Writing Club #3—"Madness" (April 23)
Rounds one and two of the Tildes Writing Club have been smashing, if small-scale, successes. In the interest of luring out a few lurkers with a timely provocation, I want to establish this month's theme by fiat.
What do you have to say about madness? Your contribution can resemble a clinician's assessment, a confession, a polemic, an absinthe specter, the cry of the cuckoo, the diagnosis offered by Major Clipton (but hopefully of greater length), or a 1980s ska band. That is, whether you take the word to be romantic, offensive, biographical, inspirational, or risible, take it as inspiration for your writing this month.
Just follow these easy guidelines:
Your submission can be prose or poetry of any reasonable length. Less than 7,000 words, surely.
Watch for the April 23 submissions thread to appear. Reply to it with a link to your work, which may be housed anywhere you like, including on Tildes. Prioritize venues that are not known to be aggressively anti-privacy (e.g., Google Docs). You may provide questions for readers.
You must provide feedback on 3 submissions if you are posting a submission. Only one needs to be a substantial critique. If you see a post without feedback, consider giving it preference in the order of your responses. No one likes to be left hanging.
You don't have to follow the theme. Your detective fiction about beaver glands is welcome, too.
Feel free to post questions or comments.
Is there a time cap for providing feedback? Like how do people feel about late feedback on their stuff? Is there an ideal time from the writer posting to receive feedback? I'm curious about people's thoughts!
Late feedback is wonderful. It's fantastic thinking a piece of writing has sat in someone's head for several days before shooting off feedback spores. In-depth responses are the best part of a writing club, I think. That said, I would prefer a short comment saying, "that was swell," over a lengthy reply that never gets posted.
Feedback is feedback. I'd be happy with it at any time, and Tildes enjoys the reputation of being a slow site, so I think it fits our community too.
Personally I'd be happy to see a thoughtful reply to my submissions at any time, though I think that after 6 months the post gets archived. Even then you can shoot me a PM.
Tildes doesn't do archiving like reddit used to (still does?), where new comments can no longer be made in a comment section after a certain period. After 30 days, posts (comments and topics) can no longer be voted on here due to Tildes deleting individual vote records for privacy reasons. However even super old topics can still be commented on, any comments there can be replied to, and any new comments are even able to be voted on for 30 days until they too have the associated individual voting records scrubbed from them.