Several months ago I put out a call on Twitter looking for people to read a working draft of my new one-act play Of People and Not Things. I got responses from two interested people and no actual feedback.

Of course at the time I had a total of maybe 80 twitter followers compared to Robin’s ~200,000. So the pool from which I was trying to draw was quite small.

In my cadre of readers contacted via e-mail, however, I got detailed notes from say 6 of the 9 people that I sent various versions of the script over the course of the piece’s gestation.

And then last November I held a workshop performance/dinner party. It was a great time (living room theatre totally needs to make a comeback) and I got really valuable feedback from another 20 people.

I would love to make use of on-line real time feedback in my writing, but I think that first I would need to spend a fair amount of time dedicated to building a digital audience ready and waiting for the call. And, unfortunately, time is my most limited commodity these days.

The part I really like about Amanda’s analysis, though, is the emphasis on “once there’s work to be done. ” Robin, I thought you did an amazingly good job of chunking the work into manageable bits. When you put out the initial call for photoshop people I was very hesitant and only signed on because it seemed like you weren’t getting people to sign on. My photoshop skills are terrible in the grand scheme of things. But when you sent out the call for the Seal of Oberon, I was like, “okay, that I can do quickly, without totally disrupting my day, and it will be fun.” (I was so much more motivated once I saw Team Lead, of course.)

Taking a huge project and breaking it into doable pieces and coming up with a way to get the right people doing the right pieces is of course the management problem of the Holocene epoch, but it’s rare for someone to have so much fun coming up with the sauce for it.