Follow-up and new design

First, how's the new blog design? I re-did it to match my website's colour scheme. Is it unreadable? Do tell me if it is.

Second, a follow-up on my previous post, which generated some arguments as to whether Miranda July's method of promoting her short story collection was productive and informative. Here's New York magazine's interview with July, in case you were curious as to who she is and what people think of her. She seems to inspire rather strong reactions, but the stories definitely sound interesting!

As for me, I was Commended in a micro-fiction competition, found out today that one of my submissions got lost in cyberspace, and am waiting for all my writing groups' reactions to the new story I recently finished. On that note I wanted to draw attention to this absolutely excellent article by the wonderfully-named Ann Pancake in Poets and Writers magazine: Reading How You're Read - The Art of Evaluating Criticism. Ann's aim is to help writers deal with the critique we receive in writing groups, workshops etc.. As she says:

With your poem, short story, essay, or book manuscript back in your hands, the first thing you'll probably do is scan the feedback as quickly as possible with the secret hope that your critics have deemed the piece perfect. But once you see this is not the case—and before you can productively sort through the comments—you have to perform a balancing act that may be the most difficult step of the evaluation process. You must suspend enough of your ego to become somewhat objective while holding on to enough of it so that you don't sacrifice your vision.

For me, this is incredibly useful advice. Having just given my precious new baby to all my writing groups, I have to make sure that their comments don't interfere with the way I see the story, that I don't submit to what may be their visions of how they would write it.

you have to have a fairly strong sense of your vision for the work. This is why it is important to avoid exposing your writing to criticism until you have a solid grasp of what you're trying to achieve.

I think I am ready for this, but if it turns out I have given the story out prematurely, I will just sit on the critique and not look at it for a while. This is a great and helpful article, highly recommended.