We authors do everything in our power to make our
manuscripts the very best that they can be.
We try to eliminate typos and grammatical errors. We strive
to ensure that John doesn’t mysteriously become Desmond, only to turn back in
to John. We push ourselves to ensure that the timeline of our back-story doesn’t
clash (or *gasp* contradict) with the timeline of the rest of our story.
So we employ, beg, or plead for beta-readers and editors.
Those people who are going to read our stories and tell us what works and what
doesn’t. Those individuals who we trust to rip our precious babies apart and
then help us put them back together and make them (hopefully) better. The
like-minded peeps who look for all the nitpicky errors of people, place and
thing, and actually enjoy telling us
when we’ve done something wrong. They are the men and women who are going to
say to us “why?” and “no, just no” and even “WTF is
going on with this?”
These people are in many ways our guardian angels, our
saviors, our own personal heroes. 
