it's a meme!

One of the nice things about being fannishly active again is that I can do fannish memes! This one, called "Frankenstein's meme" because it's patched together from bits of other memes, is stolen from trobadora via my network.

First question, answer, and full list of questions ( under the cut )

at least the hard part is done

Second draft of the fic is finished: it now stands at just shy of 48,000 words. I started writing it almost exactly two months ago, on April 29. (At least, that's when it first got saved on here as an unfinished draft, for backup.)

This is the point where I had planned to get a beta-reader, or several. And now I don't know if I will. I've made so many huge changes already that, honestly, the last thing I want is to be told that it needs more. And I wouldn't ask for a line-by-line beta of a fic this long.

Anybody have thoughts on the question? Bear in mind that this thing has no plot. It's 48,000 words of Things That Happened to Ed and His Feelings About Them. But it does (I hope) have structure and emotional coherence, which is certainly something a beta could read for. And I really like the ending, which works for me, but I'd like to be more sure it'll work for other people.

I'm planning to give it one more pass regardless to tidy up some sentences, fix typos, avoid using the same word eight times in a row, and that kind of thing. (How to tell that the word you've decided your character uses for a body part is not really "transparent"--you start to wonder if you're overusing it. But does it need to be transparent in that way? I dunno, I have no brain left.)


ETA: I've decided to put on my big boy pants and get a beta reader. It would be silly, after so much work, to let the fic go out without making it as good as possible.