Whispers

Rather than paste my whole comment there on how I lost my thin skin, have a link: http://www.thepassivevoice.com/10/2013/aaaaand-action/#comment-133798.

I'm with you. I don't know how well a stranger fits my audience because there are the huge issues of tone, genre, story-type, tropes, ambiguity, poetry and structure that all figure in. I write flash fiction, short stories, novels, and poems. I write fluff, angst, drama, and plot-driven. I write literary and straight-up genre. I write everything from Christian fiction to stuff that genre would not dream of touching. Every single one has different requirements. I need to know EXACTLY where in that spectrum my reader is to figure out

1. Is the reader actually in my target audience?
2. How do I read their comments?

So yeah. I need to know this person and their reading habits WELL or at least tolerably. I can figure it out for myself if they read a lot of my stuff, so I tend to stick to those.

I don't hold back with you very much, though I will think through my phrasing before I say something. I just have a hard time doing a lot of beta work because it's draining for me and I couldn't keep up with you really. So... I feel bad sometimes because I don't mind that you don't take criticism well. I get it. I get that there's an image in your mind of what you want your fiction to be and I don't know how to help you reach it, so that means that all my good intentions aside, I'm not really your ideal beta. I'm kind of shocked whenever I get an ideal beta, which is why I do adore in_the_blue but admit that she's rare in how WELL she fits.