So, I finally got around to posting chapter seven of Being Christina Chase, though a few days late. Even though this chapter has essentially been in the bag for probably a year or so, I made some last minute changes due to Holly Logan's invaluable feedback. It would have been on time had I not recently fallen irrationally and hopelessly in love and that I'd been traveling all weekend.

So, this is the first real payoff in the story. I've been stringing the audience along for about 43,000 words or so, all of which have been about setting up dominoes so we can knock a lot of them down in this chapter. I don't know how people are going to react. I'm not sure if those readers, who have stayed with me since chapter one, are going to appreciate being sucker punched after several chapters of light and fluffy comedy.

But, this is how I think you need to tell stories. I don't have much in the way of a literary background, but I did study music theory. One of the things you learn early on is that you can divide a piece into sections of consonance and dissonance. Dissonance is where you get your tension. It's what keeps people invested. That said, you eventually need to give them consonance. Listeners need to catch their breath and take a rest.

Chapter seven is the first break. It doesn't resolve all the plates we have spinning in the air. It doesn't even really draw the story to closing point, but it hopefully changes the trajectory so it's coming back down to earth. When I started writing the story, this is where I intended to end up, and I hope that if you look back at all the characters and how they act up until this point, the big reveal explains their actions.

Of course, this is my intent and my hope; I don't know whether I've actually pulled it off. The story is still coming down from the first "movement" so to speak. Again, I don't know how much of an audience I'm retaining, but I hope everyone is sufficiently entertained. At this point, we're still establishing the characters. After a few more chapters, the first movement should be wrapped up, and hopefully the main characters should be established. Once that chore is out of the way, we can actually get past the bootstrapping and into the story.

Again, I'm not sure I'm actually pulling off anything I'm setting out to. One thing that is gratifying is seeing people throwing out theories in the comments. I think it's a good sign when people are guessing what characters ought to do or how things might turn out. In my mind, you achieve good characterization when readers have an innate sense of what the characters would do in a prospective situation, even when they're not being told by the author what they would do. I'm not sure that I'm there, but the fact that people are speculating I think means I'm getting somewhere.