fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #2675 ]

[ SECRET POST #2675 ]

⌈ Secret Post #2675 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 033 secrets from Secret Submission Post #382.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

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Naturally, we're all grateful for people taking the time to help us out and/or to provide us with fic in the first place.

Sometimes though, you find yourself paired with someone whom you are fundamentally incompatible. Or someone who you slowly come to realise is actually batshit insane.

Share your beta reader/author horror stories here!

I can't seem to find a good beta reader! They're either really nice but bad at it, or complete psychos and brilliant but demand crazy things.

DX

What do they demand?

I had someone insist that I was in no way shape or form into the Merlin fandom or she'd up and leave.

...this was for a Sherlock fic.

Re: Beta reader/author horror stories

diet_poison - 2014-05-01 00:04 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Beta reader/author horror stories

(Anonymous) - 2014-05-01 00:05 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Beta reader/author horror stories

diet_poison - 2014-05-01 00:09 (UTC) - Expand

Does it count if I was beta reading for someone who turned out to be batshit insane? The writer was so confident that I wouldn't find anything in her fic that needed fixing because she was JUST THAT GOOD and her previous beta was "really tough". But of course, I should feel free to give the fic a once-over just in case...

There was a giant run-on sentence in her first paragraph, and it went downhill from there with sentences made up of jumbled, incoherent words. There was no plot. She backpedaled something fierce, claimed to be on cold meds and finally whipped out the "You just don't understand my WRITING STYLE" excuse.

It totally counts, anon. Yeesh.

oh no, anon! I feel your pain, because it is a pain I have shared :(

to be fair, it can be really tough for an inexperienced writer to tell the difference between "my unique personal style!!!" and "total incoherence" Especially if the writer in question is 1000X more invested in writing fiction than in reading it. At least she's still seeking and using betas? Sometimes it's a long road.

Sadly, plenty of older, experienced writers do this, too. I'm not sure it's about experience... maybe ego is closer to it. Some people truly cannot comprehend the possibility that their work isn't perfect and the first concrit they get makes their head implode.

Re: Beta reader/author horror stories

(Anonymous) - 2014-05-01 04:37 (UTC) - Expand

I was a beta for a... I guess she was a friend? Not super close, but we were on friendly terms, or so I thought. She asked me to read a short fic of hers and I wrote back a long list of things I liked about it with details and mentioned ONE tiny thing that she might want to fix. It was a factual error, not a writing error, and it was really, really minor.

We chatted and then the conversation ended. She faded out of that fandom and I only spoke to her every once in a while, but I didn't think anything of it because that happens. Several YEARS later, she brings it up and berates me for being such an evil bitch about her fic and how awful I was about it and that's why she decided we couldn't be friends and she'd never associate with me again, etc. etc.

I was FLOORED. Went back, reread the e-mail exchange and I swear to god that the only piece of actual "criticism" I gave that fic was something like "Oh, and Chattanooga isn't in Kentucky, you mean Tennessee." That was buried in a paragraph of positive feedback.

I apologized for being such a Beta Nazi (WTF?) and decided to never communicate with her again.

...

well. I think you made the right decision here. That's not even a lack of confidence in writing, that's a psychological problem of an epic size.

I've generally been the horror story. I try to warn for my stories as appropriate, from "this story gets pretty violent in parts" to "this story has strong sexual content" to just "this story is really, really bizarre." Folks accept anyway, and then they read the actual story and are shocked. (For what it's worth, I don't wheedle or protest--if they still like the story, I'm happy, and if they're outright offended by a story I thought they'd at least be okay with, I tend to curl in on myself and start apologizing and promising to improve it.)

I was writing my first story for a fandom with a pretty extensive canon and asked for a beta on a comm. Someone (I can't say if they were a BNF, but I guess they were at least a Medium Name) offered.

I told them to be brutal (and gave several detailed assurances that this was indeed what I wanted): They gave me ... ONE very minor piece of feedback, on one word choice in one sentence. That was it. I mean, I consider myself reasonably competent, but as I'm definitely not a "first draft" writer, there was no way that they had found only ONE rough spot in a 8K word plotty story involving canon characters and locations. I wound up setting the fic aside for a few days until I could spot the errors myself (and there plenty), and never asked them to beta for me again.

Sounds like it was such a mess they didn't want to work on it, and didn't know how to tell you.

DA, that's not very nice anon. Why agree to be someone's beta reader then?

My beta reader send me a file with remarks and everithing in a format wich my limited MS word can't read. I didn't admit that this is rhe reason I haven't published a betaed version, I just said that I didn't get around to it. Well, the beta unfollowed my blog and I'm still too lazy to readthis file on someone else's PC.

Yeah, formattnig stuff can be a nightmare. IMO, this is why GoogleDocs is a beta reader's best friend.

GoogleDocs is amazing!

I...don't understand why you couldn't just say "thanks for all your hard work, but my program can't read this. Is there another format you could send it in?"

Re: Beta reader/author horror stories

(Anonymous) - 2014-05-01 09:37 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Beta reader/author horror stories

(Anonymous) - 2014-05-01 19:54 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Beta reader/author horror stories

(Anonymous) - 2014-05-01 19:58 (UTC) - Expand

This wasn't fanfic but an editing job I picked up in graduate school. Someone called the English Department and asked if anyone was willing to do some copy-editing for modest pay. I agreed to do it because I can edit really quickly and knew it wouldn't be a huge time suck for me. I meet with the woman at the coffee shop, and she gives me the manuscript at which point she tells me that the author, her husband is in jail. I start flipping through the document and realize that it's this bizarre, out to lunch, kinda racist manifesto ranty thing but I don't know what to say to the lady. I don't want my name associated with it in any way, but I don't know how to say to her face that I can't do it because it's weird and skeevy. So I agree to copy edit the piece, make her swear that I won't be thanked in the acknowledgments, don't even tell her my name, and scurry away to spend a couple hours editing this "book."

Did she ever keep to her word, that is, not associating you in any way? And was the piece as horrible as it seemed summed up or worse?

Re: Beta reader/author horror stories

lunabee34 - 2014-05-02 01:17 (UTC) - Expand

Once I spent a whole day editing subtitles in a foreign language only for the releasers to end up putting half of the mistakes back into the text.

There was literally. No. Reason. Why. It wasn't something that affected the length of subtitle pieces or otherwise couldn't be corrected for technical reasons. It was just a bunch of orthographical mistakes.

Had someone beta my fic, leave a review for it, then rip off the whole premise in her own, even ripping exact lines.
Then when she was called on it, she claimed she'd never read mine. Even though her review was under her name.
Now she goes around telling people I "chased her out of the fandom" when she'd been publicly trashing it for upwards of a year, and obsessively hatereads my blog. This all happened years ago, too, and she's still at it.

wtfffff. She sounds 15.

Re: Beta reader/author horror stories

(Anonymous) - 2014-05-01 03:22 (UTC) - Expand

Re: Beta reader/author horror stories

(Anonymous) - 2014-05-01 09:41 (UTC) - Expand

yikes.

oh jeez, no :(

what a mess.

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