At our house we subscribe to a satellite television service. We made sure to include the DVR option because it is something we simply can not live without. A week ago the receiver box in the family room wouldn't work. A blue screen with the message "Acquiring Guide Info" is all we saw. It was bad, very bad. Our favorite shows weren't watchable or recordable! After doing the whole reset thing a million times and coming up with the same message I called my husband in to check things out. He checked all the cables - at least he said he did - and determined that it must be something else. Finally I gave in and called the company. After walking me through some receiver box tests she determined that we had to have someone come out to fix it. Ugh. More waiting. Today, a very nice man named Luis came to our house to restore television watching AND recording capabilities. I showed him to the basement where it took him all of ten seconds to determine that a cable wasn't screwed in where it should be. Seriously. You see, my husband moved one of the receiver boxes (the one without DVR) down to the basement so he could watch football. This required rearranging some cables. Seems he didn't re-do after the un-do and we were left without TV in the upstairs family room. Silly, silly man. So, twenty dollars and the shortest service call in history later our TV is back on track and doing what it is supposed to do.
What in the world does this have to do with writing? I was thinking about how much I value my critique group. I don't know about you, but sometimes I get to a point in my writing and revising where if I read through my story one more time I may claw my eyes out! I know it's not working the way that it should, but I've tried all the ways I know to make it better and I can't. Sometimes it's all the fixing that I've tried to do that has messed things up in the story. When I finally turn it over to my crit group it takes them no time to point out what's wrong and offer suggestions to make it better. Submitting my story to them is like a service call for my writing. The piece has a problem, they diagnose what they think is wrong and offer repair options. Then I take the fixes they've offered and get my writing back on track. It's a good thing.
