... and they ended up on the cutting floor (due to word count, plot change, not advancing the plot, etc). Yay, I've got about three on this current piece! They were good too! I guess I could make short stories out of them, but still
I frequently take discarded scenes and vibes repurpose them in other projects. Very utilitarian. And vice versa. I had a sci-fi gag once with a talking train that I really liked. It was a human head and half a torso hooked up to all sorts of wires, tubes, and other Giger-esque biomechanical shit. It spoke like a computer 75% of the time but had a quirk where it told the most obnoxious, obscene dirty jokes I could think of... all using sexualized train parts as genitalia. I thought it was hilarious at the time, but the gag took a very circuitous route before finding a home. It started as a novel, but after about 10K words it became apparent that it didn't have the juice for a longer form, so I hacked the cooler scenes up and stuck them in another novel that was first draft complete and needed some filler. That didn't work either. More juice, but nowhere worth the squeeze. So it sat disembodied for years before winding up in a third novel where it sort of stuck, though I abandoned the project somewhere around draft three. One of things writing skills I tried to develop--and mostly failed at--was recognizing how much (many?) legs an idea had before finding out the long way. Some ideas are just gags that really won't survive beyond the scene level. Some are simple machines that can hold a short story together but outlive their utility beyond the 5K word mark... kind of like a song that hits like a bastard for 3 minutes but would become a snoozefest if it were an 11 minute Tool epic. And then there's the legitimate novel ideas that are strong enough for a 100K foundation, loose enough to allow the accents and filler material needed to compliment the word count, thematically on point--but not too much--to allow them to evolve in natural yet unexpected ways. That last part is huge. Some themes sound great in development but are so rigid they drive the story in a cogent, seemingly interesting direction only to find out that the final destination doesn't work or is just plain dumb. Those suck. Nothing like banging out 99,999 words only to find out on word 100,000 that, shit, this doesn't work at all. Wish I knew that before I started.
So, yeah, it's a vampire novel, and I want a chapter where I do bloody, tension-filled vampire stuff that I think would be entertaining and that fans of the genre would appreciate, but alas, it doesn't involve the main characters or advance the plot. It's just a gratuitous romp. Between us, i love gratuitous romps, lol. Having cave explorers scale a rock wall and suspend on hooks and ropes from the ceiling two-hundred feet in the air over a lake of bat guano to examine an odd-looking black six-foot-long cocoon...that works for me. But then, whatever. Happy to throw it in the delete bin, lol.
Speaking of vampires, I tried to write a vampire book once and knocked myself out cold. I have severe hemophobia (blood phobia.) I get seriously messed up from seeing or thinking about blood, needles, etc. I don't even like typing about it right now, but I've only ever passed out completely twice. Once was from an episode of Dexter. The other was from writing the opening to my own vampire novel. Needless to say, it's not currently in production, which is a shame. Everyone who's read it loved it and wanted me to finish it, but alas. The hardest cut I've ever made was to a book I still haven't finished. I backtracked and scrapped 35 effing K! It hurt, but it was for the good of the book. At least I thought it was. I wrote another 45K, bringing it up to 80K, but I'm now semi-convinced that I lost my damned mind while I was writing it. I painted myself into a corner. I'm completely stuck, and worse, I no longer believe Act II is tenable whatsoever. I'm now thinking I might attempt to salvage that original 35K. It was good. Unfortunately, I don't have an Act III either way. I don't know what I'll do.
