Mimi-Scented Care Package

[teddy_radiator]

First day back to work (which means we'll only work three days this week, but oh well), and waiting in my mailbox was a care package from the lovely Mimi darling. The original to her 'Welcome to LJ' drawing (which is breathtaking), a Snape calendar which is so awesome, and other goodies. Talk about making me feel loved.

Good day at the shop. A friend came in to order a take away, paid with a credit card, and this afternoon after closing, as I was entering in tips from the CC slips, I found that he'd given us a $50 tip - on an $11 meal. Nice guy. Took some stunning photos of the shop during Christmas (I'll put them in the gallery - they are so beautiful I have trouble realising it's our place), and does lots of work at the theatre we perform at occasionally.

I'm getting desperate for a beta. I'm starting to realise that I am hopeless and even after beta-ing my own first three fics, I'm just as crap at finding my own mistake now as I was the first page of Spellbreaker. I got a chapter tossed from Ashwinder today because it was so rubbish they couldn't accept it! I had to laugh. I re-read it and I'd mistakenly sent my un-proofed copy, but I'm getting scared to send the updated one - it'll probably have more mistakes than the first one.

If you know anyone who would like to beta me, I would like to work with them. I have a beta for my original work, but she's just too snowed under to do the fanfic stuff as well, and she's not very familiar with canon. I'm getting into some trickier waters here with the two fics I'm working on right now, and I'm going to need to up my game.

Comments

[mimimanderly.livejournal.com]

He looks lovely as an icon, doesn't he? Squeee!!

[teddyradiator.livejournal.com]

He does, indeed...he just keeps me smiling with his bedroom eyes.... I keep writing about his eyes in my 'droxy fic'. I've always, always been a sucker for a brown-eyed, handsome man. It's one of my fav Chuck Berry songs! lol

[teddyradiator.livejournal.com]

You do Chaos better than anyone I know, Sempra... Mimi's a right little goddess isn't she??? lol

[bloodcult.livejournal.com]

Don't feel bad, I am awful, just awful, with punctuation. Everything I write starts out looking like it was written by e.e. cummings.

[teddyradiator.livejournal.com]

I had to laugh about the e.e. cummings part. I'm just hopeless. And, to be honest, it can be a bit inconsistent with the admins as well. I submitted Ashwinder's corrected version to TPP, and they sent it back with hundreds of corrections. They put in commas that Ashwinder took out, and viseversa.

[bloodcult.livejournal.com]

Slightly inconsistent, ehhh?

~laughs maniacally~
I spent well over a year mailing back and forth with Ashwinder, doing their corrections and I only ever had one piece accepted. And I think that was an accident on their part.

[teddyradiator.livejournal.com]

They've accepted three of my stories and I'm uploading a fourth, but I can almost hear them groan from here everytime I upload something. I really have to get a beta soon. I'm not too bad at self-edit, but my commas are all over the place.

Does Digital Pen still accept new work?

[bloodcult.livejournal.com]

I had several different people beta my stories for Ashwinder but it still wasn't deemed acceptable for what I was told were "characterization issues." At that point I decided there was only so far I was willing to bend over backwards for their approval and gave it up as a bad job.

There have been other archives who asked me to submit everything through one of their "approved" betas but frankly I don't have the energy for it. I have too much to do as it is.

Are you refering to Digital Quill? They are a private archive I think. For reasons of size they take new authors by invitation only. Not because they want to be exclusive but because their time and bandwidth is limited.
At least last time I checked. I could be mistaken, I frequently am.

[andyissadangel.livejournal.com]

Oh, we all can get mistakes, and when reading for the fifth time, not see them. We are, after all, only human.

Wish I could do any beta-ing, but I don't know where to put commas. I suck at commas. And after reading fanfics for almost 9 years, I have problems discerning what is canon and what is fanon. Occupational hazard, I guess =)
- BlueRavenAngel

[teddyradiator.livejournal.com]

How true! There are some things I read over and over, mannerisms, etc, and I realise they are all fanon, and have nothing to do with the original, but they've been used so much, I just accept them as original stuff!