Silk

Augh, so sorry! Yes please post @Paul SB @Appol PhD. I was away at a friend's wedding and I knew it would be busy... turns out I wasn't wrong lol.

@Paul SB @Appol PhD good to go!

Both good to go! Welcome back @ginger_reckoning!

Go right ahead! May well happen one day, but also, every week is another week.

lol. Does that mean you want to submit?

Thanks, good to know!

Please go ahead! By the way, I'm aware of the email delivery issues with the list and will be looking into it. (This is a fancy way of saying I currently have no idea why it's happening.) In the meantime, obvious though it may sound, check your junk mail if you're missing submissions (and let me know if that's what's happening!) and add readingexcuses.com to your whitelist.

Yes, please do!

Sounds good!

Sounds good!

Yes, sorry for the delay! You and @Paul SB are good to go.

As Paul says, anyone can read and comment the threads. To join the email list, just shoot me a private message with your email (helps avoid spammers) and I'll add you so you can actually read the submissions. We're pretty open door around here. Sure thing. Shoot me a private message with your email so I can remove you from the list so I'm not trying to figure out which email is yours. Thanks! Exciting! You're both good to go.

Please do! Apologies for my late reply.

Sounds good both!

Yeah I think this could work well! Solid life advice haha

Hi stranger! I think this version was a little different than the one you read... based partially on your comments

Go for it!

Excellent, anyone else?

Good to go!

Hopefully so! Any takers for this week? I’m going to be slow to respond, most likely, as the Internet is out at my place.

Please do! Slightly more normal week this week so hopefully I will catch up...

Please go ahead!

Any takers for this week?

Oh, excellent, I'm glad it was helpful! You could definitely play that up--have her notice other girls and be surprised or ashamed at herself for noticing, realize she hasn't thought about R in a long time, all sorts of things. Quite possibly. There were a couple spots where I missed attachments, and I read through the earlier chapters pretty quickly in order to catch up. For sure, anyone should feel invited to do so! Personally, I tend to hold off on sharing that stuff, since I only get that "first exposure to the story" kind of reaction once, and share it only when I'm workshopping something specific. Plus, our current little crew seems happy to run with prescriptive feedback, but not everyone is. I usually default to more reaction-based critiques unless I know the person I'm critiquing is happy to get prescriptive suggestions.

"Identity not behaviour" is a good way of putting it and also my understanding of asexuality and others. (I should note, though, that I'm not speaking from an "own voices" perspective here.) Oh, I think bringing the themes out even more could absolutely help here. What might help is to really illustrate the shift D/A's thinking. When I first read the prologue, for example, I didn't get the impression that she was mostly running away to find R; I had the impression that she was running away from things being generally bad, and finding R and/or her family was basically a bonus. All of those things can still be true, of course, but it might help to shift the focus of those first scenes to have her more focused on R. Then it will mean more when she starts "falling out of love" - she gets caught up in all these other things and R starts to become less important. Eventually, we should probably see her making choices that feel more deliberate about choosing things other than R - maybe she chooses her own safety over R, finding her mom and sister over finding R, her work over finding R, etc - but making it more apparent that she's deliberately choosing other things. She can have feelings about that: maybe she's conflicted about choosing one over the other, maybe she realizes that she hasn't thought about R in a while and has feelings about that, etc. (Which doesn't need to be long inner monologues: the Emotion Thesaurus kinds of sentences you pointed out could go a long way towards illustrating how she feels about the choices she makes.) Plus, if R is more of a presence in A's mind before she appears on the page, we'll be more prepared for that appearance and that will also help the story be more focused. Ah, I did not know this about her! Especially if this history comes more into play in the sequel, your instinct to save the long explanation for the sequel might be correct; there's the potential pacing issue but also just kind of a lot of things happening. But, I still think this is important information for us to have about the protagonist as it does of course shape her thinking, so maybe there are smaller snippets of it we can get here and there, while this longer segment appears in the second book especially if this is where the history has more direct bearing on the book.