Stop Your Wabhing and Find a Friend!

Since we've been talking about firsts and The Evolution Of this week, I'll tell you how *I remember* our little group starting. The caveat is, of course, that this information is only as good as my memory, and to be perfectly honest my memory isn't all that great. Which is why I'm the List Maven a.ka. She Who Writes Everything Down.

Waaaay back at the dawn of 2006 I found the Avon Discussion Board. It was right at the time I decided I needed some information about this whole publishing thing and I think I found the site because I was looking up page counts. We all know the question--Good Lord, how do I know when I'm DONE??

Yeah, yeah, the 25 lines/page + Courier 12 (it was 2006, after all, and before the MS Word count thing became more mainstream). But let me tell you something about the internet you may have figured out already. It's HELLA addicting. It looks so innocent at first. "Oh, I'll just get this one piece of information I need here..." 3 million clicks later you're knee-deep in your Favorites list and the blog roll keeps right on rolling.

So back to the story. I was talking (typing) about how awesome this internet do-hicky thing is and then some girl actually replied to me. Like Darcy found out yesterday, this is how it starts. She talked to me? She talked to me? She talked to me! I'm one of the cool kids now!

She said Yes! The internet IS awesome! and it turned out we'd become discussion board members within a few days of each other. Through the discussion board, she and I both joined a yahoo group called Aspiring Romance Writers. We started emailing about a thousand times a day, checking out writer websites, and gossiping about cute actors. And we also did some critting in there somewhere.

The particular loop we joined does something called Excerpt Friday. There's a few good things to be said about EF, though it can't replace having your own band of slaves--I mean crit partners--to serve you. But it's a great place to meet people, and I'll get to that in a minute.

So the first one to go down was Ms. Darcy. She posted a scene that has since been removed from her manuscript (wah! all that effort!) but that I thought was pretty darn good. (If you're new to me you'll quickly learn that I'm extremely fond of my own opinion.) It was so good, I thought she could take some brutal honesty al la Erum-style. I marked that puppy up until it crapped blood and then I posted it for the other 164 members to see.

Nice.

But she actually wrote me a civil email back! If I hadn't had my hard drive reformatted I'd tell you exactly what she said. Instead, you'll have to rely on my memory. She said something like, "I know you probably feel like a horrible person for being so mean to me, but the truth is I screamed with laughter and told my husband it was ABOUT TIME someone told me what the heck I'm doing wrong. Will you crit with me?"

Like I said, it's approximately what she said.

So I distinctly remember breathing a huge sigh of relief and immediately following that up with a polite but firm No. I was waaaay too busy with the first girl to think of taking on someone else. (I laugh now when I realize I blog four times a week AND crit for 6 people. Time is definitely what you make of it.)

Despite my firm rejection, Darcy is a crafty little witch and she figured out how to get my attention. Or maybe she was just mad at me. Either way, she scooped up my excerpt and ran it through the ringer. I was verra impressed and proceeded to reconsider. That woman has a really good eye.

So the first girl and I must've invited Darcy into our private email loop. 80 zilllion emails commenced. It couldn't have been that much later when Jacqueline joined the ARW loop. (I *know* this figure's right because in the end, the first girl had to stop screwing around with us after just 2 months--1 month with me and then 1 month with me and Darcy.) Anyway, by that time I thought critting was a blast and everyone deserved the tip of my red pen. So I whipped it out and went at it.

Jacqueline was heading off for a family vacation, but she asked if someone would take a look at her first 6 chapters while she was gone--or maybe she asked me specifically; I can't remember and you don't care. The point is, I got lucky that the 6 chapters were really more like 6 scenes, because I probably spent 2 or 3 hours on each of them. Ok, not that long. Maybe that long. It's not like I timed it.

Long story short, I had to tell Jacq I didn't have the right to invite her into our threesome. But eventually she raped my story like Darcy did and I had to admit she might be really good on the team, and worth my exerting a little pushiness. (Yes, there was a time when I was timid...)

Jacqueline, as I recall, immediately started pitching Janice to the group. But 5 people is 5 manuscripts! That's a lot of work! Yet when the first girl came back after a short hiatus and Jacq realized she had a contemporary manuscript but the rest of us had historicals, the effort to add a fifth doubled. Maybe it tripled. Anyway, the way I remember it, Janice had to decline the offer to join our group (tentatively titled We Are Brutally Honest, as Erica said Monday. There was a reason for this weird title, btw. Brutally Honest was already a yahoo group. Left to start anew and ever the improver, I pointed out that by beginning the name with a W, Outlook and Gmail and other email services wouldn't have that many options to drop down. Not like Maven, which pulls Mary, Maire, Matt, Mizu, Mercer, Mark, Mom...) .

ANYWAY. Janice declined (for now). We started thinking up other people we could invite instead. Most of us had crits on the side, like me and my Purple Pen Posse. Jacq had 9 cps at one time! But none of them felt like a good fit for this particular group. For one--with One being the major one; so major, in fact, there isn't a Two--we are time consuming. Before I went Gmail I routinely downloaded over a hundred emails a day into my Outlook.

But there was one name we could all agree on. Erica Ridley was a regular on Excerpt Friday. She had some HI-larious manuscripts. Double-bonus, she wrote both contemporary AND historical fiction. Rock on! I dispatched an invitation to WABH which she, obviously, accepted.

Unfortunately, we didn't immediately click as one group. The first girl, the original Maven, finally had to admit she didn't have time for our shenanigans. Boo. If you're reading this, we miss you! Second, we didn't invite Erica into our mass-flurry of emailing. We stuck her on the WABH yahoo loop. Anyone who's ever used yahoo groups knows it's impossible to have a flurry of anything on it. The emails come when yahoo is good and ready to send them to you.

So we did miss out on a few months of hoppin' good times. But right around the age of FanLit we corrected this problem (Erica played, too, so we HAD to huddle around with her while we obsessively checked our scores) and it turns out, Erica can waste time with the best of 'em. What am I saying? She's a Master Procrastinator.

And she can make one killer website.

YOUR TURN: So how did you meet your gang? Your blog pals? Your crit group? There's so many great people out there, it's really hard to stay focused and say No (at least, this has been my experience). Do you say no? Or do you find yourself constantly swamped by manuscripts and critiques? Are you a Jacqueline, with 9 other cps, or do you go it alone a la Janice? Tell!