Fish Tank Story Guidelines

We have a guideline that authors critique at least two stories before they can submit their own story for review, but we may waive this requirement if there is an opening in the schedule. Let Desdmona know if you have a story you want feedback on.

In order to keep the burden on reviewers down, we prefer stories to be less than 5000 words, but we will accept stories up to 10,000 words. Single-spaced, please, with a blank line between paragraphs. The purpose of The Fish Tank is to help the author improve his story, so we do insist that the poster be the original author of the piece.

We do not require final draft quality writing here, but we recommend that you make the effort to fix your spelling and grammar errors before you submit. Use your spell-checker. Proofread your work, or (better yet) find someone to proof for you. Otherwise your feedback may be nothing more than a long list of grammar mistakes.

Until Friday evening at midnight, you should stay out of the discussion on your own story. We do this so that your knowledge of your intentions does not influence the readers. If you tell the readers what you were trying to do, it will skew how they read the story. Treat the reviewer's feedback as the opinion of an actual reader.

And once Friday evening comes, jump on in to the fray! Be sure to thank everyone for taking the time to help, even on the off chance you didn't find anything in the feedback that you can use.

Note that some people who comment on your story will be inexperienced at critiquing fiction. The reviewers are learning, too! If something is unclear, wait until Friday and ask a follow-up.

By all means, you do not need to take every suggestion offered. Suggestions late in the week may be so trivial that they aren't worth following. Others may come from readers who aren't in your target audience. Use the suggestions that seem useful to you and skip the rest.

Needless to say, authors retain the copyrights to their own work.

To submit a story for review, get in touch with me at me@desdmona.com. I will put you on the schedule, and when it's your week, I will post your story to alt.sex.stories.d.

You need to get your story to me by the Sunday before the Monday that you are scheduled to be posted. I will not censor stories for content. If you provide story codes, I will add them to the post. If you have any particular requests you'd like to ask from the readers, include them, too.