Burning Down the House

Since we last spoke on the subject, I've made an amazing amount of progress on the book. Let's discuss.

Chapter 9 was finished before I left for Massachusetts. Whereas last time I described the end of the chapter as containing "a nice scene between Kelly and Emma", the truth is that I didn't remember just how good that interchange between the two of them really was. It's quite amazing, full of subtext, and really shows me at the top of my form. There is an intended result at the end of the chapter, which is to get the reader to think, "Oh crap, I think #### ##### #####." Hopefully, you can fill in the blanks if I've done my job well.

Thanks to a couple of marathon sessions at my mom's kitchen table, I blew out Chapter 10 in three days. It's a large, five scene chapter with a ton of characters coming in and out of it.
--The first scene starts with Kelly and Emma before turning into a Kelly and Alyssa scene, which contains their first fight.
--The second scene is the first Alexis showcase scene, where she and Kelly talk in her office. What a delightful character Alexis is, too. I love the way I've characterized her here as someone who's vain and shallow, and is aware of it, and loves herself because of it. There's a little bit of dot-connecting, too, as far as the relationship between her, Gwen, and Kelly, which I like.
--The third scene is a Kelly and Ben scene, which starts out at his parent's house. This is a case where I went well above and beyond what was necessary to capture the both of Ben's parents as faithfully to their real life counterparts as possible, and I remember Dan liked it quite a bit when he read it. The scene then moves along and Kelly meet's Ben's new girlfriend Rachel for the first time.
--The fourth scene takes us back to the hospital, beginning with a conversation between Matt, Brian, and Kelly that might be somewhat appalling to some people, but it's mostly happening around Kelly, who is very distracted by thinking about Alyssa. This scene was the catalyst for my big pullback at FMC where I stopped letting a lot of people read the scenes while I was working on them ... because there came a point where a few people forgot that while some of the characters were based on actual people there, I was really making most of the conversations up wholesale. In other words, some people forgot I was writing a book, not a biography of the kitchen staff. That scene also introduces Kelly's cousin Jed (based on Markwell, not one of my actual cousins), and has some key interaction between Kelly and Gwen.
--The last scene in the chapter is the wrap-up of the Kelly and Alyssa tension, which results in one of their typical lengthy conversations about her life, and ends with a spirited bout of make-up sex, which this time doesn't happen between the chapters.

So that's a lot of stuff to cover.

Chapter 11 is another busy one, but only has three scenes. And I already have two of them done.
-- The infamous Diner parking lot incident. This isn't based on anything that ever happened, but it's one of my favorites. Kelly and Ben are at the Diner waiting for Alyssa to show up. This is Ben and Alyssa's first meeting. During the wait Kelly and Ben engage in a couple of their usual dumb conversations. We meet another waitress, Leah, based on someone very important to me, and she interacts with the boys. Going into this I thought I was going to have to beef up Leah's characterization a little, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that I'd already done a really good job establishing her. The paragraph that describes the relationship between Kelly and Leah may be one of my best ever. Then of course Ben meets Alyssa, and there is some good chemistry there I can work with in later chapters. Oh yeah, then something occurs out in the parking lot, which I won't talk too much about here, except to say I wrote it in as something of a showcase for Ben.
-- Kelly, Laurel, and Cindy have dinner. Wow, I love this scene. Cindy is based on Krysten from the hospital, and if I thought I nailed the four characters in the card game, then I absolutely skewered Krysten here. It doesn't hurt that Krysten is one of the most dramatic people I've ever met anywhere, and a lot of the lines Cindy says were taken directly from the source.

All that's done.

So what's left? There's one more small scene between Kelly, Emma, and Alyssa to close the chapter. Chapter 12 is an oddball. It actually didn't exist in the original sequence from way back, and was added later. It's something of a Rashomon chapter where the same event is described to Kelly from two different viewpoints: Emma's and Alyssa's. The narration bounces back and forth between the two of them. Then we get to Chapter 13. It starts with a follow-up to the Kelly, Ben, and Alyssa subplot. Then Kelly and Gwen have a scene. And then we crash right into the exciting season finale, which I'm not going to spoil, but it does end in the most devious cliffhanger I could put together.

At the rate I'm going, I should be through that by the end of next week. That means the packet containing Season 2 (chapters 6 to 13) will be ready for publishing very soon, which is good because I'm anxious to get them mailed out.

Yay.