More thoughts on critique groups

My blog buddy Christine Fonseca has a guest on her blog today. SM Ford (aka Susan Uhlig) gives her thoughts about joining a new critique group. Check it out!

Speaking of critique groups, the Slushbusters had a productive meeting last night. Remember when I said last week that we were all working on stuff? Well, almost everyone had work to submit for last night's meeting, which is rare for us these days. Most meetings, about half of us have work to be critiqued. Alison and Steph had submissions, even though they couldn't make it to the meeting! In those situations, we use track changes and insert comment in Word and email their work back to them, rather than having a physical discussion about it.

The Slushbusters use a few different techniques for sharing our critiques with each other. Most of us make notes on the document in Word, print out the pages, discuss our ideas/cheers/criticisms at the meeting, and hand over the pages. If a Slushie has submitted a long piece of work and I don't have a lot to say, I like to copy the paragraphs I have comments about into a separate page to print and bring for discussion, but I still email the entire submission back, so they can see my suggestions within the context of the whole. I always do that for Lisa's work, because she's not physically at our meeting anyway. There's no point in printing out more than I need to make comments.

When we talked to Lisa last night, I got to use Skype on my new laptop for the first time. It worked great, once I figured out how to add another wireless connection. This computer has a wireless button that can be turned off, which it was. Oops! It took me ten minutes to figure out. And the Slushbusters consider me the techie one!