Welcome to my perfumed garden

.
I sat in a Harry Potter panel at a con a few years back and listened to a British woman tell us that unless we had a British BETA, we Americans had absolutely no business writing HP fanfic AT ALL. She wasn't really content with us using on-line guides either - had to be a real beta, or she wouldn't read it at all.

And there's that holier-than-thou entitlement thing again, that I mentioned to Gilly above. If someone's nose is so high in the air that an author has to jump through hoops before she'll deign to read the offered fic... Ms. Snooty will miss a lot of good stories.

I had a boyfriend like that once -- was looking at the blurb of one of my SF books, and thought it sounded good, was going to ask to borrow it... until he noticed the author was a woman. (Barbara Hambly, IIRC -- *big* name in SF.) I should have dropped the jerk then, instead of six months later.

And then there's the expectation that 'get a beta' is a foolproof answer. If it's a new relationship, the author has no way to know if the beta is good and/or competent, and might not know until they get enough FB that mentions it. For instance, castalie is French; she uses English well, but not with the automatic language assumptions / habits that make the writing sound 'native'. She has to trust me (her beta) to do a good job of turning her meaning into common vernacular. But if I flub it, it's likely that she wouldn't recognize the difference, and most of her readers would be too polite to call her on it. So it's pretty much a Catch-22.

Basically, anyone who gets their panties in a twist about the little things just needs to lighten UP! Geeeze...
.