Silk

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.

Yup, that part came through loud and clear, and I don't think it's necessarily a problem--nor that A has feelings about her in the present-day (though some people will find that power dynamic off-putting on its own, probably enough to stop reading in some cases, that's just an audience thing to be aware of). I don't think you have to worry too much about capturing the neurochemistry specifically, though you could certainly lace some in there if you wanted as that does seem to be an interest of the book, I think it's more that we've seen very little of A and R together, they were already on rocky footing, and then we get this scene which puts R pretty unambiguously in the camp of the bad guys. To drastically over-simplify, there's two potential arcs for R now, one in which she becomes further set up as an antagonist and hurdle to overcome, one in which she gets some sort of redemption arc and becomes an ally/romantic partner/friendly rival/ whatever. Ditto for A if you want to set her up as more than a victim of grooming: that's either something she overcomes (maybe by addressing it directly, maybe by just being a kick-butt protagonist in other ways) or as someone who's formed a relationship with R despite their rocky footing. I think either is viable, though the latter in each case is going to be harder to pull off because of the squick factor, the book will just need to spend more time showing us which road it's going down. Personally, I don't even think it's a matter of needing to happen sooner, necessarily; the pacing on this aspect feels fine to me, just noting this scene has shifted my perception of R from "potential ally" to "probable antagonist," even if she's not the antagonist. The behaviour we get from R in this scene crosses a pretty bright line, so the book will have to work harder to try and move her back to "potential ally" in my perspective. One thing I'm now very curious of as a reader is what shifted A's perspective of R since obviously it did shift at some point.

This is one of those things where I come back to the old Writing Excuses saw of "surprising yet inevitable." Right now it feels like there's lots that would be surprising, but very little feels like it might be inevitable. It's not so much I want to be able to guess what happens, but this far into the story, I want a general sense of where things are going (even if I end up being wrong! that can be done well, but it's hard to pull off a twist when my expectations haven't been set a particular way to begin with). Is this the kind of story where A solves problems with violence? With politicking? Is she well set up to do it, and we suspect we're going to watch her succeed, but are waiting to see how she does it? is she set up poorly for it and we're going to be biting our nails to see if she can pull it off? Are she and R likely to reconcile their differences in some sort of way (not gonna lie, after that last entry I am hoping and probably suspecting not), or is R going to cause her trouble? What sorts of specific problems might the lab and the virus cause--are they inviting violence, causing political upset, something that can be used against A, etc? Not that you ought to telegraph each of these down to the last detail, or touch on each and every one of them. But these are the kinds of questions that, answered broadly, can help clarify the stakes, and IMO it's actually harder to be surprised if the story feels like "anything goes." Totally up to you! I'd be happy to read it and critique accordingly - though that gets into the realm of offering prescriptive feedback, which I'm happy to offer but not everyone finds useful.

Note: I modified the title of this thread to include an “SA” tag, as the scene at the end is non-consensual. P1: Is this the same family we met before? Is there a plan to actually get them out of there? P3: Unless I’m supposed to be suspecting the kid or his mom, it feels awfully coincidental that A started suspecting something just days after the incubators were turned on. P5 “Doesn’t asexual mean you don’t have sex…” You mostly answer this in the paragraph below where it’s clear that you’re just using the term slightly differently than it’s often communicated (as I understand it, as an outsider) by those communities, but there are definitely ace people who would dispute this characterization. P7 I have no idea what she wants with the virus, btw. I imagine you intended this, but this scene shifts my perception of R pretty dramatically, from maybe well-meaning but oblivious to someone a lot more menacing and malicious. I’m certainly fair less inclined to give her the benefit of the doubt on, well, anything. Not that that's a bad thing! But it drives home that the elites, including R, see A as an means to an end and not a whole person, even though there are some complexities in the way R interacts with A even in this scene. Overall: I’m interested and excited to see the different threads of the story dovetailing a little more, but I still don’t have a very good grasp of the overall shape of the story—I alluded to this above, but I really have no idea how A thinks the virus could be useful to her, for example (“release the virus against those who oppose me” seems like an unhelpful method of defense. And obviously if the incubators produce almost two dozen infants that would be a challenging situation, but I don’t have a grasp on who or why. Further previous comments, I think a little more integration and setup of these plotlines before now will make this part of the story, where we’re entering into a new phase of “A deals with problems beyond her immediate surroundings” more exciting: I don’t think we need to or should have all the answers by any means, but a bit more foreshadowing of what’s to come.

Well hello! Welcome back! To be fair, I think it's been at least that long since I've read a Sanderson book lol. (Maybe I shouldn't admit that here?) Also, that's the second time I've heard "Brando Sando" recently and I'm chortling a bit about it.

Urgh, yeah, subscription models are a scourge on society. But, I'll definitely check them out. oh thank goodness. I have re-ordered these scenes so many times by now haha Oooh this is really interesting! I actually went a bit harder on the "negative experiences" in this draft based on feedback from the last round, specifically spending a little more time on the hospital scene, which was described by readers of an earlier draft as "blink and you miss it" in terms of how explicit it was - and it was pointed out on me that the conclusion leans pretty heavily on this scene. But maybe there is room to peel back in, say, the wearable device scene... Hm, yeah, fair enough. I could maybe do something with her "eating her doubts" along with, um, everyone else, similar to the cold plunge scene. Which might be another opportunity. Oh, this might be an idea. The intro is I think the only part of the story that I actually haven't touched during revisions. Thanks for commenting! (And all for the discussion.)

Yes, I think this is exactly the kind of emotional signalling that would add a ton to your story!

Yeah, time-wise I expect to be treading water for the foreseeable future unfortunately. That one might have more to do with my general pop culture immunity than your age...