From the Ground Up

Chapter 8 is something of a difficult proposition. Through nothing more than chance, it has a higher amount of things that need to be fixed than most of the other chapters. I'll take a quick look at the scenes and show you why.

A. Kelly and Ben scene. This one isn't too bad, but it starts off with a wrestling discussion, and as I've changed the timeframe of the chapter from 2000 to 2004, that means everything they're talked about in the other version has to be chucked and done over. Or does it? As it turns out, the wrestler being discussed the most has even more relevance in 2004, and there's more reason for Ben in particular to hate said wrestler here than there was before. I was able to keep this scene mostly intact with only a few surface changes. One of those changes, which was unavoidable given the date of the scene, required me to namedrop Chris Benoit in a positive way, which is a little creepy given that he's the guy who went koo-koo-ca-choo earlier this year and killed his family. Couldn't be helped.

B. Kelly and Alyssa. This one was pretty good the way it was, and all I did was enhance it a bit. It's a sex scene to start with, but I handle that in my usual tactful way. Then it leads into something else, which pays off at the end of the chapter, which I won't spoil here.

C. Department meeting. Oh boy. This one is going to stress me out. The scene is a department meeting involving the entire evening kitchen staff, which means I have ten speaking parts to juggle, the most I've ever attempted in one scene. There's a pretty good balance between the characters, although certain characters (Gwen, Willow, Alexis) talk a lot more than some of the others. But that isn't the problem. A ways back, when I decided to change out the hospital setting, I altered this whole scene to work in the newer factory setting. Now that I'm trashing the factory setting, I have to re-hospitalize everything, which is going to be a pain in my ass. Also, I have to insert lines for the new cook character (Jill), who replaces that other person, who I never included in this scene. This is what I'm tackling tomorrow afternoon.

D. Kelly, Alyssa, and Emma. I won't need to change a whole lot here except to smooth things out a bit and change some creaky dialogue. I have a feeling that working on scene C is going to wipe me out, so I may not get to this one for a couple of days. This is actually a two-part scene, with a break in the middle of it, and a lot of important things happen, so I'm feeling a lot of pressure to nail it and nail it hard.

The chapter after that is the famous card game chapter, which was a big hit back at FMC when I was letting more (ie: too many) people read all this. Now this is a chapter I'm looking forward to working on a whole lot. That'll probably be this weekend or so, I would assume.

One thing I've noticed is that my dialogue skills are improving. There have been spots along the way where it seems less like the characters were talking to each other and more like they were just advancing some of the story. This wasn't much of an issue in the Season One chapters, since I've been over those with a comb more than a few times, but in this second season, with so much going on all over the place, I've caught myself doing that here and there.

One example was at the end of the last chapter when Kelly and Alyssa were at Temptation's Wing, and one of Alyssa's goons gives Kelly something to think about. It was a decent scene already, but a bit perfunctory, so I fleshed out that new character's dialogue a little. That character isn't based on the actual person that would have been, but instead on a friend of mine from FMC named Tim, who worked in both the kitchen and housekeeping at different times. I know he worked there sometime during 98, because he went to Church with us once, but I can't remember if he was still there during Guinevere's tenure or if he'd left by then. But he was a thin black man who hit on every female he could, and was kind of a smooth operator, and as such ... perfect for this role. In fact, I wrote the bulk of his character's speech to Kelly while on lunch break in the cafe immediately after listening to Tim talk about one of his ex-girlfriends in Springfield. I had to get it while the rhythm was in my head, and it really worked. It's even better now that I let the character take his time in saying what he has to say.

I took that same approach with Alyssa in the second scene of Chapter 8, and let her do a little extra talking to get around to where she was headed, and that worked out pretty good.

In fact, tonight I wrote my little black heart out.