Posts Tagged ‘deleted scene’

A deleted scene from THE RED KNIGHT


red-knight-armorFestivities for the launch of THE RED KNIGHT kicked off in Toronto over the weekend at Bakka-Phoenix Books. Cake was served and readers got the chance to to check out some incredible armor that would have been worn by the Red Knight himself! But for all of you that couldn’t attend, we saved a special treat for you too. Below is a deleted scene from THE RED KNIGHT – a fantastic epic some fans are already saying would be perfect for the big screen. 

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This piece was written to introduce the company that the Red Knight commands, and represents the moments before the Captain enters the house where the nun has been killed–and the whole adventure begins.  I wanted to try my hand at a sort of ‘cinematic present’ in writing.  Later, in the editing process, we decided that it would be better to open the book with Ser John Crayford’s POV on the Red Knight and the company.  Let me just note that the sounds of a troop of heavy cavalry moving in deep fog are both as melodic and chilling as any monster.

Spring Morning

The silence of a misty spring morn.

The silence that follows the scream.

The desperate silence after the hopeless sound of utter loss.

Two men clad in green, on ponies, gallop up the road. They appear frightened, and their heads turn, their eyes are everywhere. Left and right. Up, and down.

They stop short of a farm enclosure, with stone walls as tall as a man’s shoulder, and a steeply peaked roof in dark–gray slate. On the other side of the road, a river, as broad as a good field, flowing fast, swollen with recent rain, as gray as the slate.

Something about the farm makes them hesitate, and both ponies rear and back, heads tossing.

The shorter man snaps his fingers, makes a half circle motion with his right hand, and points back down the road.  His lanky partner turns his mount and gallops back down the road. His pony’s hooves throw up muddy spray.

The man left behind loosens his falchion in its sheath. Twice. He licks his lips, and his horse backs again, like a cat backing from a dog, because something – perhaps a smell – is spooking her. The man on her back looks to the left and right, up and down. He is alone, in dense mist, and no birds are singing. The rising sun is cold and distant. Night still holds sway.

For him, time is mutable. Because for him, the silence goes on for a long, long time.

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A Deleted Scene from THE FOLLY OF THE WORLD

The Folly of the WorldWriters, if they’re smart, always cut something out of their books somewhere between first draft and publication. Often, that “something” is “quite a lot of things,” or in some cases, “literally everything except some tangentially related idea.” New material supplants old, or the old is excised simply because it adds nothing to the work, and therefore doesn’t require replacing. With THE FOLLY OF THE WORLD (UK | US | AUS), a conversation with my (brilliant) editor at Orbit led to my taking an early draft of the novel and scrapping a full two-thirds of it, salvaging a superior bit here or there but discarding the bulk. It was the right decision, and the vast majority of those undercooked—and by this point rather spoiled—words will stay where they belong, on the compost heap of my mind, so that the unused odds and ends can fertilize new ideas.

Below you’ll find an exception to my clumsy gardening metaphor; a deleted scene from the novel that I’ve opted to publish here on the Orbit blog, rather than discarding it all together. From my zero draft of THE FOLLY OF THE WORLD until midway through the revision process, this short chapter was part of the book. Usually it was the opening of the novel, but I also tried using it as the ending. I was able to fiddle with its placement in the text, and I feel comfortable showing it to you here, for the very reason I ended up cutting it from the book: it fleetingly alludes to a character and events from the novel, but doesn’t directly impact the cast or plot. You might think that this textual isolation would make it an easy choice for the chopping block, but no—for one thing, it adds a potential layer to one of the chapters in the finished novel, and for another, it embodies the spirit of the work in a detached fashion that I find all the more satisfying for its disconnect from (almost) everything else in the book.

Here then, for those of a curious inclination, is a complete, albeit rather rough, deleted scene from THE FOLLY OF THE WORLD. If you give this a read before getting a hold of the novel, feel free to incorporate the events laid out below into the greater tapestry. If you’d rather not, that’s cool, too—if this were in any way vital to the book, it wouldn’t have ended up on the cutting room floor. With no further ado, let us turn to a small town in the medieval Low Countries, and a very bad day for a not all-together-faultless fellow…

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