Getting Attention

Here’s the secret to getting other people at the OEDILF to workshop and RFA your work: workshop and RFA other people’s work. If you aren’t a Workshopping Editor yet, write enough limericks to give you the potential to have twenty approved, and we’ll try to get you there; and then workshop and RFA other people’s work. Or help out in the “Limericks Needing Assistance” forum.

There are hundreds of Tentative pieces that need minimal work. If you’re an editor—even a brand-new one—use the many tools available to go through them and see what you can sign off on. It doesn’t have to be one of the big names; it could be someone with a similar number of pieces to you, or fewer. After all, we all had “only” 20, 50, or 100 pieces each at some point. Choose whoever you think might respond well to workshopping, or whose work you enjoy reading.

We all honestly appreciate that you’re writing limericks with us. Without the writing, we’ll never get there, wherever “there” is. But workshopping and approving those limericks is a social process, and like any social process it involves give and take.

If you want to be strategic about it:

Try front-door editing rather than just random workshopping. Go through the new submissions, set them to tentative unless they’re fatally flawed (and put them on hold in that case), and RFA them where you can or leave a comment where you can’t. Be tactful with names you don’t recognise, especially if they have only a few submitted. People appreciate having their new limericks tented, and they remember the names of those who do a lot of it. If they remember your name in a positive way, they’re more likely to workshop your stuff.
Identify a selection of other OEDILFers (say, those who have about the same number of limericks as you) and focus your workshopping on them for a while. Even if you do tons of workshopping, if it’s spread across hundreds of writers few of them will notice how busy you’ve been.
Raise your forum profile. Post comments in threads that aren’t about your own plight. If people get to know you for your general forum contributions, they’ll notice your name more often in the database and the workshopping will follow accordingly.

There are other possible strategies. You could try to change your writing style to fit in more with the mainstream, although it’s hard to change something so elusive and personal as one’s writing style. Make sure you’re completely on top of all the formatting nuances of the OEDILF, because if you aren’t then that will delay RFAs. Go back through your languishing limericks and see what you can fix before someone has to tell you, because as often as not they won’t—they’ll move on to something easier. If you think some of your old work is unlikely to get RFAs without significant revision, put it on hold and come back to it another day. (If an author puts a limerick on hold, he or she has the power to return it to tentative—it doesn’t require an editor to do it for you.) Your backlog will shrink, you’ll have fewer left for editors to deal with, and you’ll be focusing their efforts where they’ll have the best effect. Then, at some later point, you can try improving the held pieces and bringing them back into your tentative pile. What have you got to lose, apart from the hour or two it takes to go through them?

A higher profile in the forums doesn’t hurt, either. Read the threads, chip in now and then, get involved in more discussions that aren’t just about your own limericks, and you’ll be able to get a clearer sense of how yours fit in with the whole. When you’re more active there, you’re likely to be more valued as an OEDILFer, and when you read the forums more often, you’re more likely to have a better perspective on the overall “state of the OEDILF” and not feel so hard done by.

The people with 0% backlogs have put in disproportionate amounts of workshopping to get them. You can decide either to workshop more or to let the RFAs fall where they may; either approach is valid. What’s important is to be comfortable with it.

None of this is a guarantee. Plenty of times I’ve had to sit around waiting for my own stuff to get workshopped. It’s only the ones that don’t get workshopped that I sweat over, of course—glass half empty, and all that.

Reworked from forum and workshop comments from February 2005–July 2008.