I’m a member of a couple of writing circles (see the links to the left), and I’ve submitted one of my stories to them. Critters has a system where it takes about a month for your story to get critiqued, but then you tend to get twenty-five critiques all back at once. SFF Online Writing Workshop have a ‘trickle’ system, where you upload your story and it’s immediately available for critique, but they tend to come slowly.
So far, my story (The House Always Wins) is reviewing very well on the OWW. There are a couple of changes I need to make, but I think it’s nearly ready for submission. The OWW has a scoring system (as well as text critiques), where you mark peoples’ work out of 5 in Professionalism of writing, Setting, Character development, Plot credibility and Dialogue (5 being considered of publishable quality, 1 being considered very poor). I’m currently averaging a 4.8 overall score, which is very encouraging indeed.
I can’t decide whether to wait another week or so, using the time to do a ‘final’ redraft, then submit, or to wait until the Critters critiques arrive in a few weeks. If I submit and get rejected, I can use the critiques as a basis for further redrafting, and if I get published, I could still learn from the criticism. However, I don’t want to rush into it and submit a manuscript that might only need a couple of tweaks to be publishable, as most markets have a dim view of resubmissions.
The problem is, I promised myself I’d get published this year, and we’re already two thirds of the way through it (and I haven’t been published yet. I haven’t even submitted anything). I think what I’ll do is look into the different markets some more, and redraft it this week. Then I’ll decide on Friday.
