It’s called scribophile.com, and it. Is. Amazing. The reviews there are indepth and thorough and respectful. One of the best things is the “karma” system that they have set up. Basically, you get a certain number of karma points for each critique you post as long as it’s over 125 words. Once the number of words in your critique reaches 125 words, you start earning karma points. You need five karma points to be able to post a story of your own. This ensures that you can’t expect people to give you something unless you’ve already given something to the community in return. I particularly like this because it ensures that feedback must be given. At first I was a bit weary as I’ve never written a real critique before, but I read a couple of ones on the site so that I had an idea as to what to do and gave it a shot. Everyone there is very understanding of the fact that writers and critiquers on the site are all at different levels. Being forced to give several critiques before being able to post a piece of my own work allowed me to become more comfortable with giving critiques and taking them as well.

And as I’ve stated before the critiques are great. One thing I’ve always hated about the “critiques” I get on other sites is that they tend to be incredibly vague. I once got a critique on a piece stating that I had a lot of spelling and grammar errors, but didn’t point anything out. On Scribophile, grammatical and spelling errors are often pointed out. (And even if they aren’t, at least I’ve never seen an open ended statement of “you’ve got a lot of grammatical errors.”) For comparison, here’s the first draft of a story I wrote called “Watch it Burn” which I posted on a site called Storywrite.com. I posted that story on Scribophile and got much better feedback on there than I did with Storywrite. But there’s one thing I would like to stress: the comments I got on Storywrite are fine as long as they are what you are looking for. If you went there looking for some constructive criticism that will help you grow as a writer those kinds of comments are…not disappointing, per se, but they’re definitely not what you are looking for.

Another thing I love about the site are the main que lines on the front page. There’s the main que, the beginners que and the best critiquers que. Each piece stays on the main que once it gets there until it’s recieved three long critiques which ensures that you’ll get plently of feedback. The only problem is that novel chapters are usually about 3000+ words which most people don’t have the time to read or else they don’t want to jump into a novel midway so some novel chapters can stay there for several hours (or days sometimes). However, I’ve been lurking in forum threads, and the administator of the website assures us that he is working on a program to speed up the process.

On the other hand, that’s such a small “failing” that it barely factors into my opinion of the site. The excellent critiques and friendly people more than make up for it. Scribophile is a site for writers of all levels and populated by people who hope to improve their writing and want to help others improve.

It’s an amazing site, and I highly recommend it to anyone who wishes to improve their writing.

I participated in NaNoWriMo this year and won. This blog will most likely focus primarily on finishing and editing my NaNo Novel, also known as Dusk, and I will talk about different aspects of the process. There will also likely be rants on various subjects as well as reviews of books, television shows, ect.