NotNoNever

Gawsh, Joann! If you find a beta that tells you your writing is not worth the time and effort, send them round to mine. I'll kick their arse six ways to Sunday. A beta or an editor is there to help, not hinder or demotivate. Can I suggest that your impulse to find one early is fine, but if you want to concentrate on anything, concentrate on your writing first, and then a beta you can work with rather than one who is arrogant enough to tell you whether to go on or not. If you want to write, you write. As they say in the papers ... 'publish and be damned'. And if people are going to damn you for what you write, well, better to be damned for doing it, than damned for not. Damn them all!

It's a bit funny when you suddenly realise that the relationship is changing somewhat. Having a responsibility to family is normal, but having responsibility for family is rather odd when it's your parents. I'm lucky, I suppose. My 73 / 67 parents are fitter than most people half their ages, and there's no dementia history. But I still feel I need to keep an eye on thngs to an extent. I could live with my father ... but my mother? Oooh noooo, that would be detrimental to both of us!

Dubillyouell, that's very stereotyping of you! I think that's probably very contentious AND very political. Lordy, I think you might get your paws dipped in vinegar and sent to the soapbox with no puppy treats for that infraction of the code!

Reminds me of the maxim that all is politics. Don't want too much sun and over windy weather? Then stop polluting the atmosphere ... that's politics.

It's soapbox material? Lordy. Even the uncontentious is soapbox material now. What's happened in there! Have they all got age or something? Indeedy

Evil! Review will be on the blog, soonish.

Hmmm, a beta's job is not to nurture, but that should certainly be included if necessary, especially for a new writer. A beta's job is most certainly not to gild (MuckitList Misdemeanour ). It's to remove the verdigris, perhaps, to allow the gilding to be brought to visibility. That's important to who's in charge of the story Betas do not enrich. Only the author can do that. Again, it is probable that the beta will suggest the removal of stuff that is lowering the standard of otherwise good work (see Dark's examples above) to let the good stuff shine. Indirectly that will cause the pop and shine. Sounds like Dark loves his beta too. I think I can see why!

Aw, is that it?! I thought I was going to get to see this list where you're fourth! Dang! Thanks anyway.

Can you give us a link for those numbers from Trebs, please? I can't find it

I love that phrase 'ripped him a new one'. Wouldn't it be ironically just, if it were literally accurate! Ah the joys of being anal about not being anal. Unfortunately the fine will have no effect. The outreach work? Well, I'd say that's got a lot of potential. Make him work and interact with those he demonises due to ignorance. It's really much harder to hate people you know.

It's a weird thing, but it's not caring about people that is the difference. Mike's right there. That's only a symptom, or even a proxy. I worked for a god-fearing, lay-preaching, born again christian once. He'd fuck anyone over in a heartbeat. The problem is this: conservatives, no, strike that, people of a strongly uninhibited free market view are far more likely to get into positions of power in employment for a variety if reasons. Let's very untidily bundle that up into market evolution. They will most likely have struggled to do it, and view those who don't achieve it as weak. Most likely those who don't are, again an untidy generalisation, more liberal or socially minded. But I know quite a few conservatives who are very generous with their time and money to needy causes. No. The difference is that those who will elbow every other bugger out of the way are the ones who become visible, and they are largely conservative for the reasons stated. Thus the obvious but erroneous conclusion to make is that conservatives are 'nasty'. They're not. It's those nasty who stand atop the pyramid, i.e. those with sharp elbows, who are visible, who become the shorthand, prima facie case, for conservatives. You want to see some examples? Donald Trump (being a twat here in the UK atm). Mitt Romney (being a twat on video this morning). The real difficulty is not that conservatives / liberals don't understand business. It's that they don't always understand that the concept of family (and, therefore, their predisposition to protect it) is just a microcosm of society and the social. Most especially those who elbow their way to the top. Mitt Romney might be a twat, but he's at least a successful one, in business terms. It sounds to me, W_L, that your employers are not that good business managers, but probably pretty good process and concept managers. Which is why they need people like you to treat their money like your own. The fact that you're doing some good for others into the bargain does not make you a bad person or a woolly liberal, or a socialist. It just makes you someone who understands and respects the interconnectedness of things. It's not fair to assume that you only took proper control of the financial systems because that was what your role demanded, or that you only saved the company from cashflow bankruptcy for the sake of saving the company, its owners, and your own job. It seems you took a very social conservative approach. The problem with most conservatives is that they are very good at the conservative part, but very bad / uninterested / irrationally fearful of the social part. They view any approach which seeks to value people as people, rather than as producer units, as dangerous and ridiculous. They seem entirely unable to comprehend that they rely on those people to do a good job. As to your own position, well, you must do as you feel you must do. However, I'd be bloody amazed if they don't come up with a very much improved remuneration package for you when you do tender the resignation. At which point you'd be well advised to consider this: are you a better asset to society staying where you are and protecting the workforce to the best of your abilities in what sounds like a reasonably small sized business, or; are you better to go somewhere else where the culture looks professionally more competent, but where your ability to affect for the greater good is largely impaired by virtue of that success. Only you can know / decide. And we all need to make reasonable money to live. So good luck in your search.

Sheez, you like your smoked smoked smoke with a little whisky thrown in for piquancy!

Hmmmmm, two out of three ain't bad, but I'm gonna have to do a bit of thinking about MMA!

My review will be on my blog when I've read them all. However, I was a bit confused that you thought there was no linkage between the bacta and the nanites, so I had a look. It us there in chapter 1. On the other hand, it may just have been a linkage I formalised fir myself, since I've always understood nanites to be either bacterial, or synobacterial. I don't know if you remember all the fuss there was about them four or five years ago when people were terrified of the 'nano soup' that might get unleashed if we weren't careful.

Golly. I've only been in the chatroom once, and then only because there were some people I was famliar with, so I didn't get any of that vibe. However, I understand what you're saying. The way to be gay is to say with dismay everything with extreme dislike for everything, especially what someone else does or likes. But it's not usually a problem on GA. I have no doubt a mod will eventually pick up on this thread, so don't be shy - name them if asked!

That doesn't count. There was no Spike Miligan involved, and it wasn't haggis being batted back and forth. Actually, somebody reminded me today that Mr. Williams would now have somebody to compare notes with - Judy Murray - as they are now the only people to have two children to have each won a grand slam.

Good to hear that, Comsie. Nice to have a bit of the history. Here's to the next ten! I reckon, though, that there is a great big fat lesson there for all current writers. If you rely on the cloud, you might just get your parade rained on from time to time. Always have a back up for your work, offline. I think there's a lot of people who'd be very unhappy if they found out what they were missing had Comicality given up the ghost with the hassles he suffered. Personally, I think we're walking blindly and blithely into data armageddon relying on the cloud so heavily these days. Imagine what life would be like if GA vanished one day, and we couldn't get the work back!

I think the more interesting question would be 'have you never?', and 'howdahell did you manage that?'

Gotta agree with that. Sheesh, what an interview. I've seen Terry Wogan get more out of Clint Eastwood. Myr's obviously a man of action!

If that doesn't break the rules on pictures on here ... I wanna break some rules with him! I might even break my rule on not watching Dallas. <Has reality check> No, that's never going to happen. It'd be like Hollyoaks on steroids, or more to the point, like haemorrhoids on steroids

I can't believe there are no reviews for this, yet. Mine will be on my blog along with the others for the Anthology when I've finished reading them all.

Aaaaaaand, now that we've got the facts out of the way, do you conspiracy theorists have anything to say?

Naughty me to disagree

Personally, I think the whole idea of there being a beta or an editor is plain ridiculous. There's editors, and that's that. As Mike L says, the author has the last word. The author should use whoever he or she feels is most appropriate within a cohort of editors to the piece being worked upon. That way you can tailor the authorial needs to the available skills. But if anybody seriously believes that there is somebody out there who is going to do spelling only, then they're bonkers. As for grammar, well, there's where it all goes wrong. Grammar can get very close to trajectory at times. And what sensible author is going to send back the comments on why Josh is shagging in chapter seven when he had his bits chopped off in chapter two, and died of secondary infections in chapter four?, on the basis that the reader was asked to 'look at spelling and grammar, but leave the trajectory and coherence to me and the editors, thank you!' Pullleeeze. I think the idea of betas is because of some inherent either fear or snobbery: fear on the part of people who don't believe in the good work they do, sufficiently, to wear the title; snobbery on the part of people who have an overinflated sense of their own importance. In amateur fiction no editor has a say over what gets published and what doesn't. That's for the professional world, and even then they're called commissioning editors. There's nobody on a site such as this who fulfils that role below the level of Myr and probably Cia and a couple of others, i.e. those who decide upon the house style policy and the nomination of Proms and Hosteds. So editor is a very important, but also fairly lowly place in the 'hierarchy'. They just don't get decision making rights. I edit for a couple of people and refer to myself as an editor, partly because, despite many explanations, I don't 'get' the definitions of beta, and; partly because I feel no boundaries when it comes to commenting on things. Send me a script asking for just a spell check and I'll go out of my way to find a hacker to insert a nasty worm into the file when I send it back Any attempt to demarcate between the two, is not an actual demarcation between two, but a division of one, with all the raggedy and bloody consequences, and doomed to fail, or be ignored. But Dark is right. It is very much about a mutual viewpoint and mutual respect. And the editor has to respect the primacy of the writer. If you suggest, and they don't use, get over it, unless it looks earth shatteringly bad. Just remember to be vigilant, and to praise where possible.

For a start, anytime I wasn't a kid. I look back on my childhood and it was just full of strife, mostly at school. Home was OK. I guess if I had to pick one, the best I could would be quite a long period. I met my husband in 1996 and everything has been a whole heap better ever since. I was lying cuddled up to him last night, in the closest thing I get to bliss without a blood pressure issue