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Comment by Marie Laval on January 20, 2012 at 22:20

Although I haven't visited the site for months, I used to be a regular of youwriteon for almost a year. I had wonderful, constructive reviews from people who had obviously taken the time and the effort to read the extracts of novels or the short stories I posted, and whose comments and suggestions really helped me improve my writing. But for each one of those, there were half a dozen meaningless reviews by people who were just there to post their '100 words' and get a review back in return, or by people who posted a very negative review starting with something like 'I hate romantic fiction but I thought I would give your story a go. It was a mistake...etc.'. I remember a very bad review with very low ratings for an extract from my historical romance where the only suggestion the reviewer made was that I should change the names of the hero and heroin because they were too complicated and sounded too French (both protagonists were French!). Reading the message board was sometimes very entertaining when egos were bruised... On the whole, I think there are genuine, friendly and very helpful reviewers on the site. There is too the promise of being read by an agent if you make it to the top 3. However there are also a few spiteful, petty people. And I did become a lot less sensitive to bad reviews with time.