On Betas
Inspired by a post by mmorpgsforlife. When you think of a beta, what do you think of? Copy editing has its place, but what the writing world (and most writers need/crave) are good editors. We call them good betas, here in the world of fanfiction.

( This got a little long. )

^_^;;; Wow. That was long. Sorry Sparky, that was a bit of TL;DR. But when one sees the opportunity to tell things from this side of the fence, it's so very hard to resist that soapbox ...

ETA: I have to hasten to say that this is only true for me! O_o I don't know how other writers do this. I know one writer I beta for, ontogenesis, has a slightly different process from me. She thinks a lot more about her plot and characters before she even comes to me, and sometimes she just shows up with a few thousand words and goes, "Okay, your turn." However, I'm a very conversational type of writer. I don't write in isolation. I've tried it, and I can't--I fail horribly when that happens. Like I said, this is my point of view from my side of the fence. ^_^ That's all.

Also, I have to emphasize that not all my fics get this treatment. ^_^;;; For example, Tohoku was very much a mostly-narrative-beta sort of fic. Caramel took a LOT of concept-beta-ing, but minimal narrative-beta. His Grandfather's Dragon was very much a mash that needed a lot of narrative work and scrutiny, but Promise was so short nothing much was changed after the first draft hammered out. (There was another one for the Dragons AU that came out to a draft of 1000+ words. It did not survive beta and died.)