Share: I had a reading exchange with another friend last Sunday, and it went really well! We had to change venues that day due to unforeseen circumstances, but what I thought would be a two-hour meetup ended up being a much longer event.
click here to read how it went :D
He and I were supposed to have our little reading session at Kopi Café, which we chose because it had comfy seating and was close enough to where we lived. We scheduled the meetup for 1:00 p.m. on Sunday. However, I woke up rather late that day, so I texted him that I was more likely to show up by 1:30 p.m. 
yet somehow, against all odds, I managed to reach Kopi Café exactly at 1:00 p.m., which was our initial agreement. The café was extremely busy, so I put us on a waitlist and waited outside.
He arrived sometime after I did. We were given a table, and it was pretty noisy inside, so it wasn’t the most conducive to just chilling and reading. We ended up talking about stuff over drinks—a chamomile-based tea in his case, and two different types of hot chocolate in mine. We decided to just head elsewhere to have the reading session since the café was too crowded. I asked him if he knew of any places where we could hang out, and he couldn’t think of any other cafés, but he did suggest his apartment.
We paid for our drinks and then went to his apartment. He kept on saying that it was pretty messy, especially since he had yet-to-be-unpacked boxes in his dining room, but it was honestly well-kept! Especially the living room. We sat next to each other on his couch while reading each other’s stories. I read three of the five chapters he had finished writing while he tried to read as many chapters of Blood Will Tell as he could in an hour. If you’re wondering why I didn’t try to do the same, well, I was a much faster reader with a much longer backlog—if I were to read all his chapters, he would hardly be left with any material for me to read for future reading sessions 
The discussion afterward was pretty fun! Aside from talking about what we liked about each other’s stories, we also put forward some theories about what was going to happen in future chapters. Well, I put more theories forward since he was writing a mystery story and I wasn’t—but also, he admitted that he doesn’t think too much about theories while reading stories, so he didn’t have much to say regarding that. He said that I wasn’t as info-dumpy which I’m still a bit surprised by, but I’m relieved regardless.
Oh, and thankfully, he said that my main character acted like he was in his early twenties! And so did my ex. Unfortunately many others thought Edin was much younger 
We talked about a bunch of other things, and he showed me his bookshelf. He arranged his books so that his favorites would occupy the top shelf. One of them was titled, Everything Men Know About Women, and he insisted that I open it.
The pages were blank 
That was also when we found out that we grew up in opposite environments—I’ve spent my time in mostly male environments, so much so that being in a non-bathroom room full of women throws me off, whereas he’s spent much more time in female-majority environments. I mean, he majored in biochemistry, while I went to a top engineering school. It’s not too surprising now that I think about it.
We met up sometime after 1:00 p.m., went to his apartment at 2:30 p.m., and I left his place three hours later. I honestly can’t wait for the next reading exchange! Maybe this time we’ll skip the café and I’ll walk straight to his place, and I’ll bring some tea and other goodies too 
Ask: Let’s assume you have a writer friend irl who’s working on the first draft of their novel, and they ask you if you want to do a reading exchange with them. From the words “reading exchange,” do you assume it’ll be a more casual thing or lean more towards critiques?
Asking this because I’ve done it with two different people who both took the phrase very differently.
The first person I did it with sent me some completed short stories for me to go over, and at the end of the reading session, he opened an app on his laptop to type out notes. He assumed it was going to be a more critical or analytical kind of exchange, where he’d receive critiques and he’d also give me critiques. I had to explain that I wasn’t looking for critiques at this stage of writing, especially since I haven’t finished the book, let alone started editing it otherwise I would’ve called it a feedback exchange and not a reading exchange.
The second person I did it with, on the other hand, thought that it was going to be a more casual thing, which was a huge relief. I think it also helped that we were both working on the first draft of novels that were far from completion—although his is and will be much shorter than mine.
Now I’m wondering if I have to rename the meetup to “casual non-critique and reactionary reading exchange” to get the point across before someone misunderstands 
Progress: I’m almost done with Chapter LX of Blood Will Tell! I managed to add about a few hundred words, and the current word count for that chapter is roughly 2900. Hopefully I’ll be able to wrap it up soon!
meanwhile Act I has an average chapter length of 1500 to 2500 words. To be fair, Act II also has a lot more lore and other content going on compared to Act I. Act III is going to be a headache to write 
I know for a fact that