About Dark World

I thought I should explain a bit about Dark World and why I'm doing it. The simple answer is to try something different.

I don't mess with critique groups anymore, for the simple reason that I don't find them useful. (Others do; this isn't a blanket condemnation.) So I was told that I should change a past tense verb to the past tense, and various people advised me to do things that are ungrammatical (many writers are apparently functionally illiterate) or wouldn't mean what I wanted to say. There was an extreme example where someone looked over two chapters of a story, was ABSOLUTELY SURE she knew what I was trying to do, and explained at great length how to do it properly. I replied that I wasn't trying to do that at all, and I even detailed how the story did work. Her response was that I should abandon my project and do the sort of story (a Narnia knock-off) that she envisioned.

So I gave up on crit groups. But a complaint I encountered a few times was that I never put forward a work in progress, only stories I had more or less finished and even polished. I don't like people looking over my shoulder while I work, and I have enough trouble with kibbitzers trying to second-guess my intentions in finished works; I don't want to think what they would do with something obviously unfinished, which they would surely consider more open to meddling.

My writing style would annoy such people anyway. Not only do I tend to edit as I go, so my rough drafts look polished, I also get back into the story in progress after a break by re-reading (and thus re-editing) the previous chapter or so.

Yet the idea of just sitting down and writing something without my usual procedures appealed to me. I didn't want to write a complete chapter every day, just two or three a week. And anyone who wants to see what my rough drafts look like may now do so.