It’s here! It’s finally here! The annual BCW writing critique! Now you can submit what you’ve been working on the past several months, trapped in your house or apartment, with nothing but deep thoughts, a mountain of dirty facemasks, empty bottles of hand sanitizer and a laptop. Working on that detective novel? Psychological thriller? Murder mystery? A small, warm cozy where that little old lady next door (the one who grows those delicious tomatoes that win the grand prize each year at the county fair) is discovered fertilizing those same ‘maters with the bodies of her last five husbands buried in her garden plot? Now’s your chance to get that sick puppy in front of some eyeballs for some good old-fashioned input from fellow writers! So here’s the details:
- Meeting date: 11/21/20 (Saturday), 11:00 – 12:30 p.m. (Zoom meeting).
- Due date: 11/14/20 (Saturday), midnight.
- Send manuscripts to buckeyecrimewriters@gmail.com. Note: if you submit, you’ll also need to participate as a reviewer. A Zoom link to the meeting will be provided.
- What to send: manuscripts should be 10 pages, maximum (if not starting at the beginning, try to provide a few sentences for context). Manuscripts can be from a budding novel, novella, short story, etc.. Since these are partials, please do not send your entire work.
- Manuscripts: double-spaced, 1” margins, 12 pt. font (no fancy/cursive fonts please). For simplicity, all submissions should be in the form of Word documents (no PDFs . . . otherwise we can’t return manuscripts with comments). Also, please include your name and email address (necessary for reviewers to email back comments).
- All reviews will be sent back to the authors so please make any changes/comments using the ‘Track Changes’ and ‘Comments’ feature in Word.
- If you don’t want to send anything but are happy to be a reviewer, please contact us for copies of submissions and a link to the Zoom meeting.
- After the meeting, please email your comments of each manuscript back to the author.
Note: due to brevity of critique time we will be focusing on the first 5 – 6 manuscript submittals only; if we get more interest, we will look into having another critique at a later date. Additional instructions and updates will be provided so keep an eye out for emails. But word to the wise: this is one of our more popular programs so anyone interested in submitting a manuscript, it’s first come, first serve. Otherwise, hope to see you there!