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NaRe09 in Sum
Jan. 1st, 2010 05:18 pm324 pages in Word. 154,530 words. 564 reviews given. Current user stats put me at just over twelve hundred total reviews, though given FFN's delay I'll have to check in a few days to be sure that's the final number.
I feel pretty good about it. I got two new good reviewers checking out my stories, the first on Reality saying interesting things and another over on Ice, and a number of others. I got a lot of hits, nearly double from last month, and numerous people added me/a story of mine to their favorites/alerts. Plus I got another chapter out of it!
And I really do think the whole blanketing thing works. The longer I go, the more it seems I get people saying they'll consider what I said, which was never even something I was trying for.
See, if you think of concrit as a private conversation between author and reviewer, it's very much like carving delicately crafted bricks and then chucking them into an empty void and hoping they somehow create a bridge, namely, frustrating, probably pointless, and prone to making you feel like finding the largest rocks possible and shoving them off the edge instead, possibly with dynamite attached.
I view it more as a communal thing. I assume that the author isn't going to take my advice, and even if they do it's going to be about some trivial thing like fixing the spelling on their title and no more. But they're not the only one who'll see the review, and it turns out authors are pretty good at taking concrit if it's not directed at them. And it also normalizes concrit, so that if someone comes along later and points out a couple things, they're more likely to take it in stride and maybe improve, and the other reviewer is less likely to get bitched at and decide to stop. It even makes it so that reviewers who think all you're supposed to do is a simple "good job! write more" might start considering what about the story they liked and didn't, and making small suggestions.
And the author, well, my reviews are signed, so they can't just delete it once they've read three lines in and realized it was critical. A month will pass, and it'll stop being upsetting. Three months will pass, and it'll stop seeming so unreasonable. Six months will pass, and they'll look back and think that maybe I had a point. And they'll remember how I reviewed a couple other stories, and that some of the things I mentioned then had bothered them a bit too, and...
In conclusion:
I feel pretty good about it. I got two new good reviewers checking out my stories, the first on Reality saying interesting things and another over on Ice, and a number of others. I got a lot of hits, nearly double from last month, and numerous people added me/a story of mine to their favorites/alerts. Plus I got another chapter out of it!
And I really do think the whole blanketing thing works. The longer I go, the more it seems I get people saying they'll consider what I said, which was never even something I was trying for.
See, if you think of concrit as a private conversation between author and reviewer, it's very much like carving delicately crafted bricks and then chucking them into an empty void and hoping they somehow create a bridge, namely, frustrating, probably pointless, and prone to making you feel like finding the largest rocks possible and shoving them off the edge instead, possibly with dynamite attached.
I view it more as a communal thing. I assume that the author isn't going to take my advice, and even if they do it's going to be about some trivial thing like fixing the spelling on their title and no more. But they're not the only one who'll see the review, and it turns out authors are pretty good at taking concrit if it's not directed at them. And it also normalizes concrit, so that if someone comes along later and points out a couple things, they're more likely to take it in stride and maybe improve, and the other reviewer is less likely to get bitched at and decide to stop. It even makes it so that reviewers who think all you're supposed to do is a simple "good job! write more" might start considering what about the story they liked and didn't, and making small suggestions.
And the author, well, my reviews are signed, so they can't just delete it once they've read three lines in and realized it was critical. A month will pass, and it'll stop being upsetting. Three months will pass, and it'll stop seeming so unreasonable. Six months will pass, and they'll look back and think that maybe I had a point. And they'll remember how I reviewed a couple other stories, and that some of the things I mentioned then had bothered them a bit too, and...
In conclusion:
