I'm just finishin up the first draft of week 10 of the next Eerie Saloon story.

I won't describe the process that Chris and I use. I've done that before. I do want to ramble a bit and tease our readers about what happens in the chapter. And get a few notions off my chest.

Two transformed characters are starting to realize their affection for other, male characters. Two other transformees move farther along in their mental transformations. Two male characters rant in what I hope are interesting ways. Town politics get even more convolutted.

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Two characters have LONG talking scenes. These are hard to write. Basically, these scenes are mostly monologs. A character can be explaning something basic, important, and complicated to another character. Or a character can be figuring something out.

To use the same character to give examples of each, consider the scenes in "Eerie Saloon: Seasons of Change -- Winter" related to the death of Maggie's wife (years back before she came to Eerie and drank the potion). In the first scene, Maggie describes the death of her wife due to to complications of giving birth to their daughter, Lupe. The mother was also named Lupe, so I'll call her by her full name,Guadelupe, to avoid confusion.

Guadelupe took a day to die, giving her time to say goodbye to her husband and her children. Her dying request to Miguel, Maggie's original, male name, was that he take care of their children as they would have had Guadelupe lived. It's a very teary sceen, which it should be.

Miguel promises, of course. The problem is, once he bcomes Maggie and falls in love with Ramon, is that she thinks the promise means that she has to take care of Ernesto and Lupe, rather than find happiness with Ramon. It's a big part of the reason why she put him of for so long. Maggie is telling the story to Molly, but that other woman mostly has shorts snippets of dialog in reply, ust enough to prod Maggie on in the telling of the story.

Guadelupe's death and the promise she extracts from Miguel is VERY important to the plot of both "Autumn" and "Winte", since it explains why Magge is so reluctant to be with Ramon. It had to be explained in detail, but the details had to flow as story telling.

The second scene is equally important. Maggie is alone, in bed, and desperate. Ramon has propsed, and she very much wants to marry him. The competition with Dolores for Ramon's affections has shown Maggie the depthsa of her feelings for him. But that promise to Guadelupe is a BIG roadblock.

Maggie thinks about Arnie (who hasn't drunk the potion at that point) and is causing his mother, Teresa, a great deal of grief. Fortunately, their cousin, Dolores, is visiting, and she has been a big help to Teresa in handling Arnie. Maggie worries that she might have similar trouble with Ernesto someday. She is comforted for a moment by the fact that Ramon has been so helpful with the boy.

Then it hits her. The promise Guadelupe asked Miguel for was REALLY that Niguel would find someone to help him raise the children properly. She has, Ramon. Maggie suddenly realizes that she will not be breaking her promise to Guadelupe if she marries Ramon. She will be KEEPING that promise.

That's a lot of material, and it all takes place in a conversation that Maggie has with herself in the middle of the night. The trick is, how to show it so that the story flows, rather than gets bogged down in a lot of she thinks A, then she thinks B, then she thinks... (ad nauseum).

Keep the story flowing, that's every writer's duty. You want it to flow through the reader's mind. You don't want him or her to trip over details or think about how "preachy" or how bogged down in some detail the story's gotten.

A lot of the Eerie Saloon stories are told in conversation, but the characters are usuelly doing something whie they talk. I don't like long, detailed narration where the author plays "fill in the details." (I try do the latter in a tongue-in-cheek voice if I can.) The problem is that such scenes can be necessary. In this chapter (week), two were necessary.

Part of the trick, I think, is consider that, in such scenes, the primary character in the scene isn't telling your story, he or she is telling her own story. You write it in her voice and wth her sensibilities, not yours. Can it be dramatic? Well, the classic scene of this type begins with the words

"To be or not to be,that is the question. Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to
suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune or to take arms against a
sea of troubles, and, by opposing, end them."

That isn't Shakespeare writing the dialog for a play. That's the Crown Prince of Denmark trying to figure out what to do in the VERY bad spot he finds himslef in.

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Incidentally, Arnie was created solely for the scen where his drunken singing late at night wakes of an injured Arsenio and leads to the first kiss between Arsenio and Laura. Like a lot of characters, he found a bunch of other stuff to do.

Let's remember that the character of Max Klinger in M*A*S*H* was originally a one-episode sight gag.

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So what else is in this chapter?

Well, there's one short scene that I'm rather proud of. One of the female characters has been drawn as a narrow-minded bitch since she was introduced. She's a gossip and a busy body, a prude, and a bully. You won't find out why she acts that way from the scene I mentioned, but, I think, you'll feel sorry for her by the end of that scene.

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You'll also find out what a rond de jambe is. Maggie calls it a "randy jam" and for good reason.

Ellie