prusik | So this is why I check my spam filter...

I spent a few days bummed by how few critiques of "Running and Falling" I had gotten from Critters. I mean, I've been doing Critters for about a year now. It's pretty clear that if your story can't manage to get 5-10 critiques over the week it's up at Critters, it may be deeply flawed. (Highly experimental fiction is probably an exception to this. But I'm not sure submitting highly experimental fiction to Critters is a good idea in the first place.) The Critters FAQ says as much (albeit quite nicely and making room for other explanations).

I was really puzzled since none of the few critiques I got pointed to any serious problems. They all pointed out a few sentences which went clunk and a few thing which were unclear, but nothing that required an overhaul.

krylyr, who read a later revision, made a few suggestions but liked it on balance.

vortexae, who read the Critters draft, had much the same reaction. The last straw was that I noticed that my story wasn't one of the (few) stories held over for an extra week due to receiving too few reviews. Something weird was happening.

Thursday, I noticed that my spam folder was unusually full. The e-mail address I use for Critters is one that I give out only to friends and a few select mailing lists. So far, it's gotten remarkably little spam, so I usually forget to check the spam folder. (Unlike my yahoo account, where I weed the spam folder daily.) Of course, most of the critiques I received last week got routed into my spam folder. I received eleven critiques, not four. (Critters posts all critiques received in the week at its website on the following Saturday, I would have also seen them at the website starting yesterday, if I had thought to look.)

(I wonder if a version of Romeo and Juliet where Friar Laurence's message to Romeo that Juliet isn't really dead gets caught by mistake in a spam filter has already been done.)

On balance, the critiques were positive. Reading them was a good exercise in triangulation. For example, the reason why people had problems with the ending wasn't because the ending was bad. It was because the opening, while apparently hooky, was pointlessly confusing. Most of the issues turned out to be things that I had fixed in the version I asked

krylyr to read. (The rest came in a handy list from

vortexae.)

Anyways, I've given the story one final going over. From here, "Running and Falling" goes off to Analog because this is the first thing I've written in a while which is plausibly hard SF. There are enough appropriate pro markets for this story to keep it in circulation for the next year. We'll see what happens.