I just completed the longest scene I may have ever written.

It's in Week 12 of the latest "Eerie Saloon" tale. Actually, it's a number of scenes, but they're all linked together. It's a trial of sorts related to one of the crimes of violence I've mentioned in my hints. I won't say who's being tried -- or why, but, at the end of it all, the mindset and roles of some characters will have changed.

I hope that it reads true. What I just wrote will have no doubt changed somewhat after it goes through the LONG set of edits that Chris and I will put the story through before it gets posted.

The story gets more and more complicated and with a much longer cast of characters. Of all the characters in the scenes, only five appeared in the original story: Bridget, Judge Humphreys, Molly, Milt Quinlan, and the Sheriff.

The defendant, most of the witnesses, the victims, and the people who act or react were all created since then. If I ever created a concordance of all the people and places in the Eerie Saloon sage, it would run for at least a hundred pages, I think.

And I keep it all in my warped little mind -- or in easily accessed files on my PC. I've got a file of the people Bridget plays poker with; a file of the staff of Lady Cerise's brother, where Wilma works; a list of all the students (by grade) at the school that Emma, Yully, and the rest go to; etc.

And it still isn't always enough. For the action required in that long sequence of scenes, I had to create three new characters. They may never be seen again, or they may figure heavily in future activities. After all, Arsenio was created solely to have somebody for the would-be outlaw, Leroy Meehan, to talk tough with. Arsenio MARRIED Leroy after Leroy became Laura. And Cap was created just to have a source for the telescope the Sheriff used to track the outlaws when they rode towards the town. I didn't know that he was Abner Socum's nephew. I didn't even know that Abner existed.

Now I know Abner and his family back to his grandfather, also Abner Slocum, who was a minor hero of the Battle of New Orleans in the War of 1812. What started as about a dozen characters moving through a more or less empty set has become well over a hundred characters moving through a well-populated town.

And we don't always know what those movements are in detail. When I started writing that sequence of scenes, I had no real idea what would be included, except that I knew how it was to end. Then I sketched out who was to testify at that trial of sorts, and what they were going to say. And they surprised me. They had their own agendas, and those agendas had to be recognized.

So did other characters. A few of them got their own scenes or got a short section in a longer scene. One character had an epiphany (look it up), albeit an incomplete one. Some nice dialog got tossed because it didn't fit.

Testimony is rehashing, so information from earlier -- sometimes quite a bit earlier -- in the story was given again. I'm hoping that it won't bore our readers to retell it. Some of it was given so long ago or in another context and may have been forgotten. Frankly, a lot of it was given before the scene I just finished was being sketched out. It wasn't created for this scene, but it was useful, so it was used.

The Russian playwright, Chekov, said that if you show a gun in the first act, you have to use it by the end of the third act. That was true here, but I didn't necessarily know that I was going to need a "gun" in Act Three, when I mentioned it in Act One.

Some of the ancillary scenes or bits of business in the scene I just finished was put in there in part to break up the monotony of fact repetition. They do serve a purpose, though.

Of course, it all serves a purpose. To amuse the reader and to make him or her think. I hope we do both.

No cats were harmed -- or even mentioned -- in the writing of this scene sequence.