Monday, May 3, 2010

Progress Report: 5/3/2010

At work, there are three basic speeds:
  1. Busy
  2. Very Busy
  3. Mega Hyper Super-Overdrive Busy (in a white wine sauce)
Last week, and this week as well, we're on the third option. In fact, we may be on the third setting until about mid-June. At which point I am likely to invoke the "I need to take some days off or I'll melt into a puddle of useless protoplasm" clause.

Such times of Option Three are traditionally not very good for writing, since there's so much energy being dumped into work. However, if I let stuff like that derail me completely, I'll never get anything accomplished. So I signed up for Critters.org.

I haven't had much luck with finding a critique group, though I've been testing options since late last year. Ruling out the local, face-to-face options, none of which seem to work, we're left with the Internet. Critters.org is a big online critique community for Fantasy and SF writers, so it seemed like a good place to start.

My feeling right now is that I would eventually like to narrow it down and develop a smaller, more personal critique circle, where all the writers know each other and commit to supporting and improving each others' work. For now, it seems the best option is to make some contact with other authors through a larger site and see who clicks.

In laptop news, my good friend Andrew offered to pass along his old Mac laptop to me, which is terrific. The sole hurdle to this is prying it from the clutching hands of his psychotic tenant. Have you ever met someone in real life who was such a walking, talking stereotype that you would never dream of writing that person as a fictional character? That's what this tenant is like. She is, in many ways, stranger than fiction.

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