As a member of Critiques and more, you are expected to both critique and send in your work. The reason for requiring you to send in your own work is twofold; one, I want you to experience what the authors are going through. It may be well and nice to tell a person that something is not that good, but you should also be able to show your own work as well. Two, I want to keep you very active with this group.

You obviously should keep up with the reading and critiquing. I figure that at least one critique of about 200 words per week is good and maybe even three would be mininum.

Manuscripts are obviously going to be less. Specifically, either four stories, a novel/novella, eight poems, or a play of two acts would be great. This is not going to be a set mininum; probably if you turn in two, it will be fine.

Right now, I'm going to use the same concept that Critters uses, when turning in stories and critiques. Stories (and I am using the broadest term here; poems and other writings are there as well), should be headed by the following

Title:
Author:
Genre: R/M/E/G/NF/P (explained later)
Words:  (approximate word count)

P=Plays

Limit your entries to about 100k or less. If you have a bigger piece, probably submit it as a "request for readers", with a web link or e-mail.

Erotic/violent works will either be thrown out if they are too graphic, or put with a parental warning on them. Use your own best judgement here.

Critiques are probably going to be the hardest. Every manuscript will be assigned a number, and you mark CRITIQUE:#### as the subject for the critique. When doing critiques, probably the best way to do it is to remember that somebody has put some effort into that piece, so be helpful. I don't want to say, be kind, because that sounds too much like you can't say anything against the piece. Just don't trash talk it.

There are several ways to do a critique. My way is to open up my e-mail client, open up a text editor, and cut/paste the quotes in, with my remarks afterwards. The reason why I don't hit reply is three-fold:

1. It automatically sucks the whole of the piece in there, which can be majorly distracting.
2. You need CRITIQUE, not Re:
3. I think of my critique as a piece unto itself, and I like white space to doodle in (I don't know how you "doodle" on a computer without causing serious damage, but when I can, I want white space.

Sometimes I give it a grade, although the grades are deceptive. The piece has to be really bad to go under a 5, while I have never given anybody a 10 yet.

First off, be specific. If you have a point to make, take the point and comment on it. For instance:

>he said "Blah, blah, blah"
I get the point that the speaker is trying to express his sadness over his father's death, but he sounds a little too robotic here. Is that what you meant him to sound like?

One thing I would advise against doing is trying to "rewrite" the piece. None of us are each other; my way of thinking is not the same as yours. Trying to rewrite the piece can sometimes change the whole meaning of the piece in a way that the author never intended. Let the author find his own way, and just point out when you think he is going over a cliff.

Also, minimize your quotes from the piece. If I see a critique that has a two-word remark after the whole of the piece, I won't count that critique.

Keep your comments on the piece, not on the author. Make sure that you write your critique so that the author knows what you are talking about.

Okay, now for the more part of Critiques and More. When you receive your critiques, read them over slowly and then take an hour to digest it. Don't slam the reader because he didn't get what you meant.

Right now you have two responses. One, if you get one specific author and one specific criticism, you can e-mail that author asking for more insight. Secondly, if you get the same criticism from a lot of authors, you can do the same thing with all of them, or you can write to the Mailing list with your general problem. Again, the mailing list is not for specific manuscripts; think of it as one-on-one therapy for your writing, or at least as one-on-one as the Internet can get.

Will my work get stolen?

Honestly, it can happen, and unlike Critters, I do not have a password protect on my site. However, there are several reasons to believe that your piece won't be pirated. The first, is that I will make sure that the people on this list are reasonably active. If a thief has to work to be on the list, they'll turn to easier targets. Also, you are dealing with writers here who wouldn't want their pieces pirated, so they hopefully they won't do it first. Finally, it's sort of like taking a piece of software that's half completed; you don't know whether or not it's buggy, or not.

Still, to keep people happy, I would like the members of this list to institute an honors system by deleting pieces as soon as they read and critique them, and not to hold any one piece for more than a month unless a person asks you to. Nor should you show a piece to anybody other than those on this list. Even if you have a professor who you think could improve this piece, don't show it to him or her. Let's keep the critiques in the group, folks.

How long do I have to critique a piece

I will distribute the pieces on Sunday and stop taking critiques by Saturday. Wednesday I distribute the critiques I have received so far, with a follow-up on Saturday.

Do rewrites count as manuscripts?

In a word, no. The reason for this is that if I were to allow them, I would have a lot of people submitting the same story with maybe one revision, or just simple editing. I could theoretically say that if you really, really revised it, then it should count. Only I would have to sit down and determine what "really, really" means, and that's too much work for me.

What happens if I don't keep up on the reading?

If you haven't submitted a critique within a month, or less than three within two months, I remove any manuscripts you have in the buffer and give you a warning. If you haven't caught up with your reading by a month, I remove you from the list.

What does being caught up with the reading mean? okay, let's assume you haven't written a critique within a month and I put you on warning, you have a month to get a total of eight critiques in. If you have done two within two months, you have the third month to get a total of twelve critiques in.

You can also tell me that you have "gone on vacation", and I won't count in the weeks that you are gone.

What about manuscripts? Well, I probably won't throw out anybody for a lack of manuscripts, but if we don't have manuscripts, we can't write any critiques. You get the picture.