My Beta Is Over. What Comes Next?

My two weeks of having my novel read in a Beta (or rather, a Demi-beta) format have come to a close. It’s now time for me to move on to reading someone else’s book and doing critiques for their work. It’s only fair – they did my book. That’s what Beta is all about.

The Beta period on Tapper was quite interesting. I learned several new things and had several old things reinforced (damn, I thought I’d fixed them). There will be a day when I go through the critiques with a magnifying glass in hand and try to make sense of them, but not now. I have too much of my own Beta reading to do (I’m trying to average at least six chapters a day).

That average took a beating on Wednesday and Thursday, unfortunately, thanks again to another medical problem. I had a simple eye dilation exam, for diabetic retinopathy (everything turned out fine, with the exception of some very mild early-stage cataracts, which run in my family). My eyes were pretty well shot for the rest of the day, which is unusual – I’m normally back on the computer after several hours, but I was very light sensitive, I had a bad headache, and my eyes hurt, especially when I looked at black text on a white computer screen background. I only managed to do one chapter on Wednesday.

Thursday, my headaches and eye pain continued. Thankfully, Scribophile has a “night mode” where the screen turns grey and the text turns white. I managed to slowly crank out my quota on Thursday. Again, thankfully, the pain was gone today, so I was able to turn off “night mode” and do regular critiques on Friday (5/31). Other medical issues tried to conspire against me, but I managed to fend them off long enough to get all six chapters done.

I did manage to get in one Tapper revision today, having to do with the first two chapters. Beta feedback showed me that what I thought was a clever opening could also be interpreted a different non-clever way. I fixed that, along with a couple of bits of Travis’s inner thoughts in chapter two. That’s as far as I dared go without a more in-depth study of the Beta feedback.

But, not to worry. I’ll have my time to take care of Beta details. Probably in a few weeks.