The Angel Brings Fire – The “Lost Chapters”
As anyone who has ever written anything that has been published will no doubt attest, it’s never possible to include everything that one has written, in any manuscript. Editing a source manuscript is never a “fun business”; and inevitably, a lot of prose that the writer would have preferred to have left in… gets cut out. (Incidentally – one of the biggest such constraints, in the case of The Angel Brings Fire, is simply the maximum number of pages that can be safely included in a single volume of the paperback versions of the book. This generally limits the narrative to no more than about 450 pages at most.)
During the editing and re-writing process, when it’s known that a particular section of a manuscript is going to be excised, it’s the responsibility of the author (yours truly) to ensure that this doesn’t create “loose ends” to the narrative or plot – that is, something that was adequately-explained when the “deleted” section was still in there, but isn’t, after the “deleted” section is finally gone. I believe that an adequate job has been done of this to date, but from time to time I’ve had readers ask me variations of the question, “hey, wait a minute… how does ‘Character X’ know ‘information Y’ about ‘issue Z’?”.
This is never an enjoyable thing for an author to hear, if for no reason other than one then goes off in a bout of self-second-guessing, asking oneself, “oh sh** – I just knew that I shouldn’t have cut out that section… and now, my readers are telling me that I was right all along!” (Of course, the same could be and likely would be said of any section of the original manuscript, that didn’t survive the trip to the proverbial cutting-room floor.)
In the halcyon “old days” of publishing, there would be no solution to this problem, but with the Internet, we now have an escape-clause… and that’s what I’m introducing with this blog-posting.
Starting today, I’ll be publishing some of the sections that had been cut out of the original Angel Brings Fire manuscript(s), beginning with the first volume of the series (Angel of Mailànkh) and continuing sequentially, until most or all of the excised material has been made available. The only significant exception to this will be narrative that was cut for reasons other than brevity – that is, if the content in question was removed because it (for example) explored plot-options that were dropped for one reason or another, then obviously there’s no point in providing it.
As should also be self-evident, readers should be warned of a Spoiler Alert in all these chapters – you should always read the “official” version of the volume involved, first, before heading to the Web and perusing one of these “Lost Chapters”.
None the less… I hope what’s to come, will help you answer whatever questions that you may have had, about the mysterious and powerful Storied Watcher!
Marcus Shields
Author, The Angel Brings Fire