Could writers PLEASE look at their OWN “shared works”?

Call me Ishmael. (Hmm, wasted here: I should start off a novel with that sentence. Begin again…)

Call me impatient, but, as a fledgling editor and publisher, I wish to make the following remarks:

I have recently taken to surfing the “shared works” section of this web-site, making comments, suggesting improvements here and there. This takes a certain amount of time, thought, and care. It is rather frustrating to see how posters of the original work often don’t reply to all the comments that are made… not even to the point of a “thumbs up”.

I honestly don’t think that I’m being ego-centric or self-pitying here. Well-thought-out comments by other writers (Lorraine, Adrian, and Wilhelmina spring to mind) seem to lie around being ignored by the very people that they’re trying to help. I can imagine these helpful commenters asking themselves “Why do I bother???”

Merely READING these comments and making a mental note of them DOESN’T help the commenters to know that their efforts haven’t been in vain. A “thumbs up” does NOT carry a signature. I have given out several “thumbs up” to X on Y’s “shared work”. X might ASSUME that that’s Y “thanking them” for the comment, but it isn’t. Only a reply will do that.

This is a friendly site, where you’ll find OTHER writers willing to offer advice on YOUR work. Some of them – like Lorraine – earn money by editing, but spend a LOT of time on this web-site offering FREE editing. It seems to me ungrateful to not at least thank them [split infinitive there!] for their time… even if you don’t agree with the advice. And if you don’t agree, why not say so? A profitable discussion might come out of that.

It’s a shame that this site doesn’t advise us (send us an e-mail) when somebody has made a comment on our “shared work”… as they do when someone sends us a private message. But Admin have their hands full running this site. They ARE working on improvements. In the meantime, is it too much to ask each one of us to check up on – and REPLY to – well-meaning comments by fellow users?

It doesn’t take TOO much time to look in once a week on your own “shared work”. A LOT less time than it took [especially] Lorraine to offer her excellent advice.

(Speaking of not taking too much time, I’m going to drag in a red herring: Please consider contributing to Emilie’s “writing game” project. https://www.writersandartists.co.uk/question/view/2644 After reading the rules there and at https://www.writersandartists.co.uk/question/view/2645 [shouldn’t take more than 10 minutes, tops], you only have to add 3 sentences at a time to help create a novel! Pop in whenever you have a spare 3 minutes. It sounds like fun… a way to relax from the seriousness and tedium of slogging over your own novel or struggling with your covering letter to agents. So far, we’ve only got 9 sentences: hardly enough for a novel. If you don’t like the subject matter or the style of what’s already been written… CHANGE it!!! Be creative! Be wild! Be yourself!)