The Fate of Alchemy

Chapter 2 Commentary

A new chapter means more things for me to comment. This is basically all the things I wanted to tell you about the chapter, but kept from actually including into the actual album; just another page with me blabbering on about what I did. Enjoy!

The big theme of this Chapter is the start of Bella’s therapy and her search for answers about the past. You get two out of the three ways her treatment takes place in this chapter: journal entry readings and hypnotherapy; I’m keeping group therapy for Chapter Three. Of course, you won’t get the narrated version of all the journal entries and hypnotherapy sessions, because if that was the case I’d have no room for anything else in the story. In fact you’re going to get a relatively small percentage of them, because a lot of them will be too boring to require an actual narration. There will be a few more important ones along the way, so those who like it can expect more.

The journal entry was really about introducing some of the important characters from Pleasantview. As you can imagine, the story is going to continue from Bella’s point of view and it’ll be a while before the Pleasantview characters actually appear. The journal entries and hypnotherapy (and more things to come) are ways to tell you the Pleasantview side of the story, without showing it directly; it’s trickier than what I did with FOP, but that’s the fun, isn’t it? Those who know Pleasantview, or read my old stories can tell Bella isn’t entirely right about her assessment, from her journal entry, Daniel being Mary-Sue’s husband, Michael being her brother and, as it will later come to be revealed, Cassandra is not a teenager anymore. I wanted to emphasize that what you see in the pictures is not, what Bella is imagining. Bella is rather clueless about the way things happened. I just wanted to give you some visual aids to distract the eye and not have to show you fifteen pictures of Bella reading her journal.

I was quite surprised no one asked about Bella’s pregnancy after reading chapter 1. Did you all just assume I’d make Bella have the twins again? Well if so, you were right, obviously. The scene with Nervous is an important one, obviously for the series. As you can see, its full meaning has yet to be explained. I want to warn those who are impatient for details that they will have to wait until chapter 14 to get a full answer on this matter. Yeah, I know… I’m very annoying.

The hypnotherapy was perhaps the hardest and most interesting part of the story to write. Of course, since this is the beginning of the story, I’m not going to give very significant and clear answers right away. So, for now, there’s a lot of symbolism, which is probably not very clear, but which will be explained in time. The most important part of the session was probably the moment where Bella looks into the telescope. It’s the most cryptic part, obviously, though there’s really a clear reason as to why Bella sees what she sees. Some of you may already have guessed something about it, though I’m not going to point anything out to those who haven’t!

One theme I really liked in this chapter is how Bella realizes how Strangetown is really a different place from what she would consider normal. I made sure to make Strangetown look very normal in the first chapter: the perfect 50’s house, the happy welcoming family… This was to contrast with the second chapter in which Bella sees Strangetown lacks structure and is really cut off from the world. This theme adds to that of Bella realizing she’s not going to get her answers very easily: every time she tries to figure something else she ends up just as lost as before.

Originally, I was going to add the scene with Olive Spector in Chapter 2, though in the process of looking for a cliff hanger I decided to leave it for Chapter 3. You can expect the characters that were introduced in this chapter (Dr. Auster, Nervous, Circe and Loki, though the latter didn’t actually appear) to reappear in the rest of the series.

That’s pretty much what I had to say about Chapter 2. I hope you enjoyed it!

Alexis, 9th September 2007.