Monday, May 25, 2009

Writer Feedback Tokens

OK. I've been thinking that it would be fun to create a Facebook application to send feedback to my writer friends. But you know what, I can write scripts and PHP programs, but I'm not really a Facebook applications programmer. OK... Yes... I tried using the Application Builder to make a FB gift application, but it's very unforgiving of mistakes and I can't figure out how to edit (and add icons as I go). And...

In the back of my head I thought, "Gee, in the old days, we would have just e-mailed these things to each other ... all these gift applications are lazy ways to send someone a picture with some text."

So... In the spirit of doing things manually here are my Writer Feedback Tokens. You have my permission to send them to whomever you'd like as long as you are not charging them money or erasing my watermark out of the GIF comment area.



Meeting Writing Goals. Congratulations on meeting your daily word count, or sustaining a certain number of stories in the mail, or whatever writing goals you've set.



Good language flow. The prose in the story is flowing wonderfully and is doing what it should.




Great Idea(s). The manuscript contained a great or compelling idea (or ideas) and used them to great effect.




Great Plotting. Whether the story used a try/fail cycle or something more convoluted, the plot worked, and there weren't any "Red Matter?" moments in the plot.



The Ticking Watch. The characters have to reach their goals, and there's a stopwatch (or maybe a ticking bomb) they need to beat adding tension and raising the stakes.



Cool Ninjas. Okay. They don't have to be Ninjas per se. But the threats to the characters were Real Threats and not paper tigers. The characters were going to be Really Dead in Nasty Horrible Ways.



Great Staging. The characters' locations were clear throughout the story, and none of them accidentally walked through a wall, furniture, or teleported.




Great visuals. The eye candy in the manuscript is clear and intriguing.





Good world building. The story takes place in a consistent and interesting world -- either one at the bottom of the sea, on another planet, or in a magical universe.




Nice Fantasy Setting. This isn't just a transcript of your FRP game. The fantasy society is well thought out, the technology is appropriate, and it takes a realistic amount of time to travel to the next castle over.



Believable Outer Space Setting. The spacecraft didn't whoosh as they plowed the space between the stars. The characters floated in microgravity. And giant flames didn't come out of the back of space craft exhaust...



Cool Science. The nanotechnology isn't magic in science clothing, or the computers don't blow up when introduced to paradoxical instructions. And the science is an inseparable part of the story.



Alien aliens! The aliens in the story are from another planet, and not some humans in a latex mask. In a pinch, this could work for Elves, too -- Elves are not humans with pointy ears.



Story Heart. The story tells a moral, has an "aha moment" or it tells a truth that reasonates with the reader. Not to be confused with romance.




Sizzling Love. Wow! Sexy (but not raunchy or pornographic) prose that probably has a NC-17 rating... OR, really sexy prose without explicit body parts.

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