Critiquing Pet Peeves

It's been a couple of weeks since I have posted on my blog.   I really have no excuse except that I am currently in between YA contemporary projects and haven’t pulled the trigger on my next idea yet.  So to purposefully distract myself, I have been doing a lot of critiquing – some long standing writing friends, most new first-three-chapters type of beta reads.  So at the risk of sounding brash and a bit snarky, let me tell you a bit about my critiquing pet peeves.

            ~Please, please, PLEASE I beg you to give you manuscripts a quick read before you send it off to your critique partners, especially new ones that haven’t read for you before. There is nothing like a myriad of spelling, punctuation, and formatting errors to pull me right out of the story and irritate the crap out of me.

            ~Think creatively.  There are a thousand and one better ways to emotionally tag dialogue then a simple “he said.”  Now don’t get me wrong, the simplistic nature of that tag is highly appreciated, just not twenty seven times on the same page.

            ~Make sure the person you ask to critique actually reads your genre. You send me the first three chapters of your erotica story, and I will read it, correct your grammar and formatting, even toss in a comment or two.  But because I am not familiar with nor do I ever read that genre for fun, my comments, thoughts, and opinions probably aren’t worth much.  

            ~Lastly, (and I am throwing this one in for you Lindsay)  Description!  I love it when it pertains to word building and drives the story forward.  Wield it too heavily or inappropriately and I get peeved. For example “I sat down on my mother’s pink and green floral pattern couch, the small flower buds hanging delicately off the green vines.”  Okay, unless those flowers are going to come alive and strangle me then I don’t give a crap if the couch is floral, paisley or just plain butt-ass ugly.  I don’t need that bit of description.  I know what a couch is, no need to describe it.  

So that is it, my usually snarky self is back to blogging.  But before you go, I would love to hear some of your critiquing pet peeves.