Episode 3: Joining a Critique Group

First, just a bit of an overview.

Here's the organizing structure I plan to use in this blog. I'll use Episodes to provide some background on what I've tried while struggling to learn the rules of writing commercial speculative fiction. I'm not claiming that these will have been successful tries or that I learned the correct rules. Eventually, Episodes may include very recent events like yesterday.

Here and there, I plan to punctuate Episodes with a Summary of rules or writing tips that I think (or once thought) make some sense, but I'll be under no illusion that these apply to everyone. Summaries may also include my take on writing jargon and philosophies. For example, a summary could include the SFWA Nebula award definition for the length of a short story as a story less than 7500 words. Or maybe that also would sneak into an Episode. See. It just did.

Eventually, I will blog Case Studies of stories I've written that have sold, along with my thoughts on why it sold. Case Studies will also include a discussion of things I've tried (like present tense) that haven't sold yet, but I'm sure will do so just any day now. You have to be an optimist to stay in this game.

Naturally, there must be the usual Day in the Life asides. These are things that happen that I just feel like writing about, particularly if I'm trying to avoid real work. I may even include software and other resources I use for writing.

More difficult to do will be descriptions of Projects including planning, problems, progress, etc. Why? because there are lots of false starts and changes of direction in these projects, which may not be s a pretty thing to watch. 

The next category is one I'm struggling to learn, but seems to be essential for anyone who wants to write for more than their own gratification:  Marketing, including setting up for Amazon and Kindle Ebooks, and whatever else I happen to try (including blogging) whether or not it succeeds. 

Miscellaneous will be a useful catch-all for things like rants, reviews of books, other things related to writing and publishing fiction, particularly speculative fiction. Of course, I reserve the right to add new categories, and I do have a few projects that are not speculative fiction.

For example, I have a novel project I've worked at here and there for three years, The Last Martian from Arkadelphia. Last Martian is not speculative fiction, nor is it about Mars or Martians. Also, it doesn't take place in Arkadelphia. Rather, it's the story of a modern man out of sync with his own life. I'll blog about it more when it's on my front burner.

So back to Episode 3. 

At that point in my sojourn into full-time fiction writer, about 2008,  I decided that I should learn short fiction before wasting a great amount of more time on novels. I tried writing a couple of short stories, a medium that I had read as an undergraduate English literature major, but had only attempted once and that while I was an undergraduate. So I wrote what I thought were a couple of clever short stories and sent them off electronically. Rejection.

What was wrong with those attempts. I didn't know. Feedback was usually not forthcoming from over-worked slush readers, and with the advent of electronic submissions, magazines could be bombarded with hundreds of submissions. I couldn't learn from my mistakes if I didn't know what my mistakes were. I needed opinions, beyond my own, to help me correct my course. After all, I didn't intend to write just for my own enjoyment--you don't need feedback for that. I wanted to write to entertain people, and I wanted to measure my success by what I was paid. The keyword there is entertain. The only way you can determine if you've entertained is feedback perhaps mixed with a little applause and monetary reward. 

So I looked to join a critique group. I live somewhat isolated on two acres in the Texas Hill Country. I located two 'local' critique groups, one forty miles away in San Antonio which seemed to meet irregularly or not at all, and an active group in Austin  over fifty miles away. Certainly there were paid workshops you could attend like the ones from Writer's League of Texas in Austin , or at least apply to attend like Clarion. I wanted the feedback, but not the lectures. I spent most of my life in academics, and I knew how to study on my own. Perhaps I made a big mistake not to consider the paid workshop approach. Perhaps I was just cheap. I was certainly too lazy to start my own critique group.

Instead, I read about online critique groups, including those that used the Turkey City Lexicon. Eventually I found three that I was willing to try, Baen's Universe on Baen's Bar, Critters, and  Hatrack  Writer's Workshop. Yes, I know there are other online workshops and critique groups, but this blog is about my experiences, not about what my experiences might have/ should have been. All three of these web sites focused on writing speculative fiction. Each used a slightly different method. Because it seemed to be the easiest to access, Hatrack was the first one I tried.

I joined Hatrack. The part of Hatrack I tried were the Fragments and Feedback forums. The idea there was that you submitted the first 13 lines from a proposed short story or longer work, and members of the forum would comment on it. In return, as a member, you were expected to comment on other member's first thirteen lines. Thirteen lines seemed a bit arbitrary to me and not easy to count on their entry screen, but the moderator had a rationale which I'll suggest down the road in a  Summary post about submissions and slush readers. Well, this experience had some uses, particularly when it came to setting up a story idea in an effort to hook the reader. I understood the concept intellectually, but it really didn't have a big impact on my actual stories, just on the thirteen lines I tried out on the forum. However, some of these exercises did give me good story ideas, which I later expanded. That's when I first started to think of writing short stories as writing exercises rather than projects to finish.

Next Episode, I'll describe my experiences with Critters, but first a note about Baen's Bar. Before I joined Critters, I joined and lurked about Baen's Bar. I could not make any sense of what took place there. I tried to read the description on their FAQs page, but it seemed enmeshed with the submission scheme for novels and the details were spread among diverse posts that were difficult to locate. Confused, I gave up and signed up for Critters (next Episode). Later, I would give Baen a second shot by simply jumping in. Once I got a handle on the operation of the slush piles, the experience was so rewarding that I might take two Episodes to document it.