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."

Anne, that's perfect differentiation.

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.

I was just gonna say! Before I finished "Graveyard Shift," SA told me flat-out, "you have two different stories here."

Now, I am a pigheaded writer, so I stuck to my original plan, but it was a DAMN good beta nonetheless. Seriously. And I don't think I ever said that.

I actually think I'm ready to start beta-ing/critiquing again, which is not a place my head's been in for a good long while. In some ways, it would actually be easier to do it for someone that I don't know very well, since I'd be able to be a bit more dispassionate about the piece itself -- which is not to say "be harsh" since with writers I like personally a lot, I tend to like their writing more than I should, which is not what a proper critique needs, and then there's the worry about hurting their feelings inadvertantly....

You should only ever hurt someone's feelings on purpose. That's the true definition of 'lady'.

I was rereading old betas recently, and I discovered two things: (1) I betaed a lot of really good stuff over the years, and a good 30% of if was never published/finished; and (2) it's a million times easier to beta with Word and track changes or colored fonts than it is to do in plaintext.

Not that I'm not still devoted to plaintext as a publishing medium, but holy fucksticks. I'm surprised people weren't publishing with beta notes still in the final versions of their stories.

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

Take that back! You so do not.

I was just gonna say!

Hey! You take that back too!

Crazy women.

I'm surprised people weren't publishing with beta notes still in the final versions of their stories.

See, I don't get that. I NEVER use the file that went through beta as the file that I post. It's more complicated, but I sit with the beta in one window and the story in the other, and make the changes. Besides, I might have changed the story since I sent it to beta.

As for colored comments, it's useful, but then not everyone uses Word. When I work with Marasmus, it's a problem, because she's on a Mac and the only thing we can use is .txt files.

Speaking of fic, I have badfic in my inbox this morning. Not just badfic, either, but bad songfic.

I blame Shrift and Dana. Dammit.