I forgot to post a W1S1 update for June. In my defense July (which is when I would have posted it) was pretty crazy around here. We had two house guests (one of which was a toddler) in our very small house, someone I love was in crisis and we had a family vacation. All in all, a pretty stress-tastic month and I’m pretty pleased everyone involved made it through still upright and breathing 🙂 So, in the grand scheme of things, not such a big deal that I missed a check-in, right?

The good news is that my check-in would have said that I was still on track for my W1S1 goals. I’d written stuff, I’d subbed stuff, hell, in June I even managed to sell two poems and see a third get published. It was a good month.

As it turns out, July was also a good month 🙂 I sold five poems and saw a sixth get published in Imaginarium 2012: The Best Canadian Speculative Writing. When it comes specifically to W1S1 goals I managed to meet those too. I wrote a couple short stories for this year’s Whittaker competition and submitted a few things to publishers.

I feel like I’m building momentum and it feels good 🙂

My Whittaker scores have been less than impressive so far. Each round’s score is out of 100 and so far I’ve earned a 72, 64, and a 71. To be fair to my poor little stories because of the nature of the competition and my uber procrastination skillz they have all be completely unrevised first drafts so far.

It’s a slobby segue, but that brings us to another thing I wanted to talk about, something that came up just this week. Last year when I was doing the Whittaker competition I wanted to have some feedback on my stories and to revise them before I sent them in for judging, so I signed up at Fanstory.com.

Fanstory is one of those online communities where you critique people’s work in order to earn karma/points/dollars that you use to get your own work critiqued. There are loads of problems with sites like these and I was very aware of them going in, but I thought I could just shut my eyes to the ridiculous bits and get a couple critiques of my work from strangers (aka people who have no reason to be nice to me LOL).

I only posted my first drafts, no finished works, and I disabled them from public view once I’d received feedback on them. I hung around there for a couple months, until I couldn’t turn a blind eye to the problems with the community anymore, and then I left (I was too busy to keep posting critiques there anyway, to be honest).

Last week I submitted one of the poems I’d posted at Fanstory to Every Day Poets. It was declined within hours because it was previously published.

O_o

That was what my face looked like. Previously published? But… um… no. I hadn’t published it anywhere yet. What the?

It turns out the poem was still visible online at the mobile version of Fanstory. That despite the fact I had ‘disabled’ it (which was supposed to make it invisible to anyone but me) and I had actually closed my account.

I was not happy.

I re-activated my account and sent an email to the admins asking them what was going on and why my stuff was visible when it shouldn’t be. I was told “That was strange because it was our mobile version. So we didn’t have that set to be private. We updated it. So it is now. That is true for all your work.” At that point I didn’t trust their settings so I actually deleted all my work from the website, which seems to have fixed the problem. The admin also tells me that there was a check box I could have clicked when I posted my work for critique that would have kept it from being visible to anyone who wasn’t logged into their own Fanstory account.

I should have clicked that box.

I am not blaming Fanstory for what happened. It sounds like there was a bit of a bug with the mobile site, but it’s still my fault. I should have been more careful. I should have clicked the check box that would mean the general public couldn’t see my work, and when I left Fanstory I should have deleted all my work, not just disabled it.

I screwed up.

Learn from my mistake.

Also, if any editors from Every Day Poets happens to see this? I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to send you something that was online elsewhere. It won’t happen again.

**Insert Clever Segue Here**

One last, completely unrelated thing? I’ve decided to discontinue my Two for Tuesday posts. Not because I’m suddenly uber with consistency but because they allow me to be lazy. I don’t want this blog to turn into weekly posts of two photographs I’ve taken. It’s not that I don’t want to show off my pictures, I do, but this is supposed to be primarily about my writing. If I give myself permission to post pictures and have them count toward my one blog a week goal, well, that’s all I’ll do. Because I’m lazy. So buh-bye T4T. Buh-bye…