Writing tip of the day: beta readers I was reading a manuscript a friend had given me, and one sentence said something like, "A piercing shriek tears through the clearing in which I sit like a cannon". Pretty good line; dramatic, descriptive, intriguing; only one problem: how the heck do you sit like a cannon?! I pointed this out to her, she laughed and promptly fixed it. I bet she had read over it several times and not noticed anything was off. I had a book that I was working on that started out 1st person, then I changed it to 3rd person, and then changed it back to 1st. I had used find and replace on Microsoft Word, but had not checked the "whole words only" box. This put me in a world of hurt with Spell Check, and eventually, after reading and rereading and re-rereading, I thought I had fixed most of the mistakes, but occasionally, I still find sentences that say stuff like "I opened the door to my room and closed it quietly behind her". Also, only send your manuscript to people you trust and who will actually critique it. "It was great" is nice to hear, but it really is no help at all. Most of the time, I don't like getting a lot of compliments on my work, because it's hard for me to know that it's not like your mom saying "it's beautiful, Honey, I'll keep it forever" just because she loves you too much to say "the head Is flat" or "red and lime green don't go together". The best feedback is the stuff that says "I loved how you did this, such and such made me laugh, but this part didn't make sense, you spelled that wrong and the joke in paragraph 3 was a little pathetic". And don't send it to people that will plagiarize it!! Don't post anything substantial on the Internet, and don't email it off to a complete stranger.