I'm thrilled to read what's recently made a higher cut. I also appreciate when these mainstays of serial publishing put their best foot forward for all to access without tolltakers and gatekkepers exacting their due. Mainly, I like being able to read the nominees and scrutinize them critically.

I'm critiquing them. I can be as blunt as I want, brutal, rude, or even rant, with no regard to decorum or courtesy because my responses will never see another pair of eyes. I can take out my frustrations on stories that made the cut. But I find that there's less to say and easier issues to find because there are so few that stand out to me. On the other hand, there is much to admire and emulate. Picking out those features, that's what I'm really after.

I'm curious, does anyone else critique published works?

I pay attention to what storytelling elements work really well or which ones ruin the story for me. I then study the book to see how the author did that element well (and how I can apply it to my own writing) or think about what could have been done to repair the flaw in the storytelling and make the story work for me.

You will discover all kinds of things you might not notice otherwise when you do this.

Back to the original question, I tend to "critique" how the author structured the story and how the suthor showed character motivation.

I successfully resisted the urge to rewrite or make any copyedits as I went through time and time again, marking conflicts with a nonce character and sought advice on whether to make any revisions. I found several misspelled words. The book was published in the middle of the last century, so there were quite a few compound word, hyphenated word, separate word changes since then, co-operate/cooperate. Replaced gun power with gun powder. Though in today's dictionaries gunpowder is a compound word, my 1960 Webster's has it as separate words, stet., except for the obvious typo. A couple of wrong words, homonym conflicts, you're/your, there/their, it's/its, and such. One factual inaccuracy. In the end only the nondiscretionary issues were revised, it's for its, etc,, one redundant article excised, the the separated by a line break in the original. One frequently recurring misspelled word was challenged again and again. But the author himself substantiated it in his correspondence with the editor who brought the original into print. It too was stet., but remarked upon in the publisher's note.

By the time I was through with the project, I'd read the text cover to cover a dozen times, besides the several times I'd read it years before for pure enjoyment. It's never gone stale on me. The language and syntax are unusual, but perfectly beautiful for the content, shifting, ephemeral, like sand dunes shaped and reshaped continuously by nature.

What I found most remarkable was how the author handled disputed content. He recounted disputed facts as though anyone concerned was unequivocably right, but allowed for all sides of perspective. The author was a retired journalist, after all.

Some of the recent published stories I've read, novels and short stories, I've rewritten the parts that didn't quite work for me, weak tension in beginnings, overextended episodic middles, anticlimactic climaxes, changed a deus ex machina-like climax crisis resolution or two, input absentee crises, worked over inconsistent influx and efflux reversals, nonlogical and/or nonlineal causation, insufficient opposition of antagonism forces, uncompleted endings.

Lately, stories that I'm reading, I see where a story went awry right away, and only mentally compose changes. I learned a lot from the process. It's making a difference in my latest story revision efforts.