I'm a man living in Kendall, Florida (just southwest of Miami).
I was born in Montreal, Canada, but I've lived in the US since 1962.

My chief hobbies are music, humor, reading and writing; I'm a member of Mensa and NA.

I've worked as a writer, editor, salesman and business owner.

Blessings, Cheers,
David

Why You Shouldn't Get a Beta Reader

(If a mere 60 percent of the following qualities are true of you, you could probably get along fine without a beta.)

1/ You are a skilled and impeccable editor and proofreader yourself, with many years of experience. You are an expert grammarian and a champion speller.

2/ You are a fine writer, a highly talented wordsmith, and your reviewers all say that your composition and usage are veritable perfection and unmatched.

3/ Whenever you run spell-check and grammar-check programs on your story chapters, they never find a thing to correct.

4/ You use your estimable skills to carefully go over your own chapters at least 2-3 times, to weed out any typos or other errors.

5/ You are ruthlessly efficient at paring down the extraneous and repetitive, and can be utterly objective about weaknesses in your own work. You can take criticism graciously, and you never mind rewriting if it means improving. You are humble and wise enough to admit when you're wrong.

6/ Your stories always start with carefully constructed outlines, so you always know where you're going -- and the text reflects that sureness.

7/ You keep thorough notes so you always remember your place, and what ideas, characters and events you want to introduce, and where.

8/ You are highly knowledgeable about your chosen story-universe, with an outstanding memory, so you never make mistakes regarding characters and their back-stories.

9/ You're utterly at home with reference materials. You always have dictionaries, thesauruses, source materials and almanacs within ready reach. As a great researcher and keen observer, you know life and the world so well that your stories never get caught in improbable or impossible dead ends.

10/ You are an omnivorous reader: you've spent your life reading literature of all kinds, you're always noticing and learning how good writers use structure, composition and word usage to best effect, and so you bring a wealth of understanding of writing, story-telling and pacing to your work.

(Didn't match with at least 6/10 of those? Then you may be well advised to read the next section:)

Why You Need a Beta, and How to Get One

From time to time, I see stories here of outstanding promise that are like diamonds in the rough. They could have become great literature, but instead they have been left in an unpolished -- one might even say corrupt -- state, weighed down by errors, confusions, miscues and inadvertent dead ends. They are a chore rather than a pleasure to read, because no effort has been made to get help in cleaning them up. This is a great pity. So many readers give up in exasperation on a story that could have been great, when all it really needed was some light editing to shave off the messiness and reveal the beauty.

If you have a story you're proud of, why wouldn't you want it to be shown in its best possible light? There are so many people here with skills and talents at editing as well as writing, and they'd be happy to help if only they were asked or permitted to help. Are your words so sacred, your talents so unique, that nobody could possibly improve on them? If so, you're the only such writer in the world.

Even the very best of writers need good editors. It is hard for even the very best editors among writers to edit for themselves. That's because we don't know what we don't know -- i.e. we are unaware of the gaps in our own knowledge, so we cannot correct an error that we don't realize we're making.
Sometimes this is because we're too close to our own ideas, and don't realize that they are only clear in our own minds, but not in our actual language. Sometimes we have written something in a moment of heated inspiration, but have failed to go back to see if it made sense within the context of the story and the story-universe. Sometimes we have adopted habits of jargon, dialect or slang that are current and appropriate in our own milieu or neighborhood, but don't realize that they won't make sense anywhere else in the English-speaking world. And sometimes we have simply gotten into eccentric habits of usage or spelling that we think should be true, but simply aren't. A good beta reader will do what we can't: he or she will bring fresh eyes to the story, see it objectively, and offer repairs that will make it more accessible and acceptable to the eyes of all our readers.

The reason to correct all these mistakes is that mistakes tend to draw the reader's attention toward THEMSELVES, and away from the actual writing. The reader has to stop, try to decode what the writer actually meant from the error presented, rewrite it in his head, and then start up again. This interrupts the flow of the story, and more importantly, it disrupts what is known as the "Suspension of Disbelief."
This is a psychological term, equally applicable to theater, politics and popular religions; but it's especially associated with fiction writing. All readers have a kind of unconscious "inner critic" that says, "Is this real?", and "Does this make sense?" while it is reading (or watching a show or movie, for that matter). When a work of fiction is tightly edited, all distractions are removed and the reader can get deeply immersed in the story, putting that inner critic to sleep. This is when a story can come alive, and the reader or viewer feels like they're living it rather than just observing it.

However, introduce enough errors, or discontinuities, and the inner critic reawakens. It nags the reader, "This doesn't make sense," or "This isn't true." If it happens often enough, the reader detaches from the story and loses interest. Moreover, while preserving that Suspension of Disbelief is important in any kind of fiction, it is absolutely critical in the genre of Magical Fantasy. A magical story has to have even more attention paid to its internal logic, consistency and precision than any other form of fiction, because it is, by its very nature, so much more improbable. Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings have to make MORE sense than Hemingway and John Grisham! That's why careful editing is important; and yes, J. K. Rowling herself has teams of excellent editors.

Some people believe that all those pesky rules of grammar, syntax, usage etc. are an arbitrary confinement, imposed upon us by oppressive experts, and therefore defiantly rebel. Actually, language rules and word usage do change over time -- just try reading Shakespeare without annotations! But within one's own time, those rules provide the same security and sureness to English users as the rules of the road do for drivers: they let us all understand at a glance what another writer means, without having to guess or assume. We don't get to pick which side of the road we want to drive on, or there would be too many deaths. Similarly, if we insist upon the right to choose or invent our own rules of language, we practically guarantee that we will be misunderstood by nearly everyone else. Far better to save our creativity for our stories and ideas, and let the framework of standard language stand for one and all.
(The obscure jargon of a subculture is designed to divide "us and them" by excluding all non-members -- which is the very definition of elitism, to the eventual abashment of those jargon speakers who had thought they were excluding the elitists! Standard language, it turns out, is very democratic.)

Writers, by definition, are good at noticing stuff. (Or should be.) We can learn a lot by observation and study; we don't have to leave all repairs for a beta. For example, I recommend familiarizing yourself with the very useful tables of English irregular verbs that can be found online through Google or Yahoo. Normally the many errors of irregular verbs (things like "I seen" or "he had saw" in particular) would be attributed to not being a native speaker of English. I assume that you're a good writer, and you don't want to look ignorant. If you're writing in the Harry Potter story universe, you'll also want to bookmark the Harry Potter Lexicon, an exhaustive resource.

If you don't yet have any editing help, you would do very well using an Author's Note to ask your readership for volunteers for Beta Reader. A Beta Reader gives a chapter a light edit for typos, misspellings, grammar, punctuation and usage. Usually they don't recommend major rewriting unless something is very unclear, though a good beta will also point out internal or story-universe continuity errors.
(Continuity is originally a movie term. Adjacent scenes in the final film might have been shot months apart. It's important that the clothing and hair lengths look the same, or the audience will notice. Similarly, in fiction, the story has to agree with itself: it mustn't contain clumsy contradictions from one chapter or paragraph to the next.)

A beta receives the draft, makes appropriate corrections, and sends it back to the author for posting. (A superior format for this exchange is MS Word, because it lets you turn on correction tracking so both sides can see, in another color, what corrections have been made. Open Office also has this feature, and because it is the native format for FF dot net, is even better to use here. Click Edit, Changes, Record. After saving both versions, be sure to turn the tracking off before submitting the final copy to the website for uploading and posting! Otherwise, both the original and the corrected items will appear in the posted chapter, which is even more confusing. The most important reason to use correction tracking is so you can learn what mistakes you're making so you won't repeat them.)
If the beta is efficient and has the time to spare, the turnaround should not exceed 1-2 days. Always remember, though, that your beta is performing this valuable service at no charge! Being patient, and giving credit, are appropriate.

"Okay," you may say, "I get the importance of grammar and usage, but why should I bother with spelling and punctuation?"

Spelling is a function of observation and memory. (That "noticing" thing I mentioned.) If your spelling is constantly off, readers will take that to mean that you observe and remember poorly, and will be less likely to believe you -- especially if you misspell well-known character names. Even worse, misspelling can produce entirely wrong words, which adds to readers' confusion. (Anyone who has written "defiantly" when they meant "definitely," or confuses "of" and "off", "from" and "form", "there/their/they're" or "where/were," urgently needs a beta.)

Punctuation shows how a sentence "breathes." That is, when punctuation is used correctly, it provides the cues of emphasis, pausing and tone that would make everything unmistakably clear if the sentence had been spoken aloud. In fact, good punctuations are almost like script directions: they make a story that is read aloud clear to any listener. When misused or underused, those cues to meaning are confusing or lacking, and the reader has to keep guessing and figuring what the real meaning, intent and emphasis should be -- which grows exhausting.
(And at times, even a mere apostrophe conveys a crucial wealth of information. Is not this distinction apparent: "That hell be glad"; or "That he'll be glad"?)

A few writers are afraid that a beta will somehow "spoil" their story. These tend to be insecure people who mistakenly believe that their every word is sacred, or a "child," and that every correction is an attempt to "slay their child." This delusion is laughably untrue; a good editor only makes a writer look good, and never tries to totally rewrite a story or stifle a writer.
If (God forbid) you did inadvertently get a beta who was too controlling, never fear: you are still the owner of the account; and unless you foolishly gave someone the account password, only you have the power to post (or not post) the edited version they sent back to you. Nothing you don't approve of has to be uploaded if you don't like it; the corrections must be returned to you first, and you can change back any changes you deem inappropriate before posting the chapter.

Likewise, some writers arrogantly assume that their writing could not possibly be improved upon. Even if, by some miracle, that were true, they may be missing little errors of usage or context that make their story (and, by extension, them) look silly. Just a brief run-through by a competent beta -- or better yet, two -- would save them a lot of face.

Some fanfic authors say they have a beta, but their stories are still full of errors and confusions. In some cases, this was because the beta was really only interested in being the first person to see a chapter, but not in actually doing the work. In other cases, the beta was merely the first person to offer to help, but may be no more competent at usage and composition than the author him/herself. If your beta is falling down on the job and not properly correcting the submitted chapters, you owe it to your own creative work and your readers to either get a second beta or simply replace them. Don't keep a failing beta on just because you're afraid of hurting their feelings; that's co-dependency.

To get a beta, Ask! Post an author's note saying, "I'm looking for a beta"; but put it at the heading of your NEXT chapter. (If you go back and add it to the end of your last chapter, too few people will see it, because they've already read it.) Once you have 4-5 volunteers, send them all the next following chapter -- BEFORE posting it. The one who returns it with the most corrections and the best suggestions gets the job.
And yes, restrain yourself: always resist the temptation to pre-post a chapter in its raw state, prior to its being sent to the beta for editing. Most readers will not usually tend to re-read chapters, and if you pre-post raw copy, they will get their only impression from the earlier, more flawed and confusing, unedited version. But if instead you wait for the beta's corrections to be returned, and then post the chapter, the readers will enjoy a more perfected, clarified and elegant version, and they will never know that they had to wait an extra two days for the beta to turn it around unless you tell them so. (Some writers are too addicted to the instant gratification of reviews, and post the raw copy anyway. Good writers have the patience and discipline to wait, only letting the very best version of their work be published.)
When your beta returns your chapter, it would be wise, indeed essential, to reread it before posting. First, you might catch errors (s)he missed, or inadvertently caused; and second, because that's how you'll learn what errors you persistently make, and how to improve. And yes, once you have a beta, urge them to go back and edit all the earlier chapters too. Readers start at the beginning. The first impression a new reader gets, on seeing your story announced, will be from chapter one -- not from the latest chapter posted. If you don't polish the early chapters, those who -- like me -- are annoyed by large numbers of language errors or confusing narratives, may not have the patience to stick around to get to chapter 10.

Why bother? Some writers proclaim that they're "only writing for themselves," or that they "can't be bothered tidying up their art for fuss-budgets."
In the first case, a writer who was really only writing for himself would not have bothered to post it anywhere. There is great pleasure in actually being read, and that is not anything to be ashamed of! (We are all allowed to have egos! We just want to avoid having unhealthy -- that is, grandiose, vindictive or self-pitying -- egos.)
In the latter case, a writer needs to respect all their readers, and not just those who share their own jargon or skill level. Having one's work edited clarifies and polishes it so everyone can appreciate it. Every work of art consists of both essence and expression -- i.e. both concept and execution. It's not just what you say but also how you say it. Permitting an edit allows the manifestation to catch up to the conception. It makes it more acceptable and welcome to every reader. Letting a beta fine-tune your story is an act of trust and love.

Hope you'll forgive me for waxing poetic on the virtues of editing! Bear in mind that I would not offer correction for a story I did not respect; I would simply say, "Next." It is because I like and respect your work that I want to see it set in a more attractive frame.

Blessings,
David

Wise Words to the Writer

1/ Every writer needs a quality collegiate dictionary within easy reach whenever writing. (I like the Random House Webster's, but have others too. I like to have a good Canadian and a UK dictionary handy as well. A good thesaurus and a major-media stylebook couldn't hurt either.)
Mark Twain said, "The difference between the right word and the almost right word is like the difference between the lightning and the lightning bug." Similarly, does your hero live in a coop, or a co-op? Is a man outstanding in his field a great doctor or an idle farmer? Your dictionary (and your beta) should recognize the distinction. (The Journalism stylebook with the best joke: United Press International Stylebook (1977, p. 29):
"burro, burrow A burro is an ass. A burrow is a hole in the ground. As a journalist you are expected to know the difference.")

The good writer loves language, and is always eager to learn more about it. Good reference works help produce better literature. Likewise, good writers are also good readers. They inhale books, magazines, newspapers, and even billboards because they love to read. They learn good composition and structure largely by observing how other good writers do it. Bad writers, on the other hand, pay no attention to literature or dictionaries. They arrogantly assume that they are above all rules and teachers, and that they can be an artist, despite having never been a student. It is fair to say that someone who never reads cannot know how to write.

2/ The writing and editing functions draw on opposite sides of the brain. Writing is more creative, while editing is more analytical. It is extremely hard to perform both functions simultaneously, and wiser not to try. It is best to go ahead and just write until the muse is exhausted; then go back and review oneself; then wait a day before posting or submitting the material, and review it again. One will always see things differently (and usually more clearly) after 24 hours have passed.

3/ One's every word is not sacred. Writing is as much craft as art. As a good sculptor or architect will tell you, very often Less Is More. If you or your editor believe that a word, a phrase, a sentence or even a whole chapter distracts and subtracts rather than adds to the story, try the idea out with an open mind and leave that word or chapter out for now. (Just keep the full version aside in a separate file; that way you can restore the missing piece easily if necessary.) Remember, unedited movies would be sixteen hours long if the screenwriter had his way. Tighter is almost always better. Extravagant verbosity is self-indulgent.

4/ A story is not a diary or journal. Not only is it unnecessary to describe every moment of every day, it is downright tedious. Observe how the passage of time is handled in well-written fiction: often weeks or even years may pass, with only a bare mention of the fact. The only action one must include is that which furthers the story; all else is stuffing.
It is also best to avoid such vapid blather as "The next week seemed to fly by in a blur." It adds absolutely nothing, because the rapid passage of time while one is busy is an experience as universal as eating, sleeping and bathroom habits, which are similarly not usually worth taking particular note of.
If passage of time must be noted, then it ought to be done creatively and reveal something about the story: "The following week was routine, but the overwhelming feeling of time running out grew worse for him." "For the next three weeks, he exhausted himself preparing for exams, the inevitable battle ahead, and his plans for the summer -- if he lived to see it." And if nothing happens for a month or two, just say that, or say nothing: "By the end of July, he had grown so sick of nothing happening that he started taking long naps just to pass the time." "If he hadn't had his books to reread over the next two months, he'd have died of boredom." "By July 31, he was two inches taller but ten pounds thinner."

5/ Timing isn't everything; it's only 90 percent. Good storytelling includes clever pacing. Just as in telling a joke, telling a story requires not blowing the punch line. Many good writers compose the conclusion of a chapter -- or even the ending of a whole story -- first, and then outline how they propose to get there. (Sort of like the story of the boy who shot his gun at a wall, and then drew targets around the bullet-holes; then was mistaken for a sharpshooter!)
There will always be expository sections -- i.e., portions or chapters that fill in the details or form a bridge, but where not too much happens. But if the writer doesn't already know where he wants to go, he risks getting too bogged down in extraneous detail or pointless meandering.
Many of the best writers always start first by outlining, so they have a framework that can be gradually filled in. They might not stick to their outline, as stories and their characters have an odd habit of taking on a life of their own; but the outline at the very least provides a point of arrival and a route to get there. Once the goal is clearly defined, the pacing is much easier to determine.
And thank God for Word Processing programs! We can move things around, type-over, rewrite repeatedly. Unlike our pioneer forebears constrained by the typewriter and a sheet of paper, we have endless flexibility. Electrons are malleable and cheap.

6/ No fanfic reader will ever know that you took more time to polish a story unless you tell them, and unless you made the mistake of writing to a strict weekly schedule (which is almost as bad an error as writing by surveying what readers want to see, rather than what you want to write), they can't complain. Taking a day or even a week longer to make a story better is a far greater service to your readers than getting it out as fast as possible. (The only valid excuse for putting haste above care is if you have -- God forbid -- only six weeks to live.)
Readers will notice, however, if a story is rushed or confused, or if it is far below the standards of earlier work. If there's a problem, and rereading doesn't seem to reveal any way to improve it or get out of a hole, better to sit on it and just let the subconscious sift through it and sort it out. Of course, some writers are addicted to the drug of reviews, and just can't wait long enough to re-examine their work and let a beta edit it. They fail to realize that improved work will result in more and better reviews.

7/ Length: While there are no absolute hard-and-fast standards, somewhere between two thousand and five thousand words seems to work best for average chapter size. Very short chapters suggest that an author has not developed his idea sufficiently, or hasn't much to say; and terribly long chapters become hard for readers to sustain their concentration on. If a chapter is ten thousand words long, the writer would do well to find some natural splitting point to separate it into two. The brain can only contain what the seat can endure. (Exceptions: joke stories leading to a punchline deserve to be short. Tense, gripping battle scenes deserve to be long.)
Not incidentally, writers want to be read, and for that, they need to be noticed. Each chapter posted "ages off the front page" of a fanfic site very quickly. (Just on FF dot net, easily seven hundred chapters are posted each day in the Potterverse alone.)
If you post five chapters of two thousand words, once every week for five weeks, there's five times the likelihood of your story being seen and subscribed to, compared to one chapter of ten thousand words, posted every five weeks. And if you decide to wait till your whole story is done before posting it -- for heavens sake, post a chapter a day, rather than all on the same day! The whole story will age off the front page, and be lost to the many who might enjoy it.

8/ You Can Never Please Everybody. It makes no sense to even try. Writers, speakers, artists, actors, musicians, politicians and even clergymen learn early on that unanimous audience approval is an impossible goal. Even if you're great, you're lucky to get eighty percent approval; and if you change what you do to attract the rest, you'll simply alienate a different twenty percent. So you might as well be true to yourself, and follow your own creative impulse. It is good to take advice; but creativity is virtually never enhanced by taking a poll. With very rare exceptions, creativity is a solitary endeavor. You must be happy with your writing. If you write first to please yourself, you're far more likely to find an audience that finds you worthy than if you try to please everyone.

9/ English is the most widely-distributed language in the world. Besides being the de facto universal language of business, science, computing, telecommunications, aviation, entertainment, travel and diplomacy, it is an official language in 52 countries, it is the first language of some 400 million people and the second language of roughly a billion more.
Since our language is both so widely diffused and yet lacks a central authority or academy, every version of English is a dialect. Even the Queen's English, while very proper, is only spoken by a tiny fraction of all English speakers. Therefore, there is no absolute "right way" to speak English.
There are, however, many expressions and usages that are so limited to a single dialect or two that they will not be understood by most other English speakers. ("Thank you for having me on" can mean "Thank you for inviting me to be on your broadcast" to an American, and can also mean "Thank you for pulling my leg/playing a prank on me by trying to make me believe something that's not true" to an Englishman. A "pot plant" to an Englishman is the same thing as a "potted plant" is to an American; but a "pot plant" to an American is a marijuana plant.)
English has such a vast vocabulary that it is both easy and wise to choose language that will let other English speakers understand you more readily. If you're writing for more than the local market, this does require learning which of your everyday words and expressions are colloquialisms, and which are universal English. But if you're writing for the internet, you have to keep in mind that your audience is now global. Writers who want to be understood everywhere will seek to make it easier, not harder, for their audience to grasp their meaning on the first try.

10/ Use what you know; don't use what you don't know. If you know physics or chemistry, it's just fine to use them -- at least in a way that a general audience will comprehend. If you've read every issue of National Geographic for the last 15 years, go ahead and take your characters on a round-the-world tour; you probably know your way around. If you know French or Latin, it's fine to use French or Latin; you won't confuse your conjugations and declensions.
But few things undermine an author more than using knowledge that they don't have, but that the reading audience does. As a prime example: One of the more feeble inventions of the internet age is the online translator. It uses a pickaxe instead of a scalpel. Anyone familiar with other languages knows that the structure of each language -- the way ideas are expressed -- is different. Also, knowing the subtle choices of one word or expression over another requires the experience and practice of actually speaking the language with fluent native speakers. Using online translators, especially to create story titles, does not make authors look "arty." It makes them look ridiculous.
Similarly, each foreign accent is a way of "mispronouncing English" in certain distinct ways. If you are really good at accents, and you've read lots of good examples of dialect writing, then it's fine to go ahead and use them to add color to a story. But misusing accents detracts from dialogue, and unnecessarily burdens a story. Characters whose accents are wrongly applied come off as mental defectives with speech impediments, rather than as foreigners. Better to use no accents or dialects than to use them badly.

Writing is an art of creating a world in the mind. When too many elements of that world are obviously the product of ignorance rather than imagination, the reader loses all respect. The good writer is, first of all, a keen observer. The best writers create those imaginary worlds so artfully and transparently that the reader's own world is changed.

Language is the clay and sticks, words and grammar are the flesh and blood, with which we create those mental worlds. Barring great progress in the technology of telepathy, we need carefully-crafted English to convey our ideas to others. To whatever extent we may lack well-honed language tools, it is a sign of wisdom and strength to get whatever help is needed to design and polish our work so it may be beautiful as well as intelligible.