Seeking Dedicated Beta for lengthy (but light) work. Bribe offered. :)

[JezzRa]

The Fandom - Inuyasha, primarily - although I have a side order of Rurouni Kenshin & Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicles stories I'd like to polish up.

The Bribe - In return for your work as a beta, I will write you a story for any of the animes I am familiar with, with a pairing of your choosing (that I am comfortable with - if I don't feel it, I can't write it...but I'm good with most any pairing and any sexual orientation). Or there can be no pairing. The scenario and plot bunny are also yours to choose, although how they are fulfilled will be up to my own devising. I prefer to write yaoi, and I have favorite animes/mangas that I generally work from... but I have intimate knowledge of MANY series. In all honesty, I have bookshelves behind me - two of them - full of my anime collection on dvd and manga, not including the ones I've read online. While my ideal return gift would be a sidestory related to my work as most of my one-shots, that's entirely unnecessary. My favorite series that I'd prefer to write from (again, not saying I can't do others), are Inuyasha, Rurouni Kenshin, Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle...maybe Yuyu Hakusho, Fushigi Yugi... others. Just tell me what you want and I'll see what I can do.

Should you decide to work on more than just one thing, however, I can add to my return gift in the form of more story / another story / stories. We'll work it out.

The Story and its warnings - My primary concern is my very large, very long fanfic 'Pride (in the Name of Love)'. VERY... long. At the time of this posting, it is roughly 650 pages, give or take. I am generally a graphic author and do not pull my punches, although I refrain from being outright crude most of the time. The primarily relationships in this story ARE homosexual in nature, although there are a few heterosexual bits as well. Due to its length, over time, it evolved to have a very long and dire list of warnings. There are scenes of torture and rape. There is violence, brutality, and blood. There is angst, incest, and potentially other controversial issues. That's not to say its all doom and gloom, but there's no reason for me to give warnings for the good parts. Of course there is love and lust and passion and happy fun stuff - I love injecting humor into my work as it goes to take the sting out of the darker chapter that may have come before and keep things on a level. But no one warns for the good.

Details - I'm looking to finally clean up and reformat and generally make nice of my works that I have posted. I want to finally feel I have a well-finished project before I continue to write more material. The story I'm primarily focused on has been self-edited three times prior for readability, stupid typos, continuity errors, etc. At this point, if I've missed it chances are I will never catch it on my own.

I have a better grasp on spelling and grammar than many authors I've read, so you're not heading into a nightmare in that regards. My spellchecker, however, is mentally deficient - for example, it doesn't understand what a contraction is and therefore considers every word with an apostrophe to be an error... and it likes changing words that are uncommon and it doesn't recognize into more common words that make no sense. The cost of having a free program... *sigh*.

I've also decided to move on up from my....90's style wordpad textual formatting, for the most part, and embrace things like...italics. Previously, I would use // Blah // to indicate thoughts for a character. I'm working on changing that all out.

What I Need Done - I'm sure that it's probably fairly easy to guess from above. However, I'll detail it.

1 - A solid read-through, on a hunt for words that don't fit, typographical errors that a spellchecker may not catch, grammatically incorrect statements, continuity errors, or parts that don't flow right and make clear sense to a reader. Also, I'd like pointed out any part that is confusing to you, as a reader, and you feel needs further explanation of any sort. There are times I take for granted details of a situation because it's very clear in my head - since I'm the omnipotent god of the story - and I may overlook explaining bits or pieces.

2 - Uniformity. To help improve the story as a cohesive whole, I want to make sure I have the same sort of page breaks, general dividers, and other formatting quirks all uniform and the same. Granted, I'm fairly sure I've already taken care of this one - but should you run accross a page break that doesn't look like the others, for example, please let me know.

3 - The thought formatting. This is a simple one, but one I may overlook. As I stated above, I'm changing thoughts from // Blah blah // to Blah blah. Its possible I missed changing some - I need them pointed out.

In Conclusion - Despite what I do need done, as I said...I've already self-edited this story three times and a fourth glance-over for formatting purposes. There will not be a lot of glaring errors. It will not be rife with typographical nightmares or nonsensical stammering. English is my first language and, while I'm not always entirely grammatically correct, I'm not terrible either. You aren't stepping into a landmine of horror The work I need done is fairly light, and there's not a real time-crunch of a deadline or anything, even if I would like it done at a fairly moderate pace so I can get it reposted and begin finishing my last few chapters.

Should you be interested in beta'ing my stories OTHER than 'Pride' and not, indeed, working on 'Pride' itself, also let me know.

You can contact me by replying to this post, emailing me at megami _ no _ remon (at) hotmail (dot) com, or going to my personal journal and all-encompassing archive at jezzra (dot) dreamwidth (dot) org.