Questions that I want answered by my readers. I have to say I love that this is always different for every story. This time I took my main character on an emotional roller coaster. My Main Character, Ash lived with her mother who was brokenhearted and more or less depressed and often absent during her childhood. After she moved out she tried to visit but it never went well. When her mother died Ash thought she committed suicide and felt guilty about it. It turns out she faked her death so she could start a new life. Then Ash found out about magic and learned her mother had been under a spell, thought that explained everything and then was told the spell was lifted when she was in kindergarten and that her mother was just her mother with no magical excuses.
There are other family issues but that is a large chunk of the journey that happens within the story and I want her emotional reactions to make sense so my first question to my readers is…
Do Ash’s reactions to the various emotional reveals make sense or do any of them seem unreaslistic?
With this I left it open. I don’t want to ask – do they seem over the top, because then my readers might think that I think something is over the top and it could influence them. Conversely I don’t want to ask if they seem too understated because then they might think about how to make them more over the top. So I like to keep the wording as neutral as possible.
During the story Ash also finds out that magic is real. She had some odd things happen during childhood and learning about magic makes them make sense. The earlier incidents are also there so the readers know this is a story with magic in it. So my second question is…
Does Ash’s reaction to learning about magic existing seem realistic?
This is followed by the third question of…
Do the early events mention serve as an adequate set up to magic for this story?
I also have several general questions I like to add to my list…
Does Ash’s relationship with the other characters make sense?
Is there any part of the story you found confusing?
Is there any part of the story where you found the story dragging or skipping over parts that needed to be expalined?
Did the story wrap up in a satisfying way?
While this is my list to start with, I will more than likely look over and add and adjust again before I send the list to my readers I will also probably adjust the wording for each of my readers mostly because I ask each of them to read for different things. But for now, those are my questions.
Ten til Midnight 