*Forget to proofread. By this I don't mean, "forget to run spellcheck," or even "miss one little typo." I'm talking to Guy Who Ends All His Plural Words with Apostrophe-S, or Girl Who Leaves Out Crucial Prepositions Every Fifth Sentence. Read your story out loud to yourself; make sure it makes sense before you send it in. We're pretty forgiving on the website, but we get enough quality stuff that yours is going to have to be the next coming of Hemmingway to survive a bunch of misspellings. This is especially crucial if you are not a native English speaker and don't necessarily have full command of the English language yet -- get someone who does to read it, if you can't tell where the mistakes are.

*Forget to name your characters. If I have to read one more piece written in the second person to disguise the fact that it's a perfectly ordinary story about someone in a failed marriage, I'm going to boycott the word "you". (This is ironic, since the first piece I accepted was written in the second person, but there are exceptions to every rule.) I'm even less a fan of pieces written in the first person that refer to the rest of the characters in the piece as "she" or "the man." It's not edgy or different, it's just lazy. Make up a damn name!

*Forget the rules. It says very clearly on our website that we take submissions up to 2,000 words. Do not email a submission announcing that your story is 400 words over that limit, but you're hoping we like it anyway. Actually, go ahead and do that. I can write your rejection letter without even bothering to read the story and go on to the next piece.

Sorry, I'm just in a foul mood. We got to work from home today -- the city is doing major construction work on Houston and they were shutting off the water to the building today (i.e., no bathrooms), and I haven't been able to turn the extra home computer time into anything productive. My own writing has completely stalled this week, as you can see from the word count meter; I took a break, hoping reading other people's work would inspire me, and now I'm just annoyed at everybody. Arrgh!