Aside from a brief fleeting thought that hey, maybe I could try to write a couple Yuletide treats -- quickly extinguished when I remembered that I don't know 99% of the sources and besides that I can't write -- I haven't participated in any of the end-of-the-year writing frenzy that's overtaken my friendslist. But don't feel sorry for me! Instead I've been keeping busy composing FAQs and conference call notes and funding requests and tl;dr emails and memos. I'm fairly confident that a few of them even end up getting read or at least skimmed.

But that's not what this is about -- I wanted to extend my praise and sympathies to the undersung legion of beta readers who make this season so merry and bright and typo-free. You have my deepest admiration, after having spent much of the last two days copy-editing stuff I didn't write and fighting the resulting urge to stab myself. Hyphenation is not a dark art! Parallel sentence structure really is your friend! Random capitalization doesn't make your tired jargon look more impressive!

So when I dive into this year's crop of Yuletide stories, dear betas, I'll be thinking of you, the watchful guardians of readability.