No matter which workshop you've selected, something in person or an online one like LitReactor, AbsoluteWrite, Scribophile, Critique Circle, or whatever's popular this week, you're going to find a wealth of advice on the etiquette of reviewing.

Here's what they won't tell you.

1. No one wants to read your novel. At least at first. Wait until you've built some relationships at the site before you impose upon people to that degree. Even if you split it up into manageable chunks, it's a hell of a commitment to ask of strangers. Give us a few short stories first, so we can get a better sense of who you are. Write a few reviews first, too, so we can make sure you're going to reciprocate our hard work.
2. Don't submit your first draft. This can confuse people, as a lot of us refer to the first version of the story we post as our first draft. But for those of us that take it seriously, it's not. It's undergone at least a few re-reads and attempts at cleanup to make it presentable and fix any glaring spelling or grammar issues. It's as finished a product as we can make it at that point in time, and we're looking for feedback to make it even better. Do the best you can and the feedback will be more helpful.
3. Presentation matters. Closely related to the above. If your site is the type where you upload attachments, stick to the conventions of the site--usually MS Word format. It's harder to add inline comments to a PDF. Use standard manuscript formatting. I know I can Select All and change spacing and font to suit my tastes, but showing up to the party with double-spaced Courier New or Times New Roman shows you're trying. Make it as easy as possible for us to give you a helpful review.
4. It's not personal. Some reviews might be tough to read, but feedback is rarely malicious.

Figuring out where to send it was a challenge. I write stuff that first and foremost has to amuse me, and there's no listing for Steve Quarterly on Duotrope. But after wading through that site and Wikipedia trying to make sense of genres and subgenres, I figured I could reasonably call the stuff I do "speculative," which made SciFi/Fantasy markets possible destinations.

Looking though submissions guidelines and past issues, I found a couple of markets where my story wouldn't be such a stretch from what they publish. Clarkesworld wasn't one of those markets, but it's the one I chose to submit to first.

There are a couple of reasons for that. First, it's a tough nut to crack. They get several thousand unsolicited submissions a year, and only publish one story a month from their slush pile. At that rate, a rejection just can't be taken personally. They're also known for their automated submission system and quick turnarounds on rejections. Within two days is typical, with reports out there of rejections coming within an hour of submission. I like the idea of that as a band-aide approach to dealing with rejection. Get the first one out of the way right away.

I can see I'm still number 83 in the submission queue, and I'm F5ing every couple of hours. I realized this morning that I picked the worst possible day to submit--the editor's at WorldCon in Reno, and the slush pile has to be the lowest possible priority right now. Figures.

So, one of the reasons I have all this web hosting is because I aspire to write more. It's something I enjoy, and having an extracurricular activity helps keep me from taking my day job seriously. The problem is that I'm absolutely terrible at it.

I don't mean structure, characters, dialog, pacing type of stuff. I'm below-average to passable at craft; certainly no worse than Kindle self-publishers. What I suck at is the actual mechanics of writing--sitting down and getting words on paper.

Half of this is pure, unbridled laziness. With a side of being easily distracted. I can work on that. The blog thing is one of things I'm trying, along with carving out a chunk of time every day or two to sit in front a keyboard, not working, not reading the SomethingAwful forums, and not jerking off. It's a battle every time.

The other half is a paralyzing fear of blank pages. I hate trying to get started, staring at a stark white screen with a blinking cursor in the upper left corner. Too much pressure. A minute or two of that, and it's too easy to tab back over to work, SomethingAwful, or pornography. Or all three.

One approach I've tried is to go low-tech, pen and paper. This has helped some. It's easier to stay focused with fewer distractions. But there's an issue of legibility. I've been typing instead of writing for nearly twenty years--my penmanship has gone to complete shit. There are advantages to this--since I can't read that first draft, only get the gist of it, it forces a re-write. When you consider that the the two places I'm most likely to be able to get anything done are on the train or at a coffee shop, though, I think it's more trouble than it's worth. The train's too bumpy for me to get anything readable, and I feel like a colossal tool writing longhand at a Starbucks.

So I get distracted too easily at my laptop, and I can't read what I write in a notebook. One approach would be to suck it up and focus, and quit being a distracted little bitch.

Another would be to look for a middle ground. I have an iPad that I had never really found a justification for having, so I looked around for writing-related applications. After trying a few that weren't really any better than the built-in Notes app, I found iA Writer from Information Architects.

Holy shit.

It's really amazing, and dead simple. It's a plain text editor that syncs with Dropbox, with attractive typography, a more writerly built-in keyboard, and the best thing ever for someone that hates plain white pages--Focus Mode. Focus Mode blurs all but the most recent three lines, and moves the cursor on a blank document down to the middle of the view. It's such a simple thing, but it makes a huge difference in overcoming the inertia of starting a new project. It gets you started, then gets out of your way. They could have called it Shitty First Draft, the App.

I can't recommend it enough.

It’s been about six weeks. The initial shock is over, but things still don’t seem quite normal yet. We’re waiting for his real parents to come pick him up any time now.

Going back, say, ten months or so, I kind of assumed that any day it’d sink in and I’d wake up one morning a responsible and respectable member of society, capable of molding a young mind into a net gain to the population. But as I type this, holed up in my bathroom, faking a bowel movement while my wife deals with the screaming--so much screaming--the odds of that happening aren’t looking good.

Until recently, I had been neglecting a different web site, thirdlifecrisis.com. Given my advancing years and family history, that URL now seems overly optimistic, so I'm declaring creative bankruptcy and starting over. If you're one of the three repeat visitors to that site, you may recognize this domain name as the name of the also-neglected podcast we were doing for awhile. That'll come back eventually.