Silk

Safe trip! Have a great vacation!

I've done NaNo once so far, and it was great fun (technically, I've participated every year, but the one year I finished was the only year I really got started). I'd definitely like to do it again this year, but whether I do will depend mostly on where I'm at with my MA thesis. And November is typically a big month for grading assignments, so we'll see. I'm tentatively interested in participating, anyway.

Caleb, Trizee, you're both down for Monday.

Definitely a big one. We've got one person signed up for Monday so far (Shadow, one of the new members). Did you want to submit on Monday, Aminar? I don't think I saw a submission from you last time.

Ah, gotcha. Writers of the Future?

Fine by me. Thoughts from others in the trenches? When's the contest deadline, Aminar? I'll try to review it in decent time since you're working towards a deadline, I assume.

No problem.

I'll put you down for Monday.

Oh, I'm sorry! I must have missed your name somehow. Four it is!

Mandamon: No problem, just clarifying Yados: Yes, you're the third for this week, so there's lots of room.

As in tomorrow, or next week? Either is fine.

Sounds good!

Go for it.

Go for it. By the way, everyone, I think I occasionally update the list of who's submitting and forget to respond here, so if you ask to submit and don't get a response from me it's probably because I put your name on the list already.

Yes, there was only one last week. Two this week so far.

Go for it, you're the first one to sign up so far.

Yes, we're still submitting as normal. Hopefully running both at the same time will allow people to have their cake and eat it, so to speak. I'll put you down tentatively for Monday.

You're on.

You're the first one to sign up.

Updated this thread to add links to Reading Group A, the IRC channels, and discussions about submission formats and workshopping outlines.

Cool! Thanks for setting that up!

I see some people are trying out the dropbox idea, so we'll let whoever's interested run that for a few weeks as well and see how people are liking it. The one drawback I can see to The Sad Dragon's solution is that the submitters would generally be getting feedback from fewer people (and the same people, until/unless we cycled who was in each group) and the variety of opinions one gets is one of the best parts of a group like this (I think, anyway). Aminar, Mandamon, Jack, I have you all down as submitting for the ninth. Did I miss anybody? There are two more slots.

This is definitely one of the problems of a group like this. Lowering the number of people submitting per week and raising the word limit (which we've actually done once already--and remember, too, we're not too strict about the 5k maximum) really only gives us the same problem from a different angle. Since there usually seem to be about a dozen people active at any one time (50+ people on the actual list) that means that most people participating get to submit at least every two weeks. If we raised the word limit to 15k and lowered number of people submitting per week to, say, three people (it's five right now), then if the same number of people stay active most people will only be able to submit once a month. I would be open to trying something new if the majority of the group agrees, but it seems to me that if we went with this approach, people would ultimately only be able to get about the same amount of material through: more material at once, with a longer wait in between. James's idea about the dropbox might work in addition to what we already do: that way, people who are hoping to push material through faster can get less detailed critiques (but that may work if you just want to catch major issues, especially if you're submitting first drafts). Other people have used beta readers as well as the RE group. You might also consider providing a partial outline or summary and only submitting the chapters you most want feedback on ... things like that. Personally, I've found this group most helpful for short fiction rather than novels for this very reason--but I recognize that only helps people who also write short fiction. In terms of how long it takes to get longer works through the group, I'm not sure there's any real way to address it without changing the structure of weekly submissions altogether. I'd be a bit reluctant to change that (though, again, open to experimentation if a lot of people feel strongly) because it seems to work pretty well insofar as ensuring that everyone gets a decent amount of feedback each week, and I know a lot of people like having even a soft deadline. In general the weekly discussion thing seems to have worked pretty well, but it's definitely a compromise.

As far as I can recall I've always been able to edit the titles of posts, I assumed because I'm a moderator of the forum. Thoughts, everyone? I just realized, too, that modifying titles is a bit counter-intuitive: you can't modify the title of a topic by opening the topic and editing the post; you have to modify the title from the main forum.

I definitely wouldn't be averse to critiquing a few outlines. At least, once I hit that mythical time where I'm done this darn degree.