Absolutely fabulous, darling!

Argh. I hate Customs & Excise.

£34.12 to pay on an order which cost £70ish, which included a huge amount of shipping, too. Fricking unbelievable. Of course, it doesn't help that the shipping company included the $55 shipping/handling in the "worth of goods" box, which I'm pretty sure affected the calculations. The only blesing is that they did put all the order in one box and I shan't be woken up tomorrow with more monetary demands.

Considering what I was buying, I can only look upon this as a Fat Tax.

Still, at least I now have a bit of variety in terms of maternity clothes. I actually look quite funky today :D Hopefully Dave approves since it was his treat!

Or... het vs. slash.

If you, as a reader, are vehemently against slash fiction, then why read a story clearly marked as slash and leave an unpleasant review complaining that all the characters are homosexual or bisexual? It's unnecessary and a tad rude. NB. This wasn't my fic, I'm just pissed on behalf of the author.

This little gem isn't going to win you any friends either: "this seems interesting.keep postzing more and please stick to het and gen.i couldn't bear to have another slash story on this site."

Can't we all just get along? Keep your eyes open for the warnings on fic; if they coincide with things you already know you don't like, then don't fucking read 'em.

On a completely different subject--anyone know what I can use to replace frozen whipped topping in a recipe?

Talking of betas. I beta-ed for another slash writer the other day. She wanted detailed. So, she got detailed.

Unfortunately for her, the story was crap. Utter shite. So bad, that I wouldn't have wiped my own arse on it. (Disclaimer - this is my personal blog, I'm not naming names so I can be as fucking bitchy as I want. So, if you're reading this, and you think this is you - don't come bitching to me about it.) Anyway. I haven't heard a squeak out of her since. It's now been three days since I sent it back and I know she's got it as I (a) got a receipt and (b) I've seen her around to know that she's picking up her mail. The good conscience on my left shoulder says that maybe I was a bit too harsh and I should have been nicer. The sexy devil on my right, reckons that she asked for detail and I did let her know exactly how much detail she'd be getting (feedback by paragraph, grammar and punctuation correction, stylistic comments, characterisation - the list goes on) and she said she wanted all of that. I even said I liked a few bits which were okay. Relatively speaking, they were bloody excellent as compared to the rest of the drivel.

The lesson from this, for me, is that I'm not going to beta someone I don't already know. I can't deal with sappy characterisations of very manly men. And neither can I deal with incorrectly used ellipses, multiple exclamation and question marks at the end of many sentences. And lets not go into the typos. Does no-one read things through themselves before sending them away to be beta read?

"Hard-one", anyone?

Another thing - when did it stop being mandatory for there to be two spaces between sentences? I'm still going to follow that rule, goddammit!

So, if you're going to write fanfic, then go out and buy (at the very least) "Eats, Shoots and Leaves" by Lynn Trusswell. Very amusing read and you'll learn something at the same time. If you're awfully keen, then a grammar textbook wouldn't go amiss. If you can't bring yourself to spend any money on something worthwhile (or more likely: something that will make your brain work!), then at the very least read the wonderfully snarky Ms. Nitpicker's Guide to Marginally Readable Fan Fiction. The bitch in me will thank you.

Incidentally, what do they teach kids at school these days? They're clearly not teaching grammar. The best way to nick a motor? How to get pregnant by 14 and screw the state (and those of us who've worked and paid extortionate taxes) out of loads of money by moving into a council house and whining until the council then do it up to the nines for you? Hmm,I guess that's another rant.

P.S. I'm sure that there are typos and grammatical errors within this rant. How very ironic that would be. I'll ignore any bitching about those too. I have made a reasonable effort to proof! (Which is more than I can say for the youth of today.)