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Monday, May 21, 2012

Drop the Needle: ACTION SCENES, ROUND 2

I promised you a second round, and here it is!

For those of you who are newer readers: "Drop the Needle" is an in-house critique session during which I call for excerpts from anywhere in your novel. (That's where the name of the crit round comes from -- those nefarious music professors who, in ages past, would "drop the needle" into the middle of a recording and expect the students to identify the piece of music by name and composer.)

The Guidelines:

  • Send a 25- to 50-word lead-in and a 250-word excerpt that you would describe as an ACTION SCENE. (i.e., a high-stakes, fast-paced scene in which there isn't necessarily a lot of dialogue) 
  • Use the WEB FORM to submit. 
  • Submissions will open at 5:00 PM EDT TODAY (May 21), and will remain open until 25 entries are received. 
  • The 25 excerpts will post on WEDNESDAY at noon, EDT, for critique.
  • All genres except erotica are welcome. 
  • This excerpt can be from either a WIP or a finished manuscript. Either way, please make sure your work is proofread and clean. 

And PLEASE don't neglect the lead-in. It's difficult to be dropped into a middle-of-the-story scene, and we will need the (brief!) lead-ins to set up the scenes for us. I believe this extra bit of information leads to better critiques.

Also, please remember that if yours is one of the entries, you are requested to critique a minimum of 5 entries.

14 comments:

  1. I think given what happened last time you would be smart to open the web form 5 mins early and allow people to format and properly label their entries allowing for genre, bold, italics, spacing, whatever) that way come 5:00 people could press send. Otherwise, knowing that last time it was a mad rush to press Send ASAP it resulted in a lot more work for you probably. Just sayin'

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  2. Well, Happy, I can't open it "early" because whatever time I set it for is the opening time. I'd be just as busy disqualifying the earlier entrants by hand as I am by the formatting errors!

    The problem is the cut-and-paste from Word. Word is a PAIN!

    You've given me an idea, though. I may have a chat with Michael to see if it would be possible to make the actual web form available before the contest opens, to give folks time to format. :)

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  3. I'm not in it myself, but I'm ready to read all your awesome offerings and offer what crit I can. :)

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  4. I'm getting my ninja fingers all warmed up! Should be another awesome round.

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  5. Looks like it's not open until 6 pm Eastern?

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  6. Oh nooooo, did I set it wrong? DANG those military times! Will fix...

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  7. It just worked for me! But, when I checked it at 1:50pm (pacific) it told me I had to come back in 1.1 hours. That was a little confusing!?!

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  8. That was me, being challenged with numbers. o-o Apologies!!

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  9. If you copy your text from your word document, and paste it in notepad, it removes the MSword formatting. Then space your lines in notepad. Then copy/paste into the entry form.

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  10. Authoress, thank goodness for the military times. My computer at work crashed at 4:59 EST and I didn't get to your blog again until I got home. I got in!

    Thank you so much for the extra chance with this round!

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  11. Well, Emily, you've made me feel better. :)

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  12. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  13. Silly fat fingers on iPhone... Looking forward to all the wonderful crits this round. Best of luck to all!

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