I've pretty much given up using betas; almost all the ones I trust have essentially left fandom or have zero time/energy these days, and I find I disagree with readers I don't know as well more often than not. Also I tend to finish pieces of exchanges on (or after! -- you didn't hear that with your mod hat on) the deadline. I'd definitely need a canon picker for Vorkosigan (or Chalion).

I got spoiled for Cryoburn by clicking on a piece of fanfiction immediately after the book came out without reading the spoiler line (if there was one), and it so upset me I've steered clear of the book. I gather one can avoid the event by stopping a few pages off the end, but I don't know whether I've got that sort of discipline.

For some reason I find it really hard to mentally resurrect characters when canon kills them off, which it seems to do with my favourites with monotonous regularity. (Thank you JKR, Joss!)