Making the cut
I’ll level with y’all for a moment; I struggle to summon entertaining entries for this blog. This website exists to talk about my books/writing adventures. So when the end of the week creeps up on me, I’m usually scrambling to come up with something to say on this blog to keep things relevant and interesting.
So, in an effort to keep everyone interested in my work, and to provide insight into my writing process I’m going to post some of my cut material from Hench. Through writing, and re-writing the book I have cut somewhere in the neighborhood of 30,000 words. For those who are counting, that’s about %16 of the final size of Hench as published.
There are myriad reasons why I cut chunks out of the manuscript, but the bottom line usually comes down to trying to keep the final story concise and focused. As I go through the self-editing process I constantly ask myself, ‘is this furthering the story?’ If the answer is no I either have to rework the words, or cut them.
The following scenes are such cuts. As you read these keep in mind that this is a sketch, not a final work. There will be a lot of rough edges and some things won’t fit neatly within the story. Finally, if you haven’t read Hench then you might want to come back after you’ve had a chance to read it. It might not make much sense without the context of the novel.
CH5 S2:
Here is a segment where I felt the dialogue was too tangential in a scene that was already long. So I axed this part. This snippet takes place while Mira is out in a coma and Hector and Lissa are watching over her.
The chair’s legs scraped across the ground with a high-pitched whine. Lissa frowned at him looked at him with mild displeasure from the loud sound of dragging the chair. “What, are you afraid that I’m going to wake Mira?”
She laughed. “For some reason, yeah. What a stupid concern, we should be so grateful that would be able to rouse her.”
He sipped his tea noisily, Lissa raised a brow. “Hey if we start doing things she likes then she’ll want to wake up right?” He spoke up. “Geeze, this is really good tea, made even better with a bunch of sugar. Mmmmm.” He took another loud sip.
Shaking her head, Lissa looked at Mira out of the corner of her eye. “Nope, nothing happing in her head, at least that I can hear. Nice thought though.” She sipped her tea, more quietly than Hector. “It is good tea though...” Her gaze was vacant for a while, not really looking at anything, just having her eyes open to prove her wakefulness, sipping her tea.
Chapt2 Scene 7
This is another cut snippet that I felt was too long in the tooth. This is an initial introduction to Hector’s cluttered room, and he’s trying to pull out some training equipment buried deep under stuff.
Hector spent some time rearranging his cluttered room, digging up items that might be useful for training. Halfway through moving aside a wardrobe to get to a stack of crates at thought hit him. What am I doing? I was supposed to take it easy for a few days, and treat myself to a steak. Without intending it, his planned personal recuperation was replaced with an impromptu training regiment. His already cramped and over-stuffed room was in a state of disarray as a testament to this.
While his room was the same size as any single lodging in the union, anyone who has seen it’s interior would swear that his was the smallest. That was because of the copious amount of items he stored in it. His room was a repository for all manner of adventuring equipment, and his collection was so extreme that it threatened to overtake what little living space he managed to preserve. Right now, his bed was covered in no less than a half dozen boxes so that he could make room to move his wardrobe, enabling him to access a few crates that he kept his training equipment in.
He had spent half of the morning moving his belongings around and his back and gut were protesting the mistreatment. For some reason, a brief conversation with Mira had overridden his desire for a few lazy days and had him digging out equipment that he hadn’t touched in years. On some level it felt good to use the neigh-neglected gear and to get revisit some of his former glory, but he also couldn’t deny that he felt motivated to help the hapless monster.