Critique Partners

It's that time again. You've finished your masterpiece. It's good, you think you really have something here so you send it off to your critique partners, anxiously anticipating her/his/their response. It's brilliant! It's fantastic! Well done! It's the whole "visions of sugarplums" thing, which as creative people, we all need. It's also important to keep in mind that the reality is...well, not so sugarplumy, and you knew that going in. So, I get the critique back from my partner...and I have to say here that I require brutality and she never disappoints...and she loves the story but: wow,  dropped threads, no real followthrough on the suspense aspects I set up at the beginning, and little to no history on the hero. And I knew I'd dropped the ball on the hero's history. Had an inkling that I hadn't done enough with the suspense aspect, and the dropped threads weren't as bad I thought they were going to be. I love my critique partners.
If you write and you don't have a critique partner...find one. And not somebody that's going to read your stuff and say...oh, that's great, I love it, it's so good...yadda, yadda, yadda. No. You need someone like me, the woman lovingly known by her crit partners as Bloody India. Sounds like I'm mean, doesn't it? But I'm not. What I am is honest, and that's the most important component in a good critiquing partnership. Honesty. The second most important is being able to accept criticism without getting your feelings hurt. The writing world is no place for the thin skinned. If I trust you enough to read my work and ask for you to be honest about what you see on the page, you need to be honest because I'm going to be honest with you. This does not mean you're nasty, rude, derisive, scornful, or any number of other adjectives used to describe someone who's just being mean. It means you read - carefully. You make notes via track changes in the manuscript and you explain the problems you see and even make possible suggestions - why is a certain scene not working, why it doesn't fit with the character arc, how to tighten up the conflict...and so on and so on.
I've had the same two critique partners for years and just discovered a new young writer and asked if she was interested in partnering up. Personally, I think you need a mimimum of 2 crit partners, people who write in a different genre than you so that when they look at your work, they can be objective.
If you're just starting out, find a writing group online. Yahoo has a ton of them. The good thing is that you'll have several pairs of eyes looking at your work. The bad thing is, you have to return the favor, so if you have half a dozen people critiquing your work, you're going to be doing 6 critiques. People who sign up, drop in for a critique or two and then disappear until they need another one are only tolerated for a short period of time. If you don't deliver, you don't get. Period.
But really, the only way to know if you're missing some really critical points in your work in progress is to have people who are objective critique it. Anybody who crits your work with pat phrases like - that was really great, send more...not someone you want for a long term critique partner cuz - really - what are they telling you? Nothing. And as a final note...let your critique partner know what it is you're looking for. If you know there are some issues in your manuscript but you can't quite put your finger on what it is, tell them that. I always let my cps know what I want them to focus on. Anything else they give me is just gravy.
And in closing let me just say: Alvania, Ella, Julia...I love you guys!