Just Be There Blog

My Goodness!

I just finished 8 of 22 reviews for the "Invalid Item" . (There are 22 entries besides my own). I'm going to take a break, but I will get 22 reviews finished before the weekend is finished.

now onto other projects...

added at 8:01pm
My earlier reviewing turned out to be rather profitable--I've received an extra 2,126 gift points for 8 reviews given--the majority of the reviews were to writer's whom I've not reviewed before. 200 gps each given at this time. (1400 gps)(100 gps for a qualifying review) 375 gps were given by a some writers as a gift for my reviewing their work. And one was an auto reward of 251 gps. At the end of the day, I will receive another 800 or so gps for having done 8 qualifying reviews (or more if I do more reviews before midnight WDC Time). Not only am I thankful of the gift point boost, but for every review I give, I increase my own critical eye for when I edit my own writing. I concentrated on how the poem made me feel (I believe poetry should incite emotion otherwise, what's the use?). How smoothly the poem reads. Is there a natural rhythm, meter, flow--however you wish to call it. And how I interpret what is being said in the poem. Some examples of today's reviewing--all can be found on the Public review page--are: Review of "Death" , Review of "Beautiful Space" , Review of "THINGS OF NIGHTMARE'S DREAMS" , and Review of "Shattered Crystal Fragments" .

Funny thing--I got to looking at my past reviews and then noticed in the header that I had 65 reviews by other authors that I hadn't responded to. Well, that is just rude--right? I mean if a reader goes through the trouble of commenting on something you've written the proper thing to do is respond to the comments. So, I clicked on the header Pending Response and started reading the reviews that were given to me over time which I hadn't responded to. What I didn't do was check out the dates these reviews were originally written--well, not until I had responded to the very last one, any way--the date? You may have guessed it--was in April of 2006. This was when the response to reviews tracker was first installed. Every review before that date had no tracker to record if any response was given or not. So, I basically responded to port raids by sponsored port raiding group members between the years 2006 and 2012. I guess from 2013 til today I have formed the habit of responding to every review I receive. Earlier today, I managed to clean up a folder that shouldn't have anything within it for more than a week--the Reviews: Pending Response folder. By the time I finished reading all those fantastic reviews, my ego was so uplifted, I nearly tore both my ears off walking through my bedroom door (Head was a bit swollen--get it?) And I had the best sleep ever in a very long time. I wouldn't recommend not responding to reviews just so you can get that ego booster when you happen to be low on ego--However, you can go back and reread those reviews under the header--Reviews: Received. Every review I've ever received is there--the first review I've ever reveived was a Private review in Aug 2, 2001 at 3:06am by a now past member 'pallasathene'. She reviewed my poem "Ashamed"  and posted it on the Suicide Challenge page where it was exposed to a select group of writers and readers on what was then Stories.Com. This exposure helped me to clean my poem up so that Ashamed now looks like a poet wrote it. (I've never called myself a poet--I'm more of a prose writer with poetic moments.) This kept me busy until well after 8am MDT//10am EDT. I have in my review cache 198 reviews. The majority of the reviews are on my poems. The majority of my poems are free form--I'm a prose writer, remember? I'm sure I've received more reviews than the 198 shown, but over time items have been deleted from my portfolio and I'm thinking the reviews oninvalid item are purged from the system to maximize room for valid reviews. It just makes sense.

Oh, did I respond to pallasathene's review even though she is no longer present on Writing.Com? Yes, I did. Call it walking up to a marker with a name on it and telling the person whom the marker represents, "Thank-you for taking the time to comment on something I'd written, and thus helping me to improve both my written item and my grasp of the craft of writing." Afterall, I'm the writer I am today, only because of all the help I've recieved from other writers yesterday.

Oh, you get to the reviews page by clicking on the blue number in the upper left corner of your page marked reviews: ### found under the portfolio numbers.