I've had the odd experience of being able to edit drafts of a story I'm reading and really, really like.

On the one hand, it's kind of cool -- I get to read chapters before everyone else. (nyah, nyah! ) Which isn't actually a cool thing all by itself, but I get a fix sooner than I might otherwise, and that's good.

The downside to this is I actually feel kinda like crap about it, and more than a little guilty. And that's because I've been ripping the chapters to shreds. Stuff that I would've let slide or not even noticed as a regular reader gets red-flagged, and background and setting text I would've read and just filed away's gotten analyzed, picked apart, and critiqued. At some length. Plus my tendencies towards flip smart-assness tend to come out in the commentary, so in addition to the sea of red (Word's chosen red as the default color for my changes, to add insult to injury) there's the snark.

The worst bit is I can't really not do this. I know that when I have other people read my stuff I want them to rip it to shred it. Every weak sentence, awkward phrase, missing transition, inconsistent behaviour -- I want 'em pointed out so they can be fixed. And like it or not I'm doing that when I edit, because I can't not do it as best I can; it feels like cheating to let things I've noticed go by unremarked. On the other hand it feels really wrong to hand back a marked up copy of something I liked with the note "you can still see some margin space on page 14".

It's just... weird. Uncomfortable was something I never expected with this. Not that I'm gonna stop, mind. As long as I'm asked to edit the things I will, it's just going to take a while to convince myself I'm not going to hurt an author's feelings by being (perhaps excessively) pickily honest.

(And, just for the record, if anyone gets ahold of one of my drafts -- please, feel free to tear into the thing. You won't hurt my feelings, and I'd rather a few dozen things pointed out in draft than to notice them after they've hit print, virtual or not)