Well, I did have some interest in joining Critters, because serious critique and review would be great, but recent events have led me to seriously reconsider ever doing so.

Namely, LeGuin's public dust-up with Doctorow and the ensuing wankery -- the serious spin doctored into her own presentation of the events, and that doctored into it by others (such as attempts to infer only a "couple" works were mistakenly removed and they were only off-line for "a few hours", etc) -- and mostly the clueless attitude of the Critters list maintainer regarding his treatment of said list as both a political platform and a community for technical critique (as linked above), instead of one-or-the-other.

I stumbled over this whole thing...heck, I don't even know how. I think I was researching hacks for my cell phone like a good little geek ( ...stumbling around... ) Notably, this will dovetail nicely with a post I'm working on for the Aerie regarding publishing and writers and the attitudes about indie publishing I encountered at a prominent liberal blog run by a couple of book editors. Basically, in a completely out-of-character reaction (oops, sorry, looks like I got a little sarcasm on you...let me clean that up), it consists of me giving the finger to the establishment and its defenders.

I seriously begin to wonder if I should bother trying to become a published fiction writer if this is the bullshit, nonsense, and drama I'm going to encounter amongst participants in the field.