I think I'd have a serious problem betaing for someone who wasn't good... Lots of 'but do you think that Buffy would do that?' or 'is this really how Giles would phrase that?'.

And-- it sounds incredibly... *something* bad... to say it, but I know it's true-- I'm a really hard critic. I'm not nice.

Oh, yes, the delivering of bad news. "Yes, it was technically good, you used all the right grammar, and the story was even interesting. But the characters were horrible." I suck at that in real life.

It's a pain, volunteering for Beta Duty and not knowing what you'll get. Sometimes, it's crap. Sometimes, it's good. Sometimes, your head spins, and you wish you'd checked their other stuff first.

Most of what I've beta'd has been at least okay.

I think it's my civic duty (which I'm behind in).

I always feel like I'm doing a disservice by just saying "Yeah, it was pretty good." Makes me think I should find something I have a quibble with.

Ahh. Plei is more civic-minded than I. Me, I do enough forced editing of suck writing in real life. I want my fandom-world editing work to be all strawberries and whipped cream and lovely, lovely language-- or at least decent-- so I can work on helping make better a project I find worthwhile.

(Hmm. That sentence was really syntactically odd. And yet, I think, grammatically correct. Ah fuck it.)

I have enough self-knowledge now that I know that I can't beta anything I don't think is good. It becomes a degrading, falsely-cheerful experience; and it's not really *too* possible to say "Oh, I might beta for you. Let me see if first, and then I'll tell you if it's worth my time"

I've painted myself into a corner on this one a couple of times. Someone would ask me to beta, and I would cheerfully say "yes." A few days later, I'd get this dreadful piece of schlock in my inbox. I'm slowly learning how to be more discriminating.

One of the hardest things to do when beta-reading is to help the writer write the kind of story he or she wants to write. When one of my beta-ees was stuck on a story point, my gut feeling was to go with a Minearesque resolution, but she was going for more of a romantic comedy sort of feel. OTOH, as she betas my stuff, I have to warn her if there is violence, death, and/or exceeding levels of pain. Despite these differences, we've each got a good feel for how the other person writes.

A lot of what I've betaed (and I've civic-betaed some horrible stuff) is crap. But I do the best I can. I'm honest, at least.

A lot of what I've betaed (and I've civic-betaed some horrible stuff) is crap.

I know *g*. I send you an assload of it.

Oh, yes, the delivering of bad news. "Yes, it was technically good, you used all the right grammar, and the story was even interesting. But the characters were horrible." I suck at that in real life.

Teaching middle school for three years helped me to deal with situations like this. Talk about your fragile egos... There's a fine line between criticism such as "The characters' behavior wasn't convincing. Maybe you should go back and rethink why Buffy would go after Willow with an icepick. Then, you can work on getting that information into the story," and "Your characterization was way off. Buffy would never try to murder Willow with an icepick."