[nvm, I've probably got enough now :)]

ETA: Have had a few more lovely people offer now, so I probably don't need any more betas. Unless they later become disgusted with my book and run away. Time will tell.






Hello. I have a thing that needs some reading…a couple of fantastically awesome people have offered, or at least offered to consider thinking about maybe reading it, but I'd like a couple more...

Who I’m Looking For: I wanna know you. I'd like it if we’ve seen each other around here, so there are no, um, surprises. At least, minimal surprises… Not that we need to have interacted a whole lot, but as long as I’ve seen you bopping around, and you’ve seen me being an idiot somewhere...

What It Is: 91,500-word kinda-strange low fantasy. There's swearing and violence and a bit of sexual in-your-endo and all that, with at least one sorta-graphic scene and possibly more, depending on how you define “graphic.” Some violence involving babies occurs. It’s very loosely based on the some of the Egyptian myths surrounding Osiris and Isis, but I’ve mangled it and fucked it all up, so it is probably deeply offensive to mythology buffs. Here is the tentative query I have for it…(dear QLH people, I am trying to revise per your demands, but haven't come up with anything better than this yet, so..."tentative" )

Isis’s brother Seth has just buried her husband in molten lead, stolen her child, and usurped the throne of Egypt. And because she’s a “goddess of life,” she’s physically incapable of pulling out his urethra and strangling him with it.

Under Seth’s command, Egypt is overrun by lynch mobs and government-mandated blood orgies. Her brother is set on raising her son in his own perverted image. There’s not a damn thing she can do about it except bring back the one god who can take down Seth: Osiris, her dead husband.

Isis tears through hell to find him, but the demons find her first. They throw her in a hole and get off on mutilating her. Bones cracked, marrow sucked, skin shredded, Isis finally snaps. As a goddess, she can’t crush a beetle. As a crazed rage-monster, she can gore a demon like a narwhal in heat. But the rage can’t last, not as long as Isis clings to her sanity.

As her mind slips away, she hears a voice in the dark. It knows things. Like how to get her husband back and save her son. All she has to do is give in to her new demonic side and maim the shit out of anyone dumb enough to get in her way. But once the anger has control of Isis, it doesn’t let go. It can bring back Osiris. It can make Seth bleed. But it can also get her son killed.

Click to expand...

What I Need: This is the first time anyone besides myself reads it all the way through, so I kind of need…um…whatever you can give me. My primary concerns are whether the story sucks, the characters are lame, the plot has a bunch of holes in it, the pacing is off, etc., and I do not expect a line-by-line. But you are welcome to screw around with my sentences as much as you like and critique however you prefer to do so.

If something comes up in Life, or you get too disgusted with the story, you can duck out. That’s totally fine with me—no worries at all. People have shit to do and this is a major time suck. I do prefer to be notified, though.

Process: PM me with an email address; I'll send you the first chapter so you can sort of see what you're getting into...sort of... If you want to continue, let me know and I'll send the rest. If not, no worries; I don't want you to read something you don't want to read.

Swap? Generally, yes...but with some conditions and caveats...

1) I'm already beta-ing/evaluating a few manuscripts, and while I can be quick if there's not a whole lot else pulling at me (highly variable factor), it might take some time to get through everything. Like, more than a month, possibly...

2) In Life, I mainly read low fantasy or just weird fantasy or dark fantasy, followed by thrillers or suspense with elements of the weird (political/legal not so much, giant squids yes) and a little SF and historical. (Basically anything with the right slant of weird and plotty is probably going to interest me.) Occasionally I do read other things for the sake of reading other things, but that's what I'm most familiar with and what I generally like. I'm willing to read other stuff, but I'd be particularly useless at erotica, romance, anything that is aimed at a religious audience, and possibly literary, depending on the book. (Hard for me to say, on literary, but I often feel like I'm missing the point when I read it... ) I do generally like the YA I've read so far, but I haven't read much of it yet, so I'm not familiar with anything category-specific as far as that goes. I haven't read actual children's books since I was a child, so I might be useless on that front as well...hm.

3) Time it takes me to beta depends on a helluva lot of things, most prominent being #1, but also including what kind of shape the book is currently in, whether it's the sort of thing I enjoy, what's happening in life, etc. I'll be leaving the country in about a month for sorta-schooling-type purposes, which doesn't mean I can't read, but I might be reeaaally slow getting things done for the remainder of the summer.


...was that long enough...?