I just got a question asking if another “Eerie Saloon” story was coming or if Chris and I were on hiatus.

It's slow work, but Chris and I aren't on hiatus.

In point of fact, we're just finishing up the work on Week 9, and I'm working on the first draft of week 10 of "Eerie Saloon: Season of Change -- Spring." With any luck, we should post the next segment, "Eerie Saloon: Seasons of Change -- Spring", sometime in mid (I hope) 2013. There's more on this in my blog as a new entry.

The way we work is, I write the first draft of a chapter (a week) and send it to Chris. He edits and sends it back to me. I send him comments on his edits, and we go back and forth through three -- maybe four -- edits before we put a chapter away.

During this process, we talk about character motivation, future plot events, and whatever else comes up. We also correct each other’s grammar and punctuation and ask about points raised in the story. Scenes can be re-arranged or rewritten. Sometimes, the order of the scenes shift. Sometimes, a new scene gets written.

When we're done, as I said, the chapter goes away, and I work on the next one. There are thirteen chapters (thirteen weeks) from the start of the story (in this case, Maggie's wedding on March 31) to June 30 (just after Laura gives birth).

Once all the chapters are done, we go through the process again, reviewing the chapters one by one. Earlier chapters may need revisions based on what happens in later ones.

Sometimes a new plotline gets added.

The sidebar Christmas Story "Eerie Saloon: Toy Soldier" was written as we were finishing "Eerie Saloon: Seasons of Change -- Winter." In "Toy Soldier", Arnie asks Jessie to give him shooting lessons. This was Chris' idea, and something that we hadn't discussed before. It was a good idea, so we put it in as a secondary plot in "Toy Soldier."

The problem was that he asked on Christmas eve. She would have answered during the time of the story "Winter." That meant that we had to write scenes related to this new idea and to fit them into the already written chapters of "Winter." Which we did, about a half dozen long scenes and several short ones.

That’s the main reason, but there are other ones.

We spend a lot of time developing the plot lines. My transcript of the discussions that took place when we were working out some of the plotlines for “Winter” run into well over 100 pages. And in the course of it, we found ourselves planning parts of three other stories: a sidebar story to “Winter”, a second sidebar story or a major plotline of “Eerie Saloon: Seasons of Change — Summer”, and a third story, a sequel set some twenty years after the current tales. (There's also a prequel set in the 1850s that tells how Shamus met Molly, bu I don't recall that we discussed it.)

These discussions continue during the writing. My comments on the third edit of Week 9 contain detailed motivational material on three of the characters.

We also do research. An awful lot of actual facts are written into the stories. Everything mentioned about Henry J. Hooker in “Winter”, including the tale of him making his fortune by wrangling turkeys from California, was true. Sadly, so were most of the facts about the Camp Grant Massacre that Shamus got so upset about. Two of the topics I’ve researched for “Spring”, the tale we’re working on now were ambulances and fire trucks.

And doesn’t THAT perk your curiosity?

The description of how women are measured for clothes, which has happened many times n the various parts of the story, is also real. It’s based on the instructions in a facsimile 1896 Sears catalog. (Of course, we altered them some for the scene where Enoch Ryland seduced Trisha.)

I have a page or more of notes that Chris sent me on transportation at the time. Did you know that Yuma, Arizona was originally an deep water seaport? That material went into the shaping of Rhys Godwyn, one of Trisha's lovers.

Research can take time. You get a lot of opinion in Wikipedia, but you don’t get facts. I once spent a couple hours checking to see if the word “hot” meaning “sexually attractive” or “sexually aroused” was used in 1871. It turned out that both meaning went back to Chaucer’s CANTERBURY TALES. It took time, but we knew, after that research, that we could have a character say the word in that context. We’ve checked on other words, too, and we’ve not used some because the meaning didn’t exist until decades later.

That's how the "Eerie Saloon stories get written AND why there's such a gap between stories.

Having mentioned the fire truck and the ambulance, I’ll give one more teaser about what happens. Somebody adopts a kitten.