Author: Rebecca Demarest

Critiquing Site

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I’m taking a break from my usual Monday morning book review to talk about something a little bit different: Scribophile.

Scribophile Logo

Scribophile is a writing community website where you can post your work for feedback, critique others’ work, participate in forum discussions about writing, publishing, and random life things, and generally just connect with other writers from around the globe. The site operates on a karma mechanic, wherein you earn karma by critiquing others work (I average about 1.5 karma points a critique) and then you spend your karma to post your own work (5 points to post a work). There are also occasional competitions to earn additional karma, and you can gift your karma out as you see fit.

I have been an active member of the site for about three months now, and I love it. Enough so that I purchased the $9.99 monthly membership that allows me to post more work at a one time, announce publications, and not have to clean out my personal message box every few weeks when it filled up. It also got rid of ads, but those weren’t much of a concern to begin with.

The problem with a lot of these kinds of sites is the mechanic they have in place to help balance people critiquing with posting their writing just don’t work. Scribophile finally found a good balance that requires and even encourages participation in the critiquing process and your work will never get buried and ignored thanks to the Spotlight functions. Each of your works goes in line to be put in the main spotlight on the front page of the posted writing section and there is a bonus amount of karma supplied for those critiquing spotlight works. And it works.

I have never had to wait long for my work to be critiqued—well, at least once I figured out that the suggested word count limit is really there for a reason. People tend to shy away from pieces much longer than the suggested 3k limit, though you eventually WILL get critiqued, it takes a lot longer to get those. But the way you get around that is to chop up your work and post it in segments. A little jarring, but something the critique writers on here get used to fast. Its easy enough to go read the other portions before going back to the end if someone is interested enough in the piece.

Also, the attitudes of the people on the site are open, welcoming, and helpful, and they are quite good at what they do. Out of nearly three months on the site, I have only ever received one not so great critique (out of 8 works posted averaging 4 critiques a piece) and for that critique, he really tried, but english was not his native language and he had never read a science fiction piece before he picked up mine so he struggled with a lot of it.

It does have one little odd quirk, however. I suggest that whatever name you chose when you sign up be something you can live with because you can’t change it after a little while to prevent confusion between authors. Most authors use whatever name they plan to be publishing under so they can announce their publications and start to build a community around their work.

Overall, I think this site is fantastic and I will be here for a long time. If you’d like to read my work in progress, come on over and sign up for a free account! I’d love to get your feedback, and I’d love to see some of your writing as well. You can find me there under Rebecca A. Demarest.

Exploring the Land of Oz

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While I was AWP this last year, I found out about a new journal, the Fairy Tale Review, that publishes my kind of writing: reinterpretations of Fairy Tales, translations, and scholarly articles about fairy tales, and this year their call for submissions was looking for stories about the Land of Oz.

I developed an idea, but to make sure it would work with the world that L. Frank Baum had created, I decided I should probably read all the novels of Oz, just to make sure I got all the history right. And guess how many there are…Baum alone wrote 14 Ozian novels (as well as some shorter bits) and then after his death, his publisher contracted with other authors to write several more. The scope of tales about Oz and its surrounding countries is extensive and deep. Baum’s tales include the list below:

My favorite of all the stories was The Marvelous Land of Oz because we get to meet HM Wogglebug TE, a bug of unusual size and education who makes the worst puns I have ever heard. His traveling companions aren’t too fond of them either. But the whole thing is such an excellent farce of the culture and society surrounding education at that time that I couldn’t help but laugh.

There was one book, however, that I found terrifying in its absurdity: The Tin Woodman of Oz. This is a tale where Nick Chopper is convinced to go find his beloved and offer himself again to her. However, there are horrific twists and turns that I’m sure to a child were delightful, but to an adult were almost too dark. Just imagine a man made of the glued together chopped up bits of two separate men who goes on to marry the woman that those two men had loved before becoming metal…shudder. I can see that done as a Saw worthy sequel…

The books, for all that they are meant for a younger audience, are very entertaining and well worth the read, particularly if you’ve only ever read or seen the film made after the first book. They are much funnier, and incredibly intelligent parodies of American turn of the century culture, much as Flatland was to the Victorian culture.

A Beautiful Death

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A few years ago, I had the pleasure to take a literature class with Ladette Randolph, author and publisher-in-residence at Emerson College. I admired her work then, and was excited to learn she had a new book out, Haven’s Wake. 

Haven’s Wake is a unique novel that takes place over the course of two days and a handful of viewpoints, all surrounding the death of a Nebraskan Mennonite family patriarch. We get views of the preparation for the funeral from such varied people as his elderly wife with a martyr complex, his shunned son who now runs a lighting design company in Boston, and his granddaughter through his other son who collects the towns dirty little secrets. To tell you much more than this would spoil the story.

What that story does, however, is to construct an incredible portrait of a splintered family, with all the sibling rivalries, trauma from days gone bye, and religious fervor you could wish for. Your heart breaks for this family while at the same time you find yourself rooting for one family member to stick it to another, then in the next chapter find yourself sympathizing with the one you just wanted to get their comeuppance. It is masterfully wrought, and I am not ashamed to say that I cried at the end.

I highly suggest this novel for anyone who appreciates a good solid family drama, and isn’t afraid to feel some emotion, because there is no way to avoid it. Go out and find yourself a copy of this one today.

Youth Literacy Day!

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Today is National Youth Literacy Day!

Today, you should:

Read a book to a child.

Donate a book to a library.

Explore 826, an organization dedicated to furthering writing and reading in inner city youth populations. Make a donation, volunteer, or answer one of their writing prompts!

Develop a sinister looking device that remotely transmits the ability to read to the whole world.

Okay, maybe this last one is a bit of a stretch, but look how easy it makes everything else look!

Some Good Old Classic Sci-Fi

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I have to admit that when it comes to the good old classic sci-fi, I have some blind spots, and, until recently, Stanislaw Lem was one of them. When my friend heard that I had never read any of his work, he promptly sent The Cyberiad to my kindle and insisted I read it right away. I was not disappointed.

The Cyberiad is a collection of short stories, one more of a novella, that have taken our technologically rich world and pushed it to its illogical extremes. There are two inventors (apparently mostly mechanical themselves) at the heart of the stories who are in constant, mostly friendly, competition in building robots and thinking machines and all sorts of devices to solve the problems of rulers and worlds.

Now, while the stories themselves are engaging, it is the sardonic and caustic attitude of the telling that makes them such a treat. Not to mention the illustrations by Daniel Mróz. I guarantee you’ll be laughing your ass off while still not getting all the jokes. Well, maybe my father would, but he’s a physicist, and these jokes are of the same caliber as the highest brow XKCD mathematical puns.

At the same time though, these stories really make you stop and think about what we are using our technology for today, whether we’re genuinely putting our knowledge and skills towards the best efforts or are we really just concerned with making better masturbatory machines. Literally, I’m not joking, there’s at least two stories involving machines like this, one meant to break a prince of his inappropriate infatuation and the other to so engage a ruler so as to prevent him from noticing that it was trying to kill him. And then there is the story about the two inventors creating a machine that writes poetry and how out of hand that gets as poets come from around the world to duel with it.

I highly suggest picking this up to read at least one or two of the stories in it. It took me a little while to get through because its hard to read more than one of the stories at once, the complex and convoluted language tends to leave your brain spinning just a bit, but its totally worth the verbal vertigo.