I watch a lot of DVD movies. I watch a lot of movies period, but I do have a fairly large DVD collection. As with the audio commentary, one of the things I also enjoy about the magic of DVDs is the fact that many if not most include deleted and/or alternate scenes. Basically, scenes of the movie that had been shot, but were removed or changed for whatever reason prior to the film being released. Most of the time they were unimportant scenes to begin with, or they were cut out because the movie was already running too long. Sometimes it really helps to understand the bigger scope of the movie being able to see something that you hadn't seen before. Or sometimes they're just fun little wastes of time.
I am a total information junkie, I love trivia and useless facts, so generally speaking I enjoy watching deleted scenes even if they are kind of pointless. I've often thought that making a movie and writing a book are really very similar. In both you're telling a story, hopefully a coherent and entertaing one, you repeat a lot of the same stuff over and over trying to get it just right, and several other points. About one of the only differences is that with a book it's (usually) one person creating it from start to finish, while with a movie there's hundreds if not even thousands involved with the cast and crew. However, like a movie, when a book is written there are many times scenes are deleted or changed, and actually for a lot of the same reasons: time and space constraints, something works much better in a different way, or something just plain doesn't work no matter how hard you try.
And that's what this page is all about. I hardly ever throw anything away, and I have a whole suitcase full of pages upon pages of material I had written over the years, some going as far back as when I was still in high school. So I thought it'd be fun to share with you some of the scenes and exploits that for whatever reason just did not make the final cut or an alternate view of what a scene almost was. Let me stress that I THINK this might be fun for you. It may be or it may just be a pathetic train wreck, but either way it's an experiment. I'm not sure if any other authors out there have thought of this before me, and honestly I can't really for the life of me think that there cannot possibly be a least one other author with this idea. If there are, please keep in mind that I don't know about them yet before you send me a yelling email stating "YOU SOB!!! YOU STOLE THAT FROM _______!" I really didn't, honest.
Okay, here's how it will work. On the book's personal deleted scene page, I'll give a short description of what it is and why it's here as well as try my best to explain where in the book it should be. Then it will link to a simple white background with no links (other than the usual ones) and no pictures. You can then read it and enjoy or...well, not...enjoy.
Oh, one more quick note! A lot of stuff that was changed or removed was done so very early in the game when I was, well, a kid. Over the years my writing has improved tremendously, so I will take the older stuff and
write them out in my current style in the way I feel I probably would have written them today. Confused yet? Okee, enjoy!
And drop me a line if you feel compeled to express what you thought about this experiment. |
