The Strange Reality of a Readers' Guide

I just finished reading the Readers' Guide questions that someone else wrote for my forthcoming novel. This someone was someone hired by my publisher for this task. I don't know her (it had to be a her), don't know anything about her, and read the questions she wrote about my book with my mouth agape -- not because they were good or bad, wrong or right, but simply because this is the first regular reader in the universe to have read my book. My agent doesn't count as regular in this context, and my editor doesn't count as regular, and my sister (who read the manuscript to try to tease out problems with time and logic) doesn't count as regular, either.

Miss Readers' Guide Writer was not charged with writing a review. Her job was to get down underneath the skin of the story to what was really going on, to what things really mean. This is the level where the writer's unconscious works, where the magic happens, where things take place that I didn't really plan. So I'm reading Miss RGW's questions and I'm thinking, "What story did she read?" and "What's she talking about?" My story is almost unrecognizeable to me in these questions. At one point Miss RGW named a character -- a relatively prominent character -- and I had to stop and think, "Wait -- was that really her name?"

I had to remind myself that I wrote this book. It seems, in some ways, that it was just a dream I once had....