Whining ramble
I'm suddenly back to fanfic writing, and I'm writing them in English for some reason (Forgotten Realms, Jarlaxle/Entreri, if you were wondering). I decided to get myself a beta reader to fix any grammar errors, weird sentences and anything else that may generally go wrong with fics. And success, I found myself one!
My beta is made of awesome when it comes to fixing my stuff. She hasn't had a whole lot to do really, cos my English is fine for the most part, but the little things she gets to point out are super useful. I do awkward sentences every now and then, but my biggest problem seems to be that I like to apply ESL logic to things where I can't go the direct way (due to not knowing the word/saying/other), and the logic... isn't always obvious to other people, apparently. She points those things out and then helps me find the right way to say it once I explain to her what I meant. It's great! She's great!
But the problem is that she is very slow/busy. The story I'm doing is a 50 prompts challenge thing, so I'm writing a big bunch of drabbles/short stories. In fact, I wrote about five of them ready before I even started looking for a beta, cos I wanted to see if I'm actually going to make this thing happen or just write the first drabble and then get bored/lazy. By the time I managed to get her in, I had eight stories and had already published the first two because I got impatient - I got the eternal silence from the first person I asked, declining from the second person (said he already had enough on his platter for now) and my beta took a couple of days to answer too, so it was a good week or so of waiting by then. ... I usually publish right away after I'm done writing (or I don't publish at all), so having to wait to do so got me antsy as hell, okay?
So I had already published the first chapters by the time my beta jumped in (funny though, she answered my query about half an hour after I published. Bad luck on my part, I suppose). However, now that it's a choise I want to get all the other chapters properly proof read before posting them, so this means that I can't post anything that my beta hasn't looked at yet. She took a couple of days to get back to me about the first two chapters, and then she also had the time to do two more during the same day, so yay! I immediately published the third chapter, but decided to keep the fourth chapter unpublished for the time being, in case it'd take her a while to get the next two done. Besides, my original plan had been to publish daily, but two days had passed between the initial publishing and the third chapter, so if I wanted to apply logic I'd now post every two days if possible. Besides, that'd give my beta more time to get the work done.
I waited two days and published the fourth chapter. No word from my beta yet. Now it's been two days since that and I'm a little down about not having a new chapter to post, but that's actually no biggie. I mean, my readers (I actually have them! How awesome is that?!) might have picked up the pattern, but I haven't made any promises to anyone, so if they have their hopes up it's their own fault. Plus no-one is gonna die from the lack of updates, and one would think that my beta would have free time on the weekend at the latest. So really, no biggie.
Except for the fact that I got inspired to draw some self-fanart for chapter nine and the picture is definitely gonna be done sooner than my beta will have even proofed chapter nine if we work at this rate and then I'm gonna have to wait two-ish weeks until I can post this picture anywhere, at least if I want to stick to my plan of posting the picture on tumblr with the drabble to go with it! D: FFFFFFFFF-!!
Yeah, that's my own fault OTL I dug my own damn grave. I'm just already antsy about posting this pic and it's not even ready yet! And if I have to wait for two weeks while staring at it longingly, then I might start to hate the picture before I even have the chance to post it! Any of you artists out there know that's always a possibility, no matter how good the picture looks right now. In short, me and my picture are doomed D:
I'm kinda thinking of chucking chapter nine at my beta after she's done with five and six, even if that might mean that updating the actual fic would be postponed because of the lack of material after I've put those two up (since I can't just upload chapter nine before chapters seven and eight. Post it elsewhere? Sure. But into the actual fic? Nope). But even this plan would require that my beta gets back to me soon and then has the time to proof read some more right away. It's completely possible that during the weekend she just proofs the two chapters she had under her scrutiny right now, and then kicks back and relaxes and leaves me hanging for another week. Oh, the agony!
But yeah. I don't blame my beta for being slow. I mean, people other than me tend to have actual lives, like jobs and family and working out and whatnot. So I don't blame her for spending her free time after her work doing something she thinks is fun and relaxing, and leaving this voluntary slavery for weekends when she has more free time and thus using an hour or two for this doesn't feel like wasting all of the day.
I just secretly wish that she wouldn't make me wait for too long with this particular issue, please OTL