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"Someone Old, Someone New, Something Stolen ..."  --> "An Ex- Marks the Spot" 

This was an odd one. It took some corkscrew turns in it, didn't it? If I say a little more about this run of chapters than I say about most, it's because it surprised me, too.

My original plan had been to make this run little more than a one-and-done. Five chapters, I thought, would be enough to scare Lisa, scare Geoff, do a swap, scare Geoff some more, then put Will and Lisa/Sydney together. I mean, there's a five-chapter outline right there, huh?

But then Sydney told Will she wanted to go on a date with him. Masked, but with HIM. She had to say that, because the seed planted at the end of "Like a Boss" was about Sydney being together with Will, not with one of his impersonations. She had to remind him of that.

It was a small but necessary moment, but one that caused the hinges come off.

Because, as I think I have mentioned in the past, I mostly improvise all these things. Even when I know where a story is going, how it gets there is an improv. Which puts me at the mercy of strong-willed characters who might have their own ideas.

So Sydney took over when she made the aforementioned pitch, which steered the story into that bedroom scene in "Faces Under Faces." What she didn't know (and what I didn't know either) is that she was teeing things up for an even stronger personality to take over. One who, though supposedly sloughed off for the night, was still there and got Will to say a few things on his behalf.

That's when Kirkham took over.

And then everything went to pieces when his mom came in to talk.


I must have had mothers on my mind when I got to "Money Matters." They don't get a lot of attention in BoM, probably to the frustration of many readers, because that is one area that is a little too squicky, even for me, to coldly explore. But I'd just got done writing a branch with Will impersonating a mother; and I've been commissioned to write a second branch where a mother is impersonated; and a reader had been talking to me about a different storyline where a housewife would get impersonated. So when I decided that Kirkham's mom needed something other than some casual, expository mentions, in she walked.

None of what she had to say, or what came next, was planned. All I knew was what had already been established elsewhere, that Kirkham's is a single-parent household on the ragged edge of shabby living. So it made sense that Mary Kirkham would have money troubles on her mind, and that was the easiest thing to toss out conversationally when she came into the kitchen. How bad were the problems? Sending the younger brother to live with a relative seemed like a way to emphasize how bad things were.

Then, after writing that scene, I wondered how much she would be making as a nurse—which she was already on record as being. I looked it up and—

Holy Jeezum Crow! Even if she's very junior, and even if she's got debts, she and her family should NOT be hurting that badly!

So why was she sending Tad out of town?

And that's when the real story occurred to me: she was getting him out of the house so she could slip another guy into it. Getting that idea onto the page meant setting off demolition charges in the middle of my original plan, but there are always costs to be paid. I did manage to wrench the story sort-of back onto course in the last two chapters, because Sydney would not have been inactive, but there's a lot more going on now than there was before or than what had been planned. And a whole new potential situation has been set up.

And so here we are at the conclusion of "An Ex- Marks the Spot"  with the Will-and-Lisa stuff relegated almost to an afterthought.

Well, as they say about the theme of crummy, predictable movies these days, it wasn't about the destination. It was about the friends we made along the way.