In search of some good feedback swaps.

I’ve started to like the idea of manuscript feedback swaps – two writers exchanging their complete drafts and each reading through the other’s and giving a detailed critique. I did two swaps for ‘The Long way Home’ back in January and early February of this year, and those notes gave me a lot of good stuff to work with on my recent draft revisions.

Now, I’ve gone back to the ‘Critiques, Feedbacks, and Novel Swaps’ forum at the National Novel Writing Month website, which is where I came across the idea in the first place… and the Script Swaps forum on the Script Frenzy website – but neither seem to be too active at this point in the summer, which is when I have a reasonable bunch of spare time to be reading and critiquing other people’s work. Sigh.

At this writing, I have gotten one swap offer at Script Frenzy, though, which I’m looking forward to – and two people from Nano Swaps have offered to critique my manuscript, but without sending me back anything to critique myself, which leaves me a little at loose ends until the critiques start coming back.

I’ve also been looking on google for other places to find swap partners, and there seem to be some possibilities, but I haven’t sifted through them all yet. One interesting one for screenplays is Screenwriters Utopia, which lets you upload your script into the database, and automates the process of releasing your script to others once you’ve posted critiques. On the other hand, they have a spot in the upload for a WGA registration number, and ‘strongly suggest’ that you should have your work registered before you upload. I’ve taken a quick look at registering my work with Writer’s Guild of Canada as a non-member, but I’m still not quite clear on how the payment process works.

So, any recommendations for good places to find feedback swap partners, year-round?

Oh, and a JulNoWriMo postscript – I got up to 50,004 words on Saturday morning, around 9 am. Still haven’t finished ‘Children of the Molecule’ – but then, I never expected to, in a month, and I can actually see that the end is not so far off at this point!