Hello, everyone,

Last night I found an online site that had reviewed a piece of mine. It was not a terribly favorable review, and they made a snarky comment about my choice of title. The latter part upset me the most because I didn't choose the title, and actually found the editor's choice horrifying.

The site is a blog style review site, that allows readers to comment. I signed up last night and was going to reply to the review, making sure to set the record straight about the title choice and some other factors of my story. But then I stopped myself, afraid it was one of those bad 2am decisions.

So I'm just wondering, is it ever a good time to reply to a criticism? I figured saying something about an editor that could be perceived as a negative, even though I probably won't work for her again, probably wasn't a good idea. Plus I expect it would come off whiny and just open me up for more criticism.

Has anyone every replied, either in their own blog or through an email or letter to a criticism of their work? Thanks for any thoughts or advice you can share.
~

Did anybody else here submit to the Anonymous Exhibitions project? I did and got back an acknowledgment of receipt, followed by--nothing. For enough months that I'm embarrassed I didn't follow up sooner. Today I did, but the email bounced back. Does anybody know anything about this?

So I was browsing the market listings at ERWA, and was struck by the Black Lace Books anthology listing, which pays rather more nicely than most of the others, and seems to have been written by someone actually familiar with written English, unlike a depressing percentage of the other entries there.

Their general guidelines for novelists are very emphatic on one point, though: "We accept submissions from female authors only, with no exceptions. The fact that all our authors are guaranteed to be women is an essential part of our marketing strategy." Barring expensive and uncomfortable surgery, that leaves me out in the cold.

It seemed like this principle might be relaxed for the short-story collections, but since they don't give an e-mail address, there's no easy way to check. Anyone here happen to have inside info on this point?

ETA: Though if I'd been paying attention, I'd have known that erastes had already posted this market

I've been wondering about this for some time now, and I figured I'd toss this out to everyone here.

Some of you, I believe, are regular contributors to free erotica sites such as literotica as well as StickyPen. Do you find them pretty good venues for advertising your work, or do they amount to negligible traffic at your sites?

Kind of an odd question for me since I'm more of a dabbler in erotica, not a specialist, but I guess it doesn't hurt to show that I can do smut. *koff*

I've got a handful of odd PWPs that I like but can't send out since none fits current open markets. I wouldn't mind posting one for free somewhere that would help increase exposure (no pun intended) for me.

Then again, maybe I can just post a story at my site as a "sampler" of sorts or send it to the ERWA story gallery for consideration.

erastes, what are the guidelines for the story gallery at the ERWA site? I've checked but can't find anything unless I'm overlooking the obvious (which happens too many times in my case).