Hi,

You might think that the beginningof this chapter is not necessary, however I was told by a very good creative writing teache rin college that YOU NEVER ASSUME your readers know anything about your characters or their lives until you tell them about it.  Now, I do know that there are many abused Harry stories here, and people read a lot of them, but what if somebody comes into this story and universe cold--never read anything about HP OR my particular take on it. They would have no clue just how bad the abuse was or how much Harry had suffered.  Yes, i could break it up, as you say, but think about who Harry is talking to--his mother, and he wants to share what happened to him. It's like a psychology session where you spill your guts to your counselor, you suddenly start talking and everything spills out of you all at once, because you've been hiding it and keeping it in for so long that it's a huge relief to just get it all out in the open.  He doesn't want to have to revisit over and over and reveal things a little at a time, he wants it all out in the open so it's done and over with.  That's why I wrote the scene the way I did. And I've seen plenty of published authors use this device to have a certain character tell a story or something from their own viewpoint.  I want people to see inside Harry's head and see how this affected him, because readers don't always know what a character thinks or feels and they need to get that perspective. 

If readers have already read this stort of story before and feel like skimming it, fine. They can do so. But it's there so other readers, maybe who aren't familiar with abused Harry and have never read or even experinced this sort of abuse can understand it. Without a detailed description, how could that be possible? If I just said, oh they threw him in the cupboard, it's not the same as describing how awful the cupboard was, it doesn't give you the same feeling of horror, of fear, and that's what I want people to feel. 

The Calming Draft, yes, I could alter that, but Severus was speaking to Lily and telling her what it was, sometimes things are repeated not for the reader's sake, but the character's sake. A lot of times I've seen other authors do this, especially when writing mystery novels. Very often the reader knows before the character in the story what happened to whoever, but they still need to follow the character as they figure it out and sometimes it can be a little repetitive.  Is it really that big a deal?

I will look at the link you mentioned.

I have had several beta readers and they have looked over my chapters before and said that they were fine, minus  a few grammatical errors and typos. 

Once again, I will ask, are you reading this story just to edit it, or for fun? Because I would hope that you're getting some kind of enjoyment out of it.  So far you've yet to mention anything positive about the plot, the characters or anything that you thought was good or that you found interesting or enjoyable.  Is there anything that you LIKE about this story? Because all you've been doing is pointing out flaws.  It might be more helpful if you also said a few things that were positive as well.  When I review others work, I try and mix pointing out mistakes with some positive comments, so the author feels that they did some things well and some things they need to work on.  If you would like to help, as you say, then try telling me what I did that was good as well as not good.