Comic Relief

Page 224 and the end of Chapter 14. I added a scene today, all of Chapter 14 pretty much, which I thought was required for a number of reasons:

1. Tracy needs a chance to show her smarts and problem-solving ability.
2. She also has been pretty down--wounded physically and emotionally--and her return to normal cannot happen all at once. She needs first to resolve to take charge and then take an action which builds confidence.
3. While the big denouement is looming, I needed to slow the pace a bit lest it be reached too quickly. My characters need time to develop their viewpoints.
4. The last few chapters have been rather dark, and I saw a chance to inject some lightness and humor by giving Tracy a scene with her father.

That's a fair amount of ground to cover in a single chapter, but I'm happy with the result. It reads more like mischief than the sort of dangerous endeavor it is. But each time I seek to write some humor into it, I wonder once again if my earlier success at doing so (and I've had a number of people tell me I was successful) was a fluke. Can I get it right again? Humor is hard, after all. Scary, angry, sad--those are easy. Humor is tough because it's so individual. My own sense of humor tends to like the droll and clever stuff rather than silliness, something I share with Tracy for the most part. Letting her funny side come out to play is what makes her so much fun to write.