Hello ^^
I was curious about how people find beta readers - I am not looking for any, but I wondered how it worked after seeing someone talk about it. I was reading some article about it on one of those websites that wants you to subscribe to their newsletter and it linked directly to the beta readers forum on this website, where at the top there is a sticky telling you not to just make an account and ask for beta readers. Very funny!
When I was a kid my mum would take me to bookstores all the time. There was a chain called Bargain Books - they just called it that, the books weren't cheaper than anywhere else - and one day when I was around ten there was a big display shelf for Dante's Inferno. My mother was very liberal about things but my school was very conservative and very Christian and to me a book about going through hell was the coolest thing I'd ever heard and my mother bought it for me and I loved it. The satire of 13th century Italian politics went over my head, nach; I was transfixed by the fabulous punishments and the austere enviornments. After that all I cared about was old verse: the Aenid, the Edda, Chaucer, whatever. This stuff was basically my Warrior Cats. I would always try and impress my peers with stories from the Eddas which, believe it or not, I did manage, and lost my well-thumbed copy of the younger Edda through injudicious lending.
To put it politely, the stuff I wrote myself was unusual. By the time I was sixteen I had become socialized into literary modernism and valued only experimental prose: Hilda Doolittle, James Joyce, William Burroughs, etc. Everything else was excrement to me. My only outlet for this was a little writer's subforum on the Runescape website(!) which mostly revovled around fantasy (which I adored but read very little of), where my writing (and terrible attitude) wasn't well received. I eventually assented and decided to go 'back to basics' and went through all the writer's workshop stuff and in the end learned to write like a well-disciplined Hemmingway and I instantly stopped enjoying writing and gave it up.
Anyway, I kind of picked it up again in the last few years because my girlfriend writes, and her writing made me want to write, so I mostly started writing smut that I will only ever show her. But it's been encouraging and I've gotten into it more and more. Now I mostly write pulp fantasy and vampire romance ('if you aren't a modernist when you're young...' etc.), and my favourite writers are Poe, Clark Ashton Smith, Anais Nin, Andrei Platonov, Dambudzo Marechera, and Charity Heartscape. Lately I've been really into early modern 'adventure' stories like Lazarillo, Orlando Furioso, Vathek, etc.
Anyway, sorry I wrote so much! Thanks a lot for reading,
Jackie
I was curious about how people find beta readers - I am not looking for any, but I wondered how it worked after seeing someone talk about it. I was reading some article about it on one of those websites that wants you to subscribe to their newsletter and it linked directly to the beta readers forum on this website, where at the top there is a sticky telling you not to just make an account and ask for beta readers. Very funny!
When I was a kid my mum would take me to bookstores all the time. There was a chain called Bargain Books - they just called it that, the books weren't cheaper than anywhere else - and one day when I was around ten there was a big display shelf for Dante's Inferno. My mother was very liberal about things but my school was very conservative and very Christian and to me a book about going through hell was the coolest thing I'd ever heard and my mother bought it for me and I loved it. The satire of 13th century Italian politics went over my head, nach; I was transfixed by the fabulous punishments and the austere enviornments. After that all I cared about was old verse: the Aenid, the Edda, Chaucer, whatever. This stuff was basically my Warrior Cats. I would always try and impress my peers with stories from the Eddas which, believe it or not, I did manage, and lost my well-thumbed copy of the younger Edda through injudicious lending.
To put it politely, the stuff I wrote myself was unusual. By the time I was sixteen I had become socialized into literary modernism and valued only experimental prose: Hilda Doolittle, James Joyce, William Burroughs, etc. Everything else was excrement to me. My only outlet for this was a little writer's subforum on the Runescape website(!) which mostly revovled around fantasy (which I adored but read very little of), where my writing (and terrible attitude) wasn't well received. I eventually assented and decided to go 'back to basics' and went through all the writer's workshop stuff and in the end learned to write like a well-disciplined Hemmingway and I instantly stopped enjoying writing and gave it up.
Anyway, I kind of picked it up again in the last few years because my girlfriend writes, and her writing made me want to write, so I mostly started writing smut that I will only ever show her. But it's been encouraging and I've gotten into it more and more. Now I mostly write pulp fantasy and vampire romance ('if you aren't a modernist when you're young...' etc.), and my favourite writers are Poe, Clark Ashton Smith, Anais Nin, Andrei Platonov, Dambudzo Marechera, and Charity Heartscape. Lately I've been really into early modern 'adventure' stories like Lazarillo, Orlando Furioso, Vathek, etc.
Anyway, sorry I wrote so much! Thanks a lot for reading,
Jackie
Welcome to the forums 
