I’m doing the revisions and corrections gathered up for me by my superb Fast Turnaround beta readers. And just hit my favorite of my screw-ups so far.
I’m eventually going to have to do something with it, I think. It’s the phrase “that you have no drunk of death”, which would seem to be a thing to be much celebrated. The correct line, of course, is “that you have not drunk of death.”
But the image of the Drunk of Death is calling to me. Going to have to figure out who and what that is, and where the creature could be inserted into something else I’m working on.
Meantime, this will go into the acknowledgements in the book, but I’d like to do a public thank you now:
My unending gratitude to:
The fast turnaround crew — Sheila Kelly, Kay House, James Milton, Jim & Valerie Mills, Linda Sprinkle, and Lazette & Russ Gifford, who between them found 497 mistakes that I missed, and got these errors back to me in typed, line-separated, database-sortable form in three days from the day they received a manuscript they�d never seen — and in some cases got them back in hours, rather than days. Your comments were brilliant, your eyes were keen, and I am deeply grateful. You were wonderful.
For me it conjours something like the closing frames of Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (top picture, here), with the addition of brandished bottles and bibulous song – probably something from Carmina Burana.
Oh good, you did get it! With everything going down, I was worried. Glad it helped!
How does one become a beta reader?