worry about including lines like "he decides to go for a beer and a screw" or "gimme your fucking muff-box". It works best if you read it in a cartoonish Viz kinda way, and great if that's what you're going for, but there needs to be more pay-off at the end. Otherwise I'd be tempted to kill the interior monologue stuff altogether and convey the creepiness and misogyny in other ways.

I'm not quite sure what the intention of the piece is either, if it's to be taken as a whole (the mention of a Vanessa suggests not). Without knowing more about the girl in the pub, it's hard to know what to make of her - that she hangs around after "tell me how you want my cock first" stretches credibility a bit, even if she's deliberately fucking with him (which would be my guess).

Got more time now as I'm working from home an I've done all my work.

So Har-De-Har-Har for me has a few probs, it seems at the start like it's set in America then switches to Britain, only definitively by choice of dialogue at the end. I also think you need to know who the celebrity is, or they need to be made up. I still think it's a joke though.

I felt like Grandel was a bit stereotypically grim - it'd be nice to have more neutral insight into somebody like that and their mind - rather than an internal monologue that becomes a bit predictable.

I liked the plot device with the novel but it did feel a bit like a joke - a shorter paragraph would have been better.

Some of the language was a bit unnecessarily flowery for my liking.

I like Andrew, it feels like something that could be expanded upon. I didn't like the opening line though, contrary to others. Maybe personal preference but it feels like too much early exposition, I'd have saved the suicide bomb or wrapped it up into the positivity stuff, even later in the same paragraph, cos the two things make a nice contrast.

You could finish the opening paragraph after expanding on some of the positivity stuff with something like "it was even stronger after his third suicide attempt". Like a sort of grim punchline.

Or just ignore me if that's not helpful!

btw the turtles one - is that darragh?

It's the perspective on the Grendel story that's confusing... You feel like the narrative voice should be a little bit more of an observer after the first para which is nicely drawn.

Stephen King (love him or hate him) does these kind of detached-omniscient bad guy descriptions really grippingly. Needful things is probs a good example.

(sorry if that's lowering the tone)

Kings a good writer of exactly that imo

Ya im turtles.

add me to the idgi chorus re charlie and eddie; I'm a pretty uncritical reader, I like pretty much everything (this should be borne in mind when reading my "critiques" of the other ones, also I'm not v bright) but this story just isn't justfying itself to me at all, like why does it need to be told? If I have to read banal clichés like "in full swing" "in stark contrast" "while the heat died down" &c one after another after another, I want it to be in the service of a more interesting story than "there is a drug bust", or failing that, more interesting characters. Would suggest reading more (better) crime fiction, seeing what the best authors manage to do with economy, memorable characters &c. Soz if that sounds harsh.

Andrew reminds me of treezy talking about tao lin kinda? Not that I've read tao lin but something about the way certain emotional states are described very painstakingly evokes hazy memories of that thread. I like it.

Deems is having fun and so am I.

Fragment is a joke, and if it isn't funny it isn't anything, and I personally don't find it funny.

Grendel is probably the closest to my own literary preferences - I love this sort of overripe, vivid prose when done well and on a sentence level this had the most bits I went back and re-savoured. Things like adding a redundant "physically" to "physically shuffles his chair a foot closer to her" will stretch some patiences but it worked for me. I do agree though that the author goes a bit too far into grotesquerie with Alan's character (at least until I read Matt's Viz comment and began to like it twice as much, esp wrt the guy sitting looking at his todger going "fucken mate")

*by redundant I meant to write "redundant" as it's obv been inserted deliberately to convey extra um physicality

not sure if it's tacky to be the first to out myself, but i want to thank everyone for their supportive comments and constructive feedback for "andrew". i think i might actually try to finish that novel now, maybe. i have a very clear sense of everything i want to happen in the book (it's like, a condensation of a bunch of autobiographical stuff really, with fictional stuff added in) but i am afraid of putting too much time into it if there are no publication prospects.

i have ideas for comments for the other ones that i will post later when i feel more capable of concentrating, and giving them the attention they deserve.

also xp snoball, you're right that the main character is a dick, but only because his best friend whom he loves is unraveling before his eyes and he has no idea how to deal with it.

also, nb. wtf was i talking about the novel isn't autobiographical, really. just the locations and some scenes are... the characters aren't based on anyone specific. i think everyone who said i need more work on the rhythms of my sentences are otm... i have something very specific in mind in terms of the tone i want to convey but i think it only intermittently comes across, and it can sometimes get clunky. ok i'm done now.

ok, i really only have comments on two of the pieces. deems' piece is incredible and i agree with whoever said that there is a strong sense of place (ireland) even though it is a saundersian whimsical piece. it seemed at one level a good natured satire of ireland's sense of itself as being behind-the-times, or provincial culturally (with the way this silly turtles song led the narrator to national fame and later a government post) and i was reminded of an interview with kevin shields where he said that when he moved to ireland from queens, ny he felt for a while that he had left the real world and was hiding out in some alternate, purgatorial type space where nothing every really happened, due to the fact that pop culture and television at that time were so america-centric. in general, it was delightful and i want to read more. in terms of tone, pacing, etc. it was A+

"grendel" i also liked as an exercise in tone. i also liked how the title reinforces your sense of the main character as a grotesque figure who occupies seedy environs. it reminded me of william s. burroughs.

aha, called it!

Har-De-Har-Har - I don't fully get the disdain for this one. A bust is a brilliant subject to write about. Yes it's been done to death, but there's so much potential conflict that it will always make for good fiction. I don't read enough crime for it to be anything other than promising ground.

The trouble imo is that this piece doesn't stretch the conflict out enough. There are maybe four separate relationships that you could have a bit of fun with - between Charlie and Eddie; between them and the big-time dealer; between them and the guests; and between the two cops - but they're all too sketchy. Have them really hate each other, see how the bust develops differently.

its boiled-down but without, imo obv, obv, the snappiness or style that makes for good boiled-down

This is otm. An obvious improvement would be by paring it down to the minimum - The two men sat among the dustsheets. A party in full swing boomed up from the lobby. It contrasted sharply with the ladders and crusted paint. Charlie was a small time dealer, Eddie his cohort. They picked a living selling cocaine to City types. But now powder wasn't selling. Competition uptown had become fiercer; so had the violence. - still not great, but much punchier.

The trouble is pulp is itself a cliche, so it's got to be done right. You can't really have 'City' and 'uptown' in the same intro (not that I could think of anything better); you don't have the time to explain what dust sheets do. You have to reflect how people talk, but without cliches - it's really hard to pull off.

Would suggest reading more (better) crime fiction, seeing what the best authors manage to do with economy, memorable characters &c.

By complete chance, immediately before turning to yours I read the prologue to Robert Crais' L.A. Requiem, which is also a hotel bust with tension between old and young cops. I'd take a look at that - it's only eight pages, but it's extraordinary how much tension and backstory can be wrung out of economy, slow revelation, and switching points-of-view (the latter being a big strength of your piece btw).

Good comments imo so far.

When are we getting next batch?

Turtles - I'm not sure the rhythm of this piece fits. It seems to be a longwinded gasbag - that first sentence could be four separate sentences - but towards the end he gets quite snappy. Maybe he's getting tetchier by that point, but it didn't quite sit with me. Agree that the Richard Ashcroft thing, while lolsome, is an unnecessary whimsy.

Otherwise there's lots of threads packed in there; ripe for development should you so choose.

Sorry for not pitching in with my crits yet, I'm at a convention, will be home tomorrow night so hopefully catch up then.

Not sure I agree on the Turtles opening line, I think the writer is just in enough control of his material to pull it off, and if you're going to do the multiple sub-clause thing then crowbarring three separate scenes into your opening line is a good way of doing it. It could be tightened up rhythmically (those first 20 words especially) but I don't otherwise have a problem with its length.

Andrew - this is very good. I was going to offer the same comment on sentence structure, but in fact you (both) do it very well; and in Andrew's case the 'exhausting' makes very plain that it's deliberate.

You could trim out a few words here & there - 'of Facebook' and 'they would repeat' are unnecessary. You also use double-adjectives - 'abandoned, barnlike' and 'twisting, wooded'. Those break the spell for me, making me aware that this is a piece of writing rather than a monologue - choosing only the right one would let the story carry on.

Fragment - I agree that this reads like a piece of sub-Hitchhiker's whimsy. Now I loved Hitchhiker's when I read it; the trouble is it completely scratched that itch, so that every time I've encountered similar later, it's set my teeth on edge. So I don't know that I can be very constructive tbh. The piece seems fine (silly name apart) - and the opening line is a good one - it's the genre I can't hack.

I'm guessing this would be better if it were to develop in an unHitchhiker's way. The ultramundane setting could work I think - but it'd be a hard job to suspend reality enough to make an alien working there seem perfectly natural.

Love the "Andrew" story best out of the whole lot. It intrigues me, its well-written and I'd love to read more.

Hi, I wanted to answer as Mrs. McCloskey but could not make an account in time. To me, though, the first line is the most cringe-inducing and contrived (everything else is pretty much straight-up reportage of the story as it was revealed to me) so I'm wondering what is it that people would rather see extended from it?

I've fabricated more on the used-car angle/alien takeover viability if that helps:

Mrs. McCloskey had taken a human lover, who also happened to be her worst salesman, in whom she confided the details concerning her species' plan for world domination: "ON THIS PLANET, FIRST YOU GET THE TRANSPORTATION, THEN YOU GET THE POWER!" The salesman was covered with drool, and failed to make his quota for that week. He wondered if there wasn't something odd, dare he say, alien, about the way Mrs. McCloskey's cilia-infested tendrils snaked into his orifices and drained his life force. Then he remembered the advice given on page 54 of Mrs. McCloskey's book: "MY #1 MOTIVATIONAL TIP: TAKE YOUR PSYCHIC TENDRILS AND DRAIN LIFE FORCE, DO IT!" He remembered it because of the motivational poster hanging on the wall with that very same slogan in large block letters captioning a smiling, but mostly drooling Mrs. McCloskey giving a tendrils-up sign.

re: "half-sarcastic sense of panic," I think it's fine, and is a better choice than "ironic sense of panic" in efficiently describing someone faking an emotion to ward off its full-fledged emergence.

re: RDRR, I agree the drug dealers are more compelling than the bumbling cops, but I disagree that that's necessarily a mistake.

i think your fragment just needs to be longer. we don't really have time to lock into the groove of your story, the universe you are creating, which is the key thing for any kind of sci-fi, even playful sci-fi.

Agree with most (gratifyingly small) criticisms of turtles, the beginning needs reworking, the ending is merely a punchline but not fitting. Signs of it being a post vs a piece i shaped (an ability im not sure i have tbph).

as for accusations of gasbaggery- i hesitate to be sure, but it's probably fair to assume that it did start out in a rather grand tone of indulgent reminiscence before i found myself getting my teeth into it- useful observation, that, and worth pondering if i revisit it.

it's kind of interesting to think about whether just letting gasbaggery take on a life of its own is a good way to start something, or whether to plan before putting pen to paper. i started something this weekend that i thought of in the shower, just pure gasbaggery, a gasbag character, whereas before i've really thought about the character before i got going. feel like either way has its advantages, the whole process for me is a bit like inspiration followed by writing followed by doubts about quality and where it's going, then repeat, then you get to an end and edit. what i'm realising now is that maybe after cutting things down they could then be grown again from the trimmed root, if that makes sense. as i often am ending up with v short pieces by the time my chopping is done.

Running with yr gasbag while the juices are flowing- good for tone imo

Pruning afterwards good for structure etc perhaps.

Certainly (evidently) i wouldnt advocate trying to edit while writing.

Re yr specific q, i guess a longer piece of work needs some thought or direction early on, whether it grows from a kernel or starts with a plan. Nice to have a promising passage or five in place to which you can look back for a quick reset tho (tone consistency again here, sorry if i fixate). Looking back on a dry chart of concept or scene plan might bend you to finish in the shape aimed for, my own gut feeling would be as you wonder about above i think? Write organically, cut into the shapes revealed by that, fit as works for what you have.

Gonna depend on where the focus on the work is obv, if concept and design are an important part of how its going to work etc

that piece definitely warms up as it hits its stride, i like the reminiscence and the way it develops. for once i'd say the language, especially at the beginning, is a bit too pared down. i needed more description, more of a feel for the location being described. i don't know if that line by line layout is as intended, i don't know if it works for me - adds to the over-sparseness maybe. basically i want more of the good bits of this piece tho, i want it richer and lol fishier.

The church was some bricks and mortar and wood that some men stuck together in a field.

Grandad’s corpse was in a box.

And one day some people who knew him and weren’t dead yet came to stand around the box and then bury the box.

And the singing was like the busker, those weak elderly voices crackling in a half-empty chilly church. This tiny building removed from everything else happening in the world at that moment. And this whole thing was meant to steel you against death or make you forget granddad was rotting in a box with white cushions in it and probably smelled like rubbish.

see this is good for me. first the sparseness, the emotional numbness, and then the expansion into the sensory. is nice. but some of the early attempts to catch that emotional blankness and its impact on the relationship - i think they need working up a bit. the blankness perhaps shd be more oblique and the girlfriend perhaps shd be more fleshed out.

It came with the explanation that it's conceived as a spoken-word piece, which to my mind explains the short paras.

that's interesting, at any rate. performance cd obviously fill out some of the stuff i'm talking about, tho i still think it needs development.

that's excellent.

i'd maybe lose or tone down the few pieces between moving to the city and the schoolkid's question, just the bits where he seems to spiral into mental fisherman outfit cliche- i think it could have gone that way but tbh it returns to the outside normality (or close to it) that inhabits the rest of the piece.

but that's a small quibble in a really good piece of writing imo.

Mordy's shd b obv given a close reading

eh didn't spot any of them particularly down on palestinians and/or minority rights tbh? maybe i missed some bible code shit tho, will re-check

thought i'd have a bite before now, tbh, disappointing.

" I see a lot of writing where it's obvious the author has a TV series or movie in their head and is trying to write that down, and that almost never works."
Even in the dan brown example it's actually kind of charming, though, and I think much more engaging than a writer who deploys it as a purposeless affect, or even one that puts a lid on such tendencies for fear of revealing crass and embarrassing ambitions at a franchise.

read this and was reminded of 'season six': http://theamericanreader.com/especially-heinous-272-views-of-law-order-svu/

still working through these, very slowly...

Harold Lovell is absolutely great. I actually think I agree with all of the criticisms of it, but only in retrospect - at no point was I thinking 'it needs to lose x' or 'how the author should've done it was y'.

I love how unsettling it remains. By which I mean it's making me pose the fundamental questions right up to the end. 'When did this stop being real?' 'What happened before?' 'Is he dead already?' I don't know the answers to these - if the piece were less skilfully poised either I wouldn't care, or my questions would be less riveting. This way it could be either a realist piece of science fiction or a straight-up piece of horror, and either way I'm gripped.

the SVU piece certainly commits to its thing in far more depth than i did

I actually think I agree with all of the criticisms of it, but only in retrospect - at no point was I thinking 'it needs to lose x' or 'how the author should've done it was y'.

imo this p much means that these criticisms are- well, not invalid, but not more than suggestions of difference than anything else. stands for most of the criticisms itt imo- fine thoughts and not bad angles from which to look again, but v eh tuomas-like in their 'i would have done it like this'iness ifgwim

I suppose that must be right. I was going to say that just because there's two valid choices, that doesn't necessarily mean they must be equally valid - but then we're into whether there's such a thing as *objectively* better. I'm inclined to say there is tbh, but whose objectivity counts? For this thread I suppose it's got to be the writer's.

The anonymous nature of it though makes feedback here much more useful as market research.
It's harder to tailor suggestions to help fortify what the author wanted to do if the author isn't necessarily there to confirm what it is.

The Zak Evans piece - only one substantive critique, which is that the lizards letter doesn't seem to be sufficiently remarkable to produce the unsettling effect described. I feel like you need either something really outrageous (the easy option) or else something that chimes horribly with the officer (hard to do) to take me with you along that development. The scenario is good though, a prison functionary creating unstable enemies has rich potential.

Other than that, I want to see capital letters at the start of sentences. You rely heavily on double adjectives at the start, and my eye needs help breaking the flow. I had to go back and read twice, which might be acceptable in a slower piece but I feel this one needs a wilder ride.

Dolly is kind of nasty I feel - not the intensity of any particular image so much as the sheer volume of them. I don't recognise the emotional state being described, and I don't believe I want to. I assume Dolly is the character experiencing it, but the horny schoolboy, who is he? Is a player, or a mere figment of her disturbed imagination? I hope the former, the latter is too vile.

I expect the aim is somewhere near The Naked Lunch, but it actually reminded me more of Nabokov's Ada, in that it retains a whimsy or olde worlde charm even through its horror.

And finally, Breathe is my own. I wasn't going to submit one, but as it happened I had aforesaid surgery that morning and dashed it off (via several drafts) to preserve the moment. Some interesting interplay between faith, confidence, vanity and the unseen that could maybe be developed further, though in pretty happy with what came out of it.

One lovely detail that I couldn't use - when it was over and they lifted the swabs from my eyes, the first thing I saw was the surgeon stretching back his latex gloves and pinging them across the theatre into a bin against the far wall. But that would've made it a different sort of story.

different but still good IMO. That's kind of a terrifying detail, definitely worth using I would have thought...

Any interest in a 'secret' I Love Writing board? Could be set up like 77, any ILXer can be let in but with anyone just trashing things for the sake of it would get access revoked.

Might do, might do

i thought the idea was mooted a little while ago but the mods weren't for it, was the decision

I very much like the sound of this.

would like this. i have been deep in expanding the piece that was here but i have a few other going concerns that i'd like to share. this thread was great reading too.

i would quite like this! i think if it were a secret board i might... actually post a thing.

do it!

It's difficult. The anonymity part of this was my way of giving a bit of privacy - which is good for getting the criticism started, but the disadvantage is that it's hard to get into a longer discussion about the piece (particularly why the author made the choices she did). A private board, so long as it got decent traffic, would be better for the latter - also providing it didn't inhibit honest criticism.

Another thing is whether the 'event' aspect of having a thread every six months would become just a couple of posters shouting into the ether. Not that I know whether this thread was an event, but it must've given some motivation I reckon - certainly I was delighted that people kept stepping up. If the board was just 'there', maybe that wouldn't happen?

would read an ilw board, but would miss these threads

Anonymity is pretty essential if anyone's going to get any useful feedback I think, though it is good to know who wrote what afterwards so there can be a conversation. TBH as it's fragments we're posting it's not such a problem having a public board, but a private one would be useful for longer/complete pieces.

Not that I have anywhere near enough stuff at the moment but, where ever it happened, I would do this monthly if everyone else could be bothered – would be a good incentive to write and improve! Six month gap kills momentum a little bit...

Unless the new board is a goer, I'm going to aim to get group III up in February. That way we can cash in on people's New Year resolutions.

Any ideas meantime for how to tweak the format? Having one piece per day seems like it might work better than posting them in batches.

I'm a bit busy right now but I'd hope that if the new board IS a goer, it'll be up before February. There's quite a bit more admin involved in private boards so Christmas is pretty much the worst time to do it, but early January should be okay?

If I set the submissions thread up in the new year, then it could also act as advance publicity/a register of interest for the new board. Then if it happens, we can kick it off with the criticism thread in February and let it fly from there?

Ya

I'd be really into the i love writing board. It could be a really great thing.

Me too.

I'd also be up for some kind of email-based thing where people send bits of writing around a group, although that might be a bit forward of me.

Anyone writing SF/F want to join a short story group? I'm part of a challenge group for 2014 where we commit to writing and submitting to market one short story every month. If you get enough stories in and you have one or more decent unsold short stories at the end of the year, they'll be considered for an anthology to be published in 2015.

There are 8 of us so far. Most people in the group are offering critiques as the stories come in, and help identifying suitable markets.

Ask for an invite to astoryamo✧✧✧@yahoogro✧✧✧.c✧.u✧ if you want to join in; say you're from ILX. I'm the list admin. You get a free pass for January, obviously.

it's auto-garbled that email address - the missing letters are nth ups o k

i was looking through my google drive and found a draft document titled "Anonymous II" that was apparently intended for this thread. i barely even remember writing it, but at least if there is an Anonymous III i'll have something to build off of

similarly i was looking through my googdrive and did not ever remember writing it ever but actually didn't hate it??? and would totally submit to this if it were to happen again if a certain amount of others would also submit

er *found something i wrote that i did not ever remember writing

who knows what happened there

karl malone alias, cunningly disguised with his real first name

NaNoWriMo is just around the corner, although interest in it seems to have fallen off the past couple of years here at ilx.