Scribophile

So in perusing the interwebs the other evening, I came across a website called Scribophile. It is a website where you can sign up to critique other people's work and have your own critiqued. While I have always had vague worries of posting my writing on websites, it wasn't the worries you would think. I don't worry about someone stealing my work or ideas as the chances of that happening are almost non-existent. What I did worry about was losing publishing rights because the work would be posted to the website.

Scribophile eased my fears of that since a) when you sign up, they have some legal documents you must electronically agree to that basically says 'you get to keep all rights to your stuff', and b) they have a section that highlights and trumptes published work by the authors that are members of the website.

Pretty cool stuff. So I jumped on, earned some karma points for critiquing some other work, and posted my first chapter of the book.

Holy guacamole! Talk about invigorating. This is copied verbatim from one of the critiquers:

I can't find anything to criticize in this. If it were a book on the shelves, I would buy it. If the rest of the novel were as good/entertaining/awesome as this first chapter, I would buy copies for my friends. This was terribly interesting, with great characters and characterizations. Any question I had while reading was answered in seconds. I can't wait to read more! Good job!

Now, I know what you are thinking. There are a bunch of critiquers on there that just post shit to make you feel good or they say the same damn thing about everyone. I thought the same thing. The cool thing about Scribophile? You can't hide what you have done. I was able to go back and review more than a dozen of this person's critiques. It turns out, she's an English teacher. And she spares nothing on many of the works she critiques, slicing and dicing many manuscripts from top to bottom. In other words, she had no reason to say what she did about mine, but she did anyway. Cuz she liked it.

I got three more critiques on that first chapter that all had extremely positive things to say. While I have had some very smart and helpful people help me edit that first chapter into its current incarnation (thanks Loving Wife and Space Cadet 570 and Angela James!), I can't tell you how rewarding it is to have complete strangers write things like what you see above.

So the vim and vigor is back in Aspiring Author's typing fingers. The earlier rewrites I mentioned are complete and after tonight, I have the first 100 pages and close to 25,000 words edited and I can't wait to keep going.

If you have been dying to see my first chapter (and chapters 2 and 3), I invite you to head on over to Scribophile. It's free to sign up, the people are friendly and even if you never critique or have any writing to post, it's fascinating to see people going through the process. If you do go over, look me up. I am listed under Dave Halter and my avatar is the familiar Jack-o-lantern you see off to the left of this blog.

By the way, many thanks to the folks that let me know after my last post either here in the comments or via Facebook or in person (hi Loving Wife!) that you get the feeds from the blog and support me by reading. It is very encouraging and I am glad these words aren't drifting in cyberspace like pixelated chaff.

Cheers!