August 17th - 24th: Crit Challenge

Thanks for sticking with us!

This week (week three) you'll be choosing and critiquing pieces you wrote in weeks three and four of July.  Next week you'll be editing those pieces.

You don't have to have fully completed FFM to participate in the August event.  In fact, even if you didn't participate in FFM at all it would be brilliant if you could help out by critiquing pieces written by those who did.

Your challenge for this third week of crit/edit August is three-fold:

Challenge ONE: Identify two pieces of flash fiction you wrote during the last two weeks of this year's FFM that you think have potential and wish to work on further.  These don't need to be challenge pieces.  Post links to them below, and optionally for each piece add at least one question that potential critics may wish to consider.  You'll want to do this ASAP so that people can start with their critiques for the third challenge of the week.  

Bear in mind that by posting the pieces below you're inviting critique on them; while we hope that none of the critiques will be outright nasty, we expect that they will have constructive things to say and may point out negatives with your piece.  If you don't think you can handle that, maybe crit and edit week is not for you yet.

Challenge TWO: The literature Community Volunteers are desperate for Daily Deviation suggestions.  We have a metric poo-ton of amazing and brilliant pieces of flash fiction written during July.  Coincidence?  Your second challenge is to suggest a DD to one of the literature CVs.  This doesn't have to be a piece from FFM 2013, but it might be .  The literature CVs are ^neurotype, ^Beccalicious and Nichrysalis.  Please check out their DD suggestion guidelines before noting your suggestion to your preferred hat.

Challenge THREE: Post at least three critiques this week on different pieces other people have linked below for critique.  Not your own piece, obviously.  You do not need to be a subscriber or to be able to use the deviantart critique feature in order to post a critique.   You don't need to be an expert.  You don't need to write hundreds of words or spend hours and hours.  You just need to do the following things:

Read the piece.  The pieces written for FFM are only short, so you may want to read the piece through two or three times so you're totally familiar with it.
Be positive: Mention at least one thing that you think was done well, or one thing that worked for you.
Be constructive: Mention at least one thing that didn't work for you, why you think it didn't work, and how it could be changed.
That's it.  It really is that easy.  Of course, you can add more if you wish.

If you see that a piece already has more than three critiques posted to it, pick a different piece.  If by the end of the week there are pieces linked to below with no critiques posted at all, you all fail at the critiquing  This is set up so there ought to be more critiques than pieces to be critiqued, so please try and spread the love. Try and keep track of your critiques because prizes.

Any questions?