it's kind of like a dating thing. You just look for people that sound good and reach out to them. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't
This is true. The site is an interesting idea and it's great that someone here on QT actually found a helpful CP.
Some posts, like the one by CHG, send up red flags that would stop me right off from looking further into a connection:
1) the rant she goes on about people who have already tried to help her.
I'd expect her to give me flack no matter what I did or how I tried to help. The very fact that I found problems would probably tick her off, despite referring to those who apparently were timid about voicing problems with her work as "soft pedaling tummyscratching people."
As for those whose questions she found exasperating, one solution would have been to agree on ground rules before proceeding, such as reading the whole ms before asking questions, if feedback on how the whole book holds together is what she was looking for.
Who needs a crit partner who's a pain in the ass to work with, beyond the work the manuscript itself may need?
2) the many grammar, punctuation, wording, and structure problems that cause confusion and other unwanted effects.
When this shows up in the request for a CP, I assume her manuscript is full of the same. This would be a lot of extra work for a partner to address. And that's without even getting to questions of character development, storyline, and other artful aspects of fiction.
