Improvements

1. I kind of like the idea of the planning weeks because it is nice to actually get a good plan for the course and for other courses.  For me, however, I started off well with my plan but then eventually began relying on the Canvas due dates again.  That might just have been my own poor planning and inability to properly time manage, but I'm not sure having more planning weeks will actually help that many people.  Then again maybe if I had had more time to plan, I might have been able to work out a better plan that I could have stuck to.  I did like the review weeks though because they were good breaks and allowed me to look back and see how far I had come so I'm loath to tell you to do away with them though!  Maybe Week 9 could be a Review Week and Week 2 is a Planning Week?
2. I really liked the story planning option!  Sometimes I don't have time to write the story or am having a hard time thinking of an idea.  The planning option was really helpful for that and let me consider my story ideas more.  I would suggest maybe having additional resources for the story planning page like linking to the Wikipedia or other helpful websites so people can get more ideas and research.  I also like the idea of having the planning option for the Storybook too because that would have been helpful for when I'm not sure of a good idea or where to go with my story.  However, having the deadline forced me to write when I otherwise could have said oh I'll just think of an idea later, so maybe not having the story planning post for storybooks would still be better.  Or maybe there could be a limit on how many times you can use the story planning post?  Not really sure about a good solution there.
3. I also don't think I'd be particularly good at reading stories out loud, but that sounds really cool!  It would be nice to have another way to reach the stories especially since most epics were meant to be spoken to an audience.
4. Yes that would be so helpful!  I know I have been having a lot of trouble with comma splices throughout the course (and in general), so especially one about that would be so great!  I typically don't like having to sit through videos to learn concepts but there really isn't a good way to teach how to find comma splices (at least that I found) that really helped me understand where I was going wrong.
5. Thematic weeks would be pretty cool!  Would people still be allowed to pick readings though?  Because I really liked being able to pick my own readings and do whatever type of story I wanted, but I wouldn't mind having a little bit of restriction as long as I still got to pick the actual story.