WANTED: Beta Readers

Another writing milestone reached: Just after Labor Day I finished the draft of my 2025 work, FORLORN TOYS. Now a bit more than 3 weeks later, I’ve done my first round of copy edits and the draft is ready to be read! What was up with that, you say? How can you be “done” but  not done? Before the draft can be usefully read by others, I had to deal with 3 main things:

Handling repeated words

I read back to myself everything I write, and I read it aloud to Kim. That identifies a lot of awkward wording or construction. But a lot sneaks by. An example:

Irá ran to the common area of the suite and called for light. Consulting her vox, she found in a minute that what she needed was available on Badami. Sending messages, she was pleased to find the right person available at this late hour. She made her requirements known, and was assured the requested equipment would be delivered first thing in station morning.

The two “availables”s just look and sound clunky. So that gets changed to:

Irá ran to the common area of the suite and called for light. Consulting her vox, she found in a minute that what she needed was on Badami. Sending messages, she was pleased to find the right person available at this late hour. She made her requirements known and was assured the requested equipment would be delivered first thing in station morning.

This is a simple example. There were literally 1000s of such repeats to examine, the majority of which are perfectly Ok.

“I must expunge every last adverb,” said Tom editorially.

Doubtless many of you recognize a Tom Swifty when you see it. In this case, it’s no joke – too many adverbs in your text do make it read like a dime-store offering from a bygone time. Two examples I seemed to have used a lot were softly, and barely. I also got flagged for perpetually but that’s alright – the name of the heroes’ spaceship (and a minor star of the story I might add) is the Perpetually Unimpressed Bystander.

Getting Consistent

Consistency may be be the hobgoblin of little minds, but in a book it counts for a lot. If in chapter 3 you say, “This trip will take seven whole days”, and in chapter 5 when the trip is done someone says “Well, that was a well-spent five days”, believe me, readers will notice.

Consistency is more than just timelines. Here’s one thing I found in going through my draft: About midway in the story the heroes find an important fact, that a certain person went to a certain star-system at a certain time. They learn this from a transponder on the relevant spaceship. Later in the story, the heroes need to locate that star system, and they use a very cool way to do that. But as I went through the book start to finish, it hit me: Didn’t the transponder thing already tell them that answer? The cool method I mentioned is necessary to the story line and I couldn’t drop it. So I had to go back and change the details of what the transponder was able to determine.

“Complete but there are probably bugs”

After decades developing software it’s too much to hope for that I would forget what a beta release is: Code that has been updated to include a target group of features, but that likely contains defects. The same concept applies to fiction: The story is complete but likely contains defects. But, how can a story have a “defect”? It’s not like we’re launching a rocket and downcasting a critical 64-bit floating point number into a 16-bit integer. Isn’t a story’s quality purely a subjective thing? No, not really.

For example, if a story tells us multiple times a character is a math genius, but then math never comes into the story, that’s a defect – we’ve confused and probably disappointed the reader by getting them to expect something and then not delivering. Pretty much all readers will have that poor experience. Another common defect involves settings: the story is set in a place that is either under- or over-described, or in place that has no connection to the plot and the characters. Again, the reaction to this kind of thing is pretty universal.

Certainly there some issues that bother some readers more than others. An example is the science in science fiction. Some SF readers are more interested in character or theme, and gloss over hand-wave-style magic technology. Others have a higher bar – they want to read about things that have at least some possibility of being consistent with real science.

The list of possible problems an author might have in their newborn book is long: unconvincing characters, sluggish pacing, confusing structure, dialog that sounds the same for everyone, unbelievable or unsatisfying plot turns, and so on. Of course I myself have opinions on whether those things are issues in my book, but I am also not objective and, after spending 9+ months staring at and typing the story, my brain is a bit numb to it. So I need other people to read the book and tell me what they think is wrong, or right, about it.

So far I have 6-5 “friends & family” beta-readers, and 3 paid beta-readers. All of of these are equally valid and important to me. But the feedback from the paid readers does have an extra benefit: these readers typically are English teachers, librarians, editors, or other writers, and so their feedback will speak directly to principles of the writing craft. They will say things like “Character XYZ’s personal stakes were not compelling”, “Supporting character ABC’s sub-plot is too thin” or “The build of tension in act 2 is too slow”. But still, it’s absolutely valuable to me to hear from regular readers “The plot seemed far fetched” or “This part made no sense” – it’s all important.

Sign up today!

I still could use more beta-readers so if you’d like to give it a try, drop me an email at: author (at) wild-puma (dot) com. FORLORN TOYS is about 92,000 words, typical size for a present-day SF novel. Here’s a short blurb that tells what you’d be getting into:

Irá Norlander – a 70-year-old woman in a regenerated 10-year-old body – wants revenge against the 3 false friends who stole from her the greatest discovery of extinct alien technology ever found. But as she searches for weapons to use against her enemies, she discovers how so many intelligent species became extinct, and how humanity could suffer the same fate.

Till next time …