…is this a bad idea? I want to grow as a writer and there are many people who read here whose opinion I trust. Even if it were to be shredded (which I hope it wouldn’t be), wouldn’t that be a good experience in skin-thickening and getting used to criticism? I’m curious to know what you think and I’m posting in Café Society because the sign says ‘literature’ (not sure if my rubbish qualifies, but nothing ventured, nothing gained).
It’s been done before. But note you’ll be allowing Creative Loafing to have part of your copyright (their own reproduction rights). And copyright is insufficient to keep some people from copying you. We are Google-indexed, after all.
I wouldn’t do it. You’re likely to get a lot of glib comments, none of which have any time or serious thought behind them, and which entirely contradict one another anyway. That’s the nature of the internet.
The risk of trying to follow a blizzard of such casual advice is that it makes you second-guess yourself at every other paragraph until you’ve turned the manuscript into a complete mess and forgotten what you were trying to achieve in the first place. You need to either trust your own instincts about what’s good and bad, or find a smart, ruthlessly honest, friend who will devote some time to reading your stuff before delivering a considered opinion.
Don’t post it here. Get permission to post a link to it elsewhere. Instantly dismiss any criticism only one paragraph long.
An online critique group can be very useful, but the SDMB is not an online critique group.
If your story is science fiction/fantasy/horror, then you can join critters.org and get a critique – but you’ll have to do critiquing on your own. But that’s good practice.