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- Posted: Fri, 13 Apr 2007 23:50:55 +0000
I'm going to start this off with a disclaimer. This is not a rant. Most rants are 'Your Mileage May Vary', but this one is even more subjective than that. This is my personal philosophy on the beta process. It's not really intended to be a "how you should beta people's stuff" thing, unless you're betaing for me, in which case you might be interested. I wouldn't post it here, actually (I wrote this for a friend of mine because she asked my opinion), except that I think people might get something out of it, and if there's anyone else out there who thinks a little like me, they can point their betas here for discussion. It's also for my convienence, so I can send my betas/ potential beta-ees here to understand where I'm coming from.
While we're at it, this is not how most young writers should be betaed. This is more for the people who know the mechanics of writing, who know what their style is and are confident enough with the core concepts of fictional development to talk on a fairly meta level about their stories. Okay, that was longwinded for a disclaimer. I suck at brevity (Exhibit A: the rest of this post). That said, moving on!
Let's start with the different definitions of "beta". For some people, when they ask for beta, they're looking for someone to just glance it over quickly for any major glaring errors and then say "post it!", while some people look for detailed spelling/grammar editing but nothing else, and some others are looking for plot help, characterization help, help with flow, etc, etc. Knowing what you want from your beta and communicating it clearly is the first thing any author needs to do, and knowing what you can offer as a beta and communicating it clearly is the first thing any potential beta needs to do.
Me, personally I'm a "whole story" beta. I like to think of myself as a "story doctor" rather than a beta sometimes, because I'm not the person to go to if you want spelling/grammar help or nitty-gritty down-to-the-single-sentence phrasing and style help. I can do both of them, but I hate doing them. What I do best is go through a story and tell where it's working for me as a reader, where it's not, and what I think the author needs to change in order to get to the point he/she wants to be. And that's what I'm looking for when I send a story out for beta, too, because the #1 problem that I, and I think most of the more experienced authors have is that they're too close to the story to see what works and what doesn't.
There are a few things to keep in mind with that. Let's pretend you've typed the last words of your story, you've spellchecked it, you've run it through the grammar checker and laughed at the bad, bad advice it gives you, and you've found someone who's willing to look it over for you. You're not looking for line-by-line commentary; you're looking for overall commentary on the structure, flow, and content of the story. How can you make this experience be the best possible for both of you?
(Standard disclaimer again: this is my experience and my opinion, and what works for me isn't going to work for everyone [the world would be a boring place if it did]. Your mileage may, and probably will, vary.)
Negotiating with a new beta is like negotiating a first S&M scene. No, really. The first step, and the most important one, is for the author to lay out exactly what he's hoping to get from the process, and for the beta to lay out exactly what he'll provide. No harm in saying "hey, I don't think we're going to be a good fit, so thanks but no thanks" from either side! It's a disaster when you send a file to someone expecting a quick glance for major errors only, and get back a detailed, line-by-line edit.
The way I see it, the role of a beta is to point out what's actually in the text of the story, as opposed to what's in my head while I'm writing the story. I always know what I intended to write, but what I don't know is how closely I hit it. I can do my own spelling/grammar checks, but what I can't do is evaluate how the story reads to someone who doesn't have all that backstory floating around. I know what I intended to write, but I don't know how much of it actually made it onto the page!
The role of a beta, IMO, is not at all to make edits or corrections. We use the word 'beta' as shorthand for 'beta editor', but the fact that we shorthand that to 'beta' rather than to 'editor' indicates that we're not as interested in the editing part. It's not my job, when I'm doing a beta, to tell you how to tell your story: it's my job to tell you about the story I'm reading, and you then decide whether that's in line with the story you want to tell or not. I actually beta most often for people whose writing style is drastically different from mine, and I often find that I learn more about the construction of a story from doing that than by doing beta for someone who writes prose that I could almost believe had been written by me and then erased from my mind with a flashy thing.
When I go to do a serious beta read for someone, I usually ask for three key things up front: 1). What do you want the reader to get out of this story? What emotional impressions and "feel" are you going for, and what impression do you want the reader to leave with? 2). What do you think you did well in this story, and what are you unsatisfied with? 3). What level of commentary do you want from me, and what do you want me to concentrate on?
#1 tells me what the authorial intent is. We talk a lot in these postmodern times, in analyzing writing, about how authorial intent is dead, and how what a reader takes out of a story is at least as important as what a writer intended, and how an author's work must stand alone and she should neither explain it nor justify it to her audience -- that if a story requires an explanation, it's failed to communicate it in some way, shape, or form. And I do believe this, truly. It's just that this attitude is not at all useful to the beta process. A story shouldn't be a mystery to your beta; your beta should, in most cases, go into the process already knowing what you're trying to convey or communicate, in a really broad-picture sort of way, so he can help you identify the parts where you're not quite getting there.
(An exception to this is when you're specifically looking to answer the question of "does this story make any sense at all outside my head?" In those cases, you might want to hand the story to your beta first, and say, "tell me what you think is going on here", or "tell me what you think is going on in the main character's head", or whatever, and see what kind of response you get. When I was writing my story Every Way The World Ends, after I had finished the story and before I was ready to edit it, I threw it at a half-dozen people and said: okay, look, I don't want a beta on this, I just want a reaction -- tell me what impressions of Rob (my MC) you get out of this, and where you think his head is at? And the responses let me tweak how I was presenting it, what kind of language I was using and what sort of things made it into the final version of the story, by letting me see the kind of responses people had.)
Every story is like a mystery in some ways: the reader has to tease and puzzle the themes and statements out of it. The role of a beta is to tell you, before you show the story to other people, where you're not making those themes and statements clear enough. A lot of times, a writer sends a fic to beta like it's a game -- "let's see if you're right about what I intended!" And that can be very useful, as I mentioned in that last paragraph, but it can also be really ******** frustrating for the beta to spend hours and hours and hours picking out things that don't lead to what he thinks the author's intent is, where it turns out that the author really intended nothing of the sort.
Make it easier for your beta; tell them, up front, what you're trying to do with the story, so they can bring all their experience to the table and focus it all on the end-goal you want. (Or, if what you're looking for is that kind of unspoiled reaction, tell them that. In this case, it's sometimes helpful to do two rounds -- one for your beta to tell you their initial impressions, and then you explain what you were aiming for and let them go to town.)
#2 -- "What do you think you did well in this story, and what are you unsatisfied with?" -- tells me several critical things. First, by finding out what a writer thinks he did well in the story, I can usually also figure out more about some of his unconscious motivations. If someone says he was trying to write a story about Character A and Character B, for instance, but mentions that he really likes the way Character C came out, I might take a harder look at the role Character C's playing in the story and how she's functioning, to see if there's some subconscious theme there that should get a little more attention.
Knowing what a writer is unsatisfied with, about the story, also tells me where to concentrate my attention. If someone tells me that they're unsatisfied with the pacing of the story, for instance, I can really concentrate, as I'm reading, on the pacing, and see what leaps out at me and what doesn't. Sometimes all I need to do is reassure the author that no, the pacing is perfectly fine, really! Sometimes I do see the same problems he's seeing, and can really settle in to deconstruct the text and try to figure out why he's unhappy with it. And sometimes I can see that what the author's unhappy with is actually a symptom of a different problem entirely. (More about that later.)
And, of course, #3 -- "What level of commentary do you want from me, and what do you want me to concentrate on?" -- will shape the nature, level, and detail of my commentary. If someone only wants a quick readthrough for me to tell them whether or not the story makes sense to me, they're not going to want to get back five pages of analysis about the structure and the themes and how I'm reading A's motivations as reflected in B's actions, etc.
Now, the actual advice I deal out in beta is (obviously) very dependent on the draft itself, but you know, I'll be honest here: in all the beta work I've ever done, there's really only ten Big Problems that I keep describing to people, over and over again. This is mostly because the people I beta for regularly have a very, very good grasp of the basics of writing, because these problems are, on the whole, "advanced" errors -- it's the kind of stuff you don't start bringing up, in beta, until you're dealing with a text that's already reasonably polished, and you want to bring it up to the level of exceptional.
If you're doing beta work for someone who's not there yet, and needs more help, you might be analyzing different problems, but seriously? These are the things that I think every really good writer will struggle with until the day he dies, in every story (to a different degree), because they are not problems of craft so much as problems that arise from being too close to the text and thus not having as much perspective.
These're all things I struggle with and get wrong myself, and they're all things that I think we all struggle with, and the more I see these problems reflected in other people's stories, the more I can identify them (and fix them!) in my own.
So, what are those Big Ten?
1. You have a hidden theme that's not fully developed, and you should either cut it out entirely or expand on it.
2. This short story is really an Embryonic Novel, and you're trying to cram too much into this story. (#1 and #2 are very connected, but not always the same thing.)
3. All of your pieces are here in the story, they just aren't connected enough for the reader to draw the conclusions you want.
4. Your story's missing one or more major pieces that will lead a reasonable reader to the conclusions you or your characters make, also sometimes manifesting as: There's something off with your character motivations or actions, and they're not quite making sense to me (because they're not justified enough).
5. Your pacing is either too abrupt, or too slow, and it doesn't mesh with the mood or tone of the story.
6. Thematically, the story doesn't feel whole; either the tone and structure of it or the recurring image-clusters you use abruptly change partway through, and the ending doesn't feel like it belongs to the same story as the beginning.
7. Your balance of showing vs. telling is off somehow.
8. The language you're using in the narration doesn't always feel like the character voice, or the dialog doesn't sound appropriate for the character's voice.
9. Your conflicts are resolved too easily, and there's not enough tension in the plot.
10. There's discrepancies in how you treat the separation of the authorial narrative and the character voice in the story. (This is sometimes, but not always, related to a point of view problem.) Either you start out with a very clear distinction between What The Character Is Saying (thoughts and dialog) and What The Author Is Saying (narration), and switch partway through to having the narration be in the character's voice too, or vice versa.
As I said, nearly all of those problems result from being too close to the text. You-the-author know what the conclusions are, or what you intended, or what your character motivations are; the question is whether or not it comes across in the text to someone who doesn't have the benefit of being in your head with all the things you've thought about. Or you're too close to the prose, so it's harder to detach from it and think: hey, this seems a little bit clunky, and I should probably rephrase it. Or you're not consciously aware of the themes or image clusters or tones you're using, and so you can't necessarily spot when you've switched away from them, you just know something's wrong. Usually when I can't figure out why a story isn't working, I come back to this list and ask myself, which of these really is pinging as something that I can work on in this piece?
Sometimes a story gets stuck and I can't tell which of the problems it's stuck on, so I put it away for a while and come back to it later. Usually, time will lend me enough distance that I can pick through the text so far as though it's someone else's, and identify the serious sticking point. (Sometimes not, though, and that's when I have to throw the draft at someone else and say "okay, why am I stuck on this?" wink But in doing beta for other people's work, I've become way more aware of sticking points in my own, and if and when I get stuck, I can apply a lot of the same techniques to my own writing. I'll never be able to catch all of the problems, because again, I'm too close, but since I'm sensitized to the common problems, I can go back through my text and read for the specific markers I've learned to read for in other people's stories.
Anyway, back to the beta process on other people's stories. I have said, in the past, that the role of a beta reader is like the role of a spa clinician: to buff and to polish and to oil and to massage the text until it glows. It's not to try to tell the story the way you would tell the story: it's to attempt to figure out the best way to help the author get the message across in her own style and her own voice.
A lot of what I do, during a hard-core beta, is ask questions. Endless questions, in fact. Sometimes they're rhetorical devices to prod the author into revealing/thinking about something that I can see the glimmers of in the text, but sometimes I genuinely can't tell the answer, based on what I'm seeing. I don't expect to get back explicit answers to those questions, but they're my way of saying: hey, you know, I think your reader (me) is going to be sitting here and wondering these things; do you want to get into this here?
And that, really, is the core of "good beta". I look, specifically, not to correct someone else's work, but to enhance it -- make them aware of things that I'm reading into a text, aware of things that I'm sticking on in a text, and aware of things that throw me out of the text. Other people have drastically different beta styles, and drastically different beta expectations. It's important -- critically important -- to be up-front about what style of beta you are and what style of beta you're looking for. If you haven't thought about it before, do yourself and your future betas a favor and sit down now to figure it out.
Some people don't get anything at all out of my style of beta, and that's okay! It doesn't mean they're any more or less a writer for it, just that they're looking for different things. And I do try to adapt my style of beta, to an extent, if I'm working with someone who's only partially looking for the sort of things I gravitate to offering, but on the whole, it's better for those people to find people who are better suited to the kind of things they're looking for.
So really, it all boils down to: know yourself, know what you're looking for, and know what you can offer. The more you know, and the more you get on the table up front, the less chance there is of a massive disaster of epic proportions, and the more you're likely to come out of it, in the end, with a story that's the absolute best you can possibly make it.
I'm going to eat dinner now, but I'll be back in a bit to chat about this, probably. In the meantime, talk amongst yourselves!
While we're at it, this is not how most young writers should be betaed. This is more for the people who know the mechanics of writing, who know what their style is and are confident enough with the core concepts of fictional development to talk on a fairly meta level about their stories. Okay, that was longwinded for a disclaimer. I suck at brevity (Exhibit A: the rest of this post). That said, moving on!
Let's start with the different definitions of "beta". For some people, when they ask for beta, they're looking for someone to just glance it over quickly for any major glaring errors and then say "post it!", while some people look for detailed spelling/grammar editing but nothing else, and some others are looking for plot help, characterization help, help with flow, etc, etc. Knowing what you want from your beta and communicating it clearly is the first thing any author needs to do, and knowing what you can offer as a beta and communicating it clearly is the first thing any potential beta needs to do.
Me, personally I'm a "whole story" beta. I like to think of myself as a "story doctor" rather than a beta sometimes, because I'm not the person to go to if you want spelling/grammar help or nitty-gritty down-to-the-single-sentence phrasing and style help. I can do both of them, but I hate doing them. What I do best is go through a story and tell where it's working for me as a reader, where it's not, and what I think the author needs to change in order to get to the point he/she wants to be. And that's what I'm looking for when I send a story out for beta, too, because the #1 problem that I, and I think most of the more experienced authors have is that they're too close to the story to see what works and what doesn't.
There are a few things to keep in mind with that. Let's pretend you've typed the last words of your story, you've spellchecked it, you've run it through the grammar checker and laughed at the bad, bad advice it gives you, and you've found someone who's willing to look it over for you. You're not looking for line-by-line commentary; you're looking for overall commentary on the structure, flow, and content of the story. How can you make this experience be the best possible for both of you?
(Standard disclaimer again: this is my experience and my opinion, and what works for me isn't going to work for everyone [the world would be a boring place if it did]. Your mileage may, and probably will, vary.)
Negotiating with a new beta is like negotiating a first S&M scene. No, really. The first step, and the most important one, is for the author to lay out exactly what he's hoping to get from the process, and for the beta to lay out exactly what he'll provide. No harm in saying "hey, I don't think we're going to be a good fit, so thanks but no thanks" from either side! It's a disaster when you send a file to someone expecting a quick glance for major errors only, and get back a detailed, line-by-line edit.
The way I see it, the role of a beta is to point out what's actually in the text of the story, as opposed to what's in my head while I'm writing the story. I always know what I intended to write, but what I don't know is how closely I hit it. I can do my own spelling/grammar checks, but what I can't do is evaluate how the story reads to someone who doesn't have all that backstory floating around. I know what I intended to write, but I don't know how much of it actually made it onto the page!
The role of a beta, IMO, is not at all to make edits or corrections. We use the word 'beta' as shorthand for 'beta editor', but the fact that we shorthand that to 'beta' rather than to 'editor' indicates that we're not as interested in the editing part. It's not my job, when I'm doing a beta, to tell you how to tell your story: it's my job to tell you about the story I'm reading, and you then decide whether that's in line with the story you want to tell or not. I actually beta most often for people whose writing style is drastically different from mine, and I often find that I learn more about the construction of a story from doing that than by doing beta for someone who writes prose that I could almost believe had been written by me and then erased from my mind with a flashy thing.
When I go to do a serious beta read for someone, I usually ask for three key things up front: 1). What do you want the reader to get out of this story? What emotional impressions and "feel" are you going for, and what impression do you want the reader to leave with? 2). What do you think you did well in this story, and what are you unsatisfied with? 3). What level of commentary do you want from me, and what do you want me to concentrate on?
#1 tells me what the authorial intent is. We talk a lot in these postmodern times, in analyzing writing, about how authorial intent is dead, and how what a reader takes out of a story is at least as important as what a writer intended, and how an author's work must stand alone and she should neither explain it nor justify it to her audience -- that if a story requires an explanation, it's failed to communicate it in some way, shape, or form. And I do believe this, truly. It's just that this attitude is not at all useful to the beta process. A story shouldn't be a mystery to your beta; your beta should, in most cases, go into the process already knowing what you're trying to convey or communicate, in a really broad-picture sort of way, so he can help you identify the parts where you're not quite getting there.
(An exception to this is when you're specifically looking to answer the question of "does this story make any sense at all outside my head?" In those cases, you might want to hand the story to your beta first, and say, "tell me what you think is going on here", or "tell me what you think is going on in the main character's head", or whatever, and see what kind of response you get. When I was writing my story Every Way The World Ends, after I had finished the story and before I was ready to edit it, I threw it at a half-dozen people and said: okay, look, I don't want a beta on this, I just want a reaction -- tell me what impressions of Rob (my MC) you get out of this, and where you think his head is at? And the responses let me tweak how I was presenting it, what kind of language I was using and what sort of things made it into the final version of the story, by letting me see the kind of responses people had.)
Every story is like a mystery in some ways: the reader has to tease and puzzle the themes and statements out of it. The role of a beta is to tell you, before you show the story to other people, where you're not making those themes and statements clear enough. A lot of times, a writer sends a fic to beta like it's a game -- "let's see if you're right about what I intended!" And that can be very useful, as I mentioned in that last paragraph, but it can also be really ******** frustrating for the beta to spend hours and hours and hours picking out things that don't lead to what he thinks the author's intent is, where it turns out that the author really intended nothing of the sort.
Make it easier for your beta; tell them, up front, what you're trying to do with the story, so they can bring all their experience to the table and focus it all on the end-goal you want. (Or, if what you're looking for is that kind of unspoiled reaction, tell them that. In this case, it's sometimes helpful to do two rounds -- one for your beta to tell you their initial impressions, and then you explain what you were aiming for and let them go to town.)
#2 -- "What do you think you did well in this story, and what are you unsatisfied with?" -- tells me several critical things. First, by finding out what a writer thinks he did well in the story, I can usually also figure out more about some of his unconscious motivations. If someone says he was trying to write a story about Character A and Character B, for instance, but mentions that he really likes the way Character C came out, I might take a harder look at the role Character C's playing in the story and how she's functioning, to see if there's some subconscious theme there that should get a little more attention.
Knowing what a writer is unsatisfied with, about the story, also tells me where to concentrate my attention. If someone tells me that they're unsatisfied with the pacing of the story, for instance, I can really concentrate, as I'm reading, on the pacing, and see what leaps out at me and what doesn't. Sometimes all I need to do is reassure the author that no, the pacing is perfectly fine, really! Sometimes I do see the same problems he's seeing, and can really settle in to deconstruct the text and try to figure out why he's unhappy with it. And sometimes I can see that what the author's unhappy with is actually a symptom of a different problem entirely. (More about that later.)
And, of course, #3 -- "What level of commentary do you want from me, and what do you want me to concentrate on?" -- will shape the nature, level, and detail of my commentary. If someone only wants a quick readthrough for me to tell them whether or not the story makes sense to me, they're not going to want to get back five pages of analysis about the structure and the themes and how I'm reading A's motivations as reflected in B's actions, etc.
Now, the actual advice I deal out in beta is (obviously) very dependent on the draft itself, but you know, I'll be honest here: in all the beta work I've ever done, there's really only ten Big Problems that I keep describing to people, over and over again. This is mostly because the people I beta for regularly have a very, very good grasp of the basics of writing, because these problems are, on the whole, "advanced" errors -- it's the kind of stuff you don't start bringing up, in beta, until you're dealing with a text that's already reasonably polished, and you want to bring it up to the level of exceptional.
If you're doing beta work for someone who's not there yet, and needs more help, you might be analyzing different problems, but seriously? These are the things that I think every really good writer will struggle with until the day he dies, in every story (to a different degree), because they are not problems of craft so much as problems that arise from being too close to the text and thus not having as much perspective.
These're all things I struggle with and get wrong myself, and they're all things that I think we all struggle with, and the more I see these problems reflected in other people's stories, the more I can identify them (and fix them!) in my own.
So, what are those Big Ten?
1. You have a hidden theme that's not fully developed, and you should either cut it out entirely or expand on it.
2. This short story is really an Embryonic Novel, and you're trying to cram too much into this story. (#1 and #2 are very connected, but not always the same thing.)
3. All of your pieces are here in the story, they just aren't connected enough for the reader to draw the conclusions you want.
4. Your story's missing one or more major pieces that will lead a reasonable reader to the conclusions you or your characters make, also sometimes manifesting as: There's something off with your character motivations or actions, and they're not quite making sense to me (because they're not justified enough).
5. Your pacing is either too abrupt, or too slow, and it doesn't mesh with the mood or tone of the story.
6. Thematically, the story doesn't feel whole; either the tone and structure of it or the recurring image-clusters you use abruptly change partway through, and the ending doesn't feel like it belongs to the same story as the beginning.
7. Your balance of showing vs. telling is off somehow.
8. The language you're using in the narration doesn't always feel like the character voice, or the dialog doesn't sound appropriate for the character's voice.
9. Your conflicts are resolved too easily, and there's not enough tension in the plot.
10. There's discrepancies in how you treat the separation of the authorial narrative and the character voice in the story. (This is sometimes, but not always, related to a point of view problem.) Either you start out with a very clear distinction between What The Character Is Saying (thoughts and dialog) and What The Author Is Saying (narration), and switch partway through to having the narration be in the character's voice too, or vice versa.
As I said, nearly all of those problems result from being too close to the text. You-the-author know what the conclusions are, or what you intended, or what your character motivations are; the question is whether or not it comes across in the text to someone who doesn't have the benefit of being in your head with all the things you've thought about. Or you're too close to the prose, so it's harder to detach from it and think: hey, this seems a little bit clunky, and I should probably rephrase it. Or you're not consciously aware of the themes or image clusters or tones you're using, and so you can't necessarily spot when you've switched away from them, you just know something's wrong. Usually when I can't figure out why a story isn't working, I come back to this list and ask myself, which of these really is pinging as something that I can work on in this piece?
Sometimes a story gets stuck and I can't tell which of the problems it's stuck on, so I put it away for a while and come back to it later. Usually, time will lend me enough distance that I can pick through the text so far as though it's someone else's, and identify the serious sticking point. (Sometimes not, though, and that's when I have to throw the draft at someone else and say "okay, why am I stuck on this?" wink But in doing beta for other people's work, I've become way more aware of sticking points in my own, and if and when I get stuck, I can apply a lot of the same techniques to my own writing. I'll never be able to catch all of the problems, because again, I'm too close, but since I'm sensitized to the common problems, I can go back through my text and read for the specific markers I've learned to read for in other people's stories.
Anyway, back to the beta process on other people's stories. I have said, in the past, that the role of a beta reader is like the role of a spa clinician: to buff and to polish and to oil and to massage the text until it glows. It's not to try to tell the story the way you would tell the story: it's to attempt to figure out the best way to help the author get the message across in her own style and her own voice.
A lot of what I do, during a hard-core beta, is ask questions. Endless questions, in fact. Sometimes they're rhetorical devices to prod the author into revealing/thinking about something that I can see the glimmers of in the text, but sometimes I genuinely can't tell the answer, based on what I'm seeing. I don't expect to get back explicit answers to those questions, but they're my way of saying: hey, you know, I think your reader (me) is going to be sitting here and wondering these things; do you want to get into this here?
And that, really, is the core of "good beta". I look, specifically, not to correct someone else's work, but to enhance it -- make them aware of things that I'm reading into a text, aware of things that I'm sticking on in a text, and aware of things that throw me out of the text. Other people have drastically different beta styles, and drastically different beta expectations. It's important -- critically important -- to be up-front about what style of beta you are and what style of beta you're looking for. If you haven't thought about it before, do yourself and your future betas a favor and sit down now to figure it out.
Some people don't get anything at all out of my style of beta, and that's okay! It doesn't mean they're any more or less a writer for it, just that they're looking for different things. And I do try to adapt my style of beta, to an extent, if I'm working with someone who's only partially looking for the sort of things I gravitate to offering, but on the whole, it's better for those people to find people who are better suited to the kind of things they're looking for.
So really, it all boils down to: know yourself, know what you're looking for, and know what you can offer. The more you know, and the more you get on the table up front, the less chance there is of a massive disaster of epic proportions, and the more you're likely to come out of it, in the end, with a story that's the absolute best you can possibly make it.
I'm going to eat dinner now, but I'll be back in a bit to chat about this, probably. In the meantime, talk amongst yourselves!
