Critiques Are In!

Its been a whirlwind the last week or so. 

Between regular work, freelance work and relaunching a book, we've been a tad busy. And the wonderful distraction of the Olympics are a click away. 

Of course watching yesterday was kind of sad and maybe a little disappointing but that has passed now replaced with that weird kind of hope that seems to come with being a hockey fan. 

We haven't forgotten about Stargazing or this blog and regular blogging will pick up once more. 

 We have made it into the second round and if you want to read more about the project and what the judges have said, it can be found here: http://www.smallpressidol.com/forum/topicview/misc/651.htm 

Personally, I do better with hard and fast rules. Submission rules, contest rules. Rules that say, "Give me 10 of A and 6 of B". All right, no problem! I can give you that and put out the best work I possibly can under that type of structure. 

As it turns out, when a hard structure is absent, I don't do so well-with the process or the critiques. In the structured systems, at least I know what I've missed or what they wanted to begin with. With this contest, its so vast and I have been stuck wondering "Well, what do they want?" many times.

 This of way of doing it of course, can be really good because it leaves the door open wider for creators-especially artists to show off their work.

Maybe I have become too expectant being on the literary side of things or too used to being constrictive within my writing style because the pitch I wrote and submitted, would make a great query letter. 

So we are off to round two and in between work, work and more work, I've started to think about the background on these characters that will appear in Stargazing. "Bio".... How far back should I go to make it an interesting read? Three generations, a whole family tree? Probably not that detailed of course, but it is tempting.

Mulling it over and tweaking the finer parts and hoping it turns out for the best and hopefully in the second round, I will have landed exactly what they were looking for or have written something well enough to be given a high enough opinion to continue on to the third round.