Beta Reader needed for MG

So I sort of ran into a problem. I found a beta for my supposidely middle grade fantasy and I umm traumatized her daughter. She cried for hours claiming I'd injured tinkerbell and was going to kill her.

I swear I don't kill any fairies, but the fairies do have their wings ground off by ogres. They heal, I swear it, but they are also ostratized from their fairy society while they are healing...

So I need a new beta and apparently I need to make the request that you please don't read this to your kid. The girl swallowing book, fairies with ground off wings, attacking ogres, and colorless, cheerless village seem to be too much. I thought it was great, my daughter loved it, but she's probably just used to me and my sick and twisted ways as my husband puts it. He laughed at me for hours last night and told me I'm never going to live this down.

This book is the first of 7, I'm already into the second book but it's probably going to be too much as well, there's dying ogre babies, killer wasps, a desperate search for a flower, and ogres wanting to enslave all the fairies, grind off all their wings, and use the resulting dust to become super powered mindless warriors so they can destroy the giants that chased them out of their land...

Any takers?

Strange Days said:

I don't know whether I'll have enough time to help you, sadly, and it's not my genre anyway. I just wanted to tell you that if your book traumatizes little girls- it is, most likely, good!
And, well, since it is really impolite to post and not offer ANY help at all- I'd be glad to find a little time to read a least a chapter from your story!

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Well thank you. I thought I was fine with the whole fairy grinding thing because in Fairy Quest for the Egg ( a tinkerbell story) one of the fairies requests to have her wings cut off so she can swim with mermaids. So they cut them off with a knife. Their wings don't grow back. And they have fairies die (wink out) because of disbelief. Maybe it's the way I'm handling it, but my 8 year old was all over the story, gripped, and couldn't wait for the next book.

If you don't have time, I completely understand. I'll see if I have any other offers and if I don't get any, I'll send you the first chapter. The book swallowing portal thing was apparently very scary too.

Thanks Mark.

I wanted the story to have meaning, for actions to have consequences that were possibly devistating, you know like real life. I think maybe that's what pushed it past MG. Maybe I will see if I can rewrite it to fit YA. I'd only have to add about 3 years on the MC and perhaps her quest would make more sense.

Well got a response from the second Beta I had. "Although your writing is very strong, children's writing just isn't your calling, stick to genres where you can torture puppies."

I guess I was just never one of those fluffy happy happy joy joy little girls.

Come to think of it, the only stories my dad would tell me had us at the edges of our seats and if we didn't scream at the end, it wasn't a good story.

Salis said:

I don't know when parents became such pussies. It used to be that stories intended for children were supposed to be scary as shit, in fact, sometimes scarier than stuff for adults.

Sheltered kids just have so much more of a horrible time when they actually get out into the real, unsanitized world (which would seem to be born out by that kid freaking out over an imaginary character suffering some sort of pain).

Sorry, I'll stop derailing your thread now. D:

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Yeah the Brother's Grimm fairy tales are good examples of how children's books used to be.

I'm sure I'll end up gearing it toward like 13+ where kids are allowed a little more daring stuff should I say?

I was just really excited about the whole wing grinding thing and equated it to someone losing the ability to walk in the book, and that people can and are happy despite their limitations and that the fairies had to learn acceptance and had to accept a wingless guardian to come help protect their city from the rampaging ogres.

To basically get over their idea of perfection and superficial existence or face losing everything and accept the imperfect.

Exir said:

Grrrr... MG doesn't mean it's all fluffy pink rabbit sentimental crap, and it doesn't mean actions don't have consequences. Just different kinds of consequences -- things such as losing friends, adapting to a new place, etc.

Sorry, I'm very possibly overreacting, and I have nothing against stories which are geared to a more mature audience. It's just that I'm writing MG myself, and I'm sensitive to even the suggestion that MG is somehow inferior just because it doesn't deal with mature (grown-up) topics...

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Oh please understand. I don't mean it being inferior at all. I just mean what I was trying to do was not appropriate. The meaning and subjects I was putting in were not appropriate and it's all on me. MG is actually quite difficult to write for because you're trying to juggle certain things and certain topics while keeping it right for that age group and I failed at doing that.

I'm actually quite disappointed in myself, I have a tendancy to use my own interests in what I would want to see as a gearing point for what to write and I just can't do that in MG. I'm not quite sure how or where to take the story from here. I knew my story might have been too dark and too much for that age group and I was hoping the betas I sent it to a while back would be able to help me understand what was too much, what wasn't, what subjects were appropriate and so forth.

On the bolding mine, I wasn't able to capture that. I was doing the wrong kind of consequences that aren't really applicable to that age group. I'm still trying to wrap my head around it and perhaps as my beta suggested I might not have a place in young children's writing.

It's like I can't write romance, I make it too dark, too tragic, too everything and it doesn't mean romance is inferior, it means I'm not capable of writing it. It seems the same is true for MG.

Melia said:

What you have may be considered upper MG. Have you read 'Faery Rebels: Spell Hunter' by R.L. Anderson? It's marketed as MG, but some of the references to suicide, etc., put it on the upper limits. I've heard it's being marketed as YA in Britain.

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I haven't read it. Unforunately I live in an extremely small town, our library is based on donations only and has fewer than 1000 books, and we have no book store within 150 miles of my apartment. If my husband takes this other job and we move, I will definitely check it out.

Exir said:

No worries icerose. Like I said I'm always super-sensitive, and writing predominantly MG stuff doesn't help. (And I DID throw in a smiley for good measure, so there... )

I actually have a similar post in the "writing for kids" forum, where I asked a few questions about what is stretching it too far in MG.

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I completely understand. I don't even write genres like romance, I can't, I don't have the skills for it and it's not something I read, and when people start dismissing it as a crap "easy" genre I get my hackles up, so I can't even imagine how I'd react if I thought someone was dissing on a genre I adore.

Guess this one's going in the trunk until I can figure out how to handle it.