Avatar is now up on Zoetrope, a site for written works to be read and reviewed. Avatar is my story about a different kinda video game - where the character you control is sentient, and you must form a bond with him in order to accomplish tasks.
By submitting it, it shall now be criticized, which is what I wanted. This is a good feeling, when you get done with a written work enough that you feel that you can present it to people, even if it's still not done. It's final form was about 9,500 words. And apparently, this was too long for Zoetrope. So I decided I would submit it to FictionSlamming instead, and submit my Galerians snippet to Zoetrope (I originally intended to do the reverse). But Avatar was too long for that, too, so I went to work trimming it. This was an exercise I hadn't needed to do before, but it hearkened back to my Cat Column days when I had to trim articles so they'd fit down into one column. Mission statement - cut every word that's unnecessary to the meaning of the sentence. And with what I'd gotten through after taking a character out, I felt like I was on a role, so I set to trim it down to under 8,000 so I could get it on Zoetrope. They consider above 8,000 a novella, and this sure isn't one of those.
So that's done, no reviews yet, but I only put it up at the end of the day. If I'm not satisfied with the criticism I get, there's always Critters. Today I hope to finish my Galerians snipped to submit to FictionSlamming, an 'exclusive' criticism site.Labels: Playable Character, The Cat Column, Zoetrope