Thank you for the help... I seem to have made progress following your instructions verbatim, but I am having the oddest issue at the moment...
I can read and write to "a" file I specified ("\\\\172.16.167.33\\vCOShares\\simple.txt")
However, it does not seem to affect the file system at all! No file is read/written to at that location, yet I know the data is persistent since I can write in a workflow and then read it back in another....