Tag Archives: creative writing

Crit group, 2/19/26

Posted on by Henry

I have been away from my regular crit group for about a year. Caring for a new baby will do that. I recently started back up again with a smaller group of people who are more narrowly focused on my preferred genres. I love the difference.

In the previous group, there were long lulls between my submissions. We had enough people that taking turns meant there could be a month or two between any one person’s submissions. That delay made it harder to stay in the ‘excited creation’ phase of making progress on a project. It wasn’t the only thing pushing me that way (mental health and caring for other duties distracted me just fine) but it didn’t help.

Now I’m submitting smaller pieces more regularly. This feels like a positive feedback loop rather than simply treading water. I’m still juggling my writing alongside everything else in my life, but it’s amazing what a difference feeling excited after a critique session makes.

This smaller group’s composition makes a big difference too. While the larger group had plenty of good insight and good questions, there was enough friction between the genres I was writing and the comfort zones of the other writers to derail my enthusiasm. This smaller group is composed solely of genre fiction writers with overlapping genre expertise and familiarity with more recent genre fiction. I’m no longer asked to explain a genre, or to explain a secondary world in great detail at the start of a story. This has made the difference between feeling uncertain about a piece after submitting it to the larger group, and feeling excited to improve the same piece after receiving precise and knowledgeable feedback from the small group.

I miss the social space of the old group. I enjoyed the people, and I did receive some useful responses. But this smaller group is so much better at delivering what I want from a critique group, there’s no way I’d go back.

It’s a good enough group experience, in fact, that I’m tempted to invite another writer whose critique has been transformative for me previously. At the same time, I fear adding more people—every additional writer dilutes our ability to respond to everyone every session. I’ll have to talk this over with my friends and see how they feel.

Internal critics & crediting all the work

Posted on by Henry

I struggle to give credit to all the important work that is part of writing.

I think that work can be roughly sorted into three categories:

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Back to LARP writing

Posted on by Henry

I’m writing LARP material again!

It’s been a while. I’ve sat on an idea of mine for a little over a year, and I’m finally having the excited conversations with other LARP friends that keep pushing me to develop it. It’s a good feeling.

I’ve also been writing material for a different LARP that my friends are running. This means taking limited information about national histories, and group goals, and maybe a sentence or two about group flavor, and turning that into 400-500 words of group background with coherent flavor. It’s a rewarding exercise, something I haven’t done recently but have plenty of experience with. Plus, it’s wonderful being able to just produce creative work and share it with people immediately.

I’ve stopped doing that here, for a number of reasons, and I regret that sometimes. Maybe I’ll change that again in the future.

As for the fun LARP ideas I’ve been having, they’re tied to a combination of old story ideas I’ve mused over for about five years and a set of scene ideas that have inspired me in the past two years at Wayfinder. The basic concept: PC groups of treasure hunters and historians return to the ancient places of their ancestors in the Shunned Lands to recover lost relics, and in the process discover both why their old stories refer to a prior golden age and why that golden age ended in catastrophe. The rest of the game is all about facing the consequences of releasing the disastrous remnants of that ancient history.

My excited conversations have mostly been about puzzling through how to produce specific scenes, and what we’d need to make them work. It feels really good, engaging with my WFE friends like this outside of the camp season. That collaborative problem solving and supportive creativity is something I always miss during the rest of the year, when I spend most of my time staring at words and trying to cudgel them into some more effective shape.

Perhaps I’ll be able to work more of that into my other writing routines, and carry that excitement forward.