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1. Submit your piece with proper manuscript format. There’s a reason people ask for it. It’s readable, leaves room for notes, and quickly gives a basic idea of how long the piece is (and therefore an estimation of how much time it’s going to take to critique it). I don’t care if you like a funky new typeface or want to save paper. The standard format is standard for a reason. Be professional, be respectful. The basics: Times New Roman/Courier, 12 point, double spaced, one inch margins.

2. If everyone else is bringing printed pages, don’t e-mail yours. It gives them nothing to hand back to you, nowhere to take the notes, and studies show you read different on the computer versus on paper. You want the most bang for your critique. Don’t shortchange yourself, and the your critique partners.

3. Edit your pieces before you print them, not after. There’s nothing more maddening than finding out a writer has changed everything they turned in, and your critique doesn’t do them any good. It feels like wasted time all the way around.

4. Start and end with something positive. Critiques can be incredibly hard to hear, and sandwiching in the bad with some good notes is useful to spare feelings.

5. If you have to cry, it’s totally legit to say you need to step into the bathroom to freshen your lipstick or use the facilities. Take a minute, take a deep breath. That being said, the lady’s room at the last workshop with a critique element I attended was full of snifflers after every group meeting. Even the people who got really positive critiques were emotional about it.

Only managed two pies this year because I was house sitting for most of the day.  The T-Rex from the Jurassic Park logo for me and Baymax by request of the nine-year-old.

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Terms and Conditions seems to be my ghost. It’s haunting me. I don’t think I’ll finish Connection Terminated until I’ve got Terms and Conditions wrapped properly.

There was a time that would have made me sad, I think, but I can’t seem to give up on it yet.

For the past nine years I’ve worked in some capacity or another for Dr. Ping-Tung Chang, 2010 United States Professor of the Year and fairly brilliant math professor.  He’s an impatient, bossy person. He’ll call me 96 times a day or more on my day off to badger and bully me in to doing just one thing for him that day. He’ll send angry 3: 00 a.m. e-mails in broken terrible English to people he’s mad at and then ask me to write polite apologies and restate his argument in better language the next day. He’ll agree to meet up at 8:00 a.m. and then be angry I’m not there by 6:00 a.m. – or worse, drop by to get me.

He’s eaten my time like it’s cotton candy for years.

Now that he’s no longer eating my time, I’m not quite sure what to do with it all. I still expect him to call six times in the middle of a movie. To show up hours earlier than we agreed. I’m looking forward to adjusting to it, though.

A small confession about character names:

One of my best friends is a fairly popular young adult author. She’s got more than a dozen books out. More than a few fans. She’s got books in every library I’ve ever visited. As you can imagine, she’s used more a few names over the years to fill out her books. Cool names. Tough names. Soft names. Names from exotic locales, and historic names, and the sort of names that top baby name charts.  Off-beat names, too.

She uses so many that it’s hard not to overlap, when I’m writing. I don’t go out of my way to avoid it, even. Not with the first draft. I don’t think about it.

Still, draft one of Connection Terminated overlaps on three names. Not for important characters – they’re side characters in both her work and mine – and the characters are nothing alike. They’re not even the same species, let alone the same character type. Still, it bothers me.

You’d think I’d be used to naming a character only to find she’s used the name, but it weirds me out every time.

Welcome, 2015. The year of writing, editing, and polishing Connection Terminated.

I was talking to a few friends the other day about how terrifying I find the idea behind my novels. Being booted from the internet, kicked off, connection terminated, permanently and unexpectedly? That’s one of the scariest things I can think of. There are so many people I adore and care about that would never know what happened to me, that would wonder, and worry, and have no way to follow up on finding out.  And I’ve been on the other side of that, too. I used to play a MUD back in the day, and we had two people disappear after 9/11. They didn’t log back on.  Everyone speculated and worried about what might have happened, but we didn’t know. We didn’t get confirmation for months that they’d been killed. That they were never going to log back on. I remember every time I logged back on for months, someone would ask if anyone had heard from either of them. They weren’t even friends, in real life. Just two people who happened to work in the same building and play the same game online who both vanished on the same day.

To me, that’s terrifying. That’s lay up at night thinking about how easy it is to just vanish level terrifying.

Or maybe it’s cyber-stalking, instead of being booted from the internet. How easy it is to put together all the little pieces of your life and figure out who you are, where you’re from, what your schedule is. To find you, and you’d never know, because they could be anyone. That guy from your MMO. The girl on your Twitter feed. The kid you argued with on the forum the other day. The old man you laughed at for not being able to figure out Vent. Sure, they’re just digital. Until they’re not.

That’s scary, right? And maybe a little exciting.