Silk

Both our new folks have stated that they're not ready to submit just yet, so there are still four slots open . Tal, you can certainly take one of them if you want.

I'll put you on the list for Monday. Just a couple of FYIs: I've just had two new members message me today to join the list and I've let them both know that they are welcome to submit this week, so heads up, there's the possibility of a busy week if they both want to submit on Monday. Also, I probably won't be responding to submission requests until Sunday morning/afternoon--my big band is performing tomorrow and it's pretty much going to tie up my whole day. So yeah, please excuse any delays on my part.

Nope, there's one more slot. Go right ahead.

Nonsense, it's only 15:34! I mean, uh, that's fine.

You're good to go.

CommandanteLemming, Robinski, I'll put you both in tentatively for now.

We have our first submitter for Monday the 8th, SirenKing.

I'd think this mostly depends on what the submitter wants to get out of critiques for the chapter in question. If your primary aim is to get feedback on the events/structure/etc of a specific chapter or scene, and you're more interested in feedback about the particulars of the submission rather than the chapter's place in the overall story, then submitting chapters out-of-order is probably fine. (The skeleton you mentioned would probably still be helpful for giving people an idea of what happens in between, since that stuff's still important, with the caveat that readers may still miss stuff that they might have otherwise gotten if they'd read the "full" manuscript--foreshadowing etc.) In a group like this, where it typically takes quite a while to push a full long-form manuscript through, it could also be useful to submit this way if you've got particular scenes you're particularly anxious to get feedback on, like if you want to see if a particular scene (or whatever) "works" in a certain way without committing to writing the buildup. (With the same caveat as above.) Or, I suppose, if you just want to keep feedback coming while you write the other chapters, so you can incorporate that feedback into your current chapters when it comes to stuff dealing with scene-by-scene, line-by-line, or whatever other issues you're interested in that can reasonably be critiqued within the frame of a single chapter. However, if you're mostly interested in getting a sense of the story overall, submitting stuff out of order may not be the most useful approach for you, since even with a skeleton it WILL distort readers' sense of how the chapter works overall in the piece--more than a weekly submitting pace already does, anyhow (there's a certain level of artificiality in any writing group that just can't be avoided). Doing it this way will make it more difficult for readers to critique, and you to get useful feedback about, how the chapter works as a unit of a larger story. tldr; depends on whether you're most interested in getting feedback on the chapters as individual units or the story overall.

No problem. PM with the email address that you want to use and I'll add you to the list so you can start receiving submissions. Other than that, the whole process for sending/receiving/critiquing subs is detailed in the Welcome to Reading Excuses thread, so just let me know if you have any questions.

Just so you, there are actually two things going on in this forum. There's the Write About Dragons writing group that this thread is about, in which the writers have all decided to do Sanderson's Write About Dragons course together (and are writing novellas, I believe). If you're interested in that one specifically, I'll point you to EndurantArchivist, who's been managing the Write About Dragons Group. I haven't been participating myself, so I don't know how far along they are in the course or how manageable it would be to join in/participate at this point. However, there is also the Reading Excuses writing group (most of the writers in the Write About Dragons group are part of the larger Reading Excuses group, though I think there are a few 17th Sharders who aren't part of RE). Instead of just being novellas, the RE group is pretty much open to anything: mostly novels, but also various categories of short fiction, and we've even had people submit poetry and screenplay scripts on occasion. Most of the members are readers and writers of speculative fiction, but we don't exclude other genres. The submission date for Reading Excuses is every Monday, and the rules and submission process are laid out in this thread. So, if you're interested in joining the larger Reading Excuses writing group instead of/in addition to the Write About Dragons group, let me know and I'll hook you up. ETA: I'm afraid I don't know of any VOIP groups--maybe others do? But someone also posted a thread recently that talked about starting up a writing group that met over Google Hangouts, in case that's something you're interested in.

Up to you. If you had planned on working on it some more before submitting, I wouldn't worry about submitting early just 'cause we have a quiet week--but if you'd like to submit today, go ahead

You're the first to ask so far, go ahead.

I can be patient. It's a huge endeavour.

There're only three people signed up for tomorrow/today (time zones! hooray!), so go ahead, Tal. Vinaigrette. Man, now I'm hungry.

Jagabond, Commandante Lemming, and Robinski for tomorrow. The fettuccine noodle is at the ready.

Congrats! I'm afraid I won't be reading them for a while as I don't own any sort of e-reader. But they look great.

You wouldn't be the first to miss it, all good.

Yup, go for it.

I'm not really sure what you mean by the stories being four A4s in length (pretty much every market I can think of defines the length of a story by its wordcount), but-- "Short story market" usually means magazines, anthologies, etc., that specifically publish short fiction and pay writers for the individual short stories that they publish; I don't think whether short fiction collections, with the exception of anthologies I guess, are typically considered part of the "short story market" as such since they're typically published and sold by a single publisher, much like any other single book (and there are relatively few of them published because they are typically rather difficult to sell).

Or because you like writing shorts.

Cool, that's four submitters so far...

Looks like andyk and EndurantArchivist for this Monday the 11th so far, have I missed anyone?

manaheim, Robinksi, Shivertongue and andyk so far. Anyone else?

Manaheim, you and Robinski are the only two to ask so far, so unless there's a lot of interest over today and tomorrow I'd say you're good to go.

Go ahead--Tal's submission is pretty short so I wouldn't be too worried about having an extra submission this week. In fact, even with Tal's submission, we're still only at four submissions so far for tomorrow.