The Omake File

I promised quite a while ago to talk about this sometime.

So ... yeah. Stuff gets cut out of chapters. Or, sometimes, I write scene fragments that I just never find a good place to use. The conversation bewteen Iku and Dhiti in chapter 10 ("Why do you keep talking to me?") was nearly an example of this—I wrote it for chapter 9, and actually posted it as a teaser for chapter 9, then had to cut it again. Fortunately it found a home next chapter.

If there's something about a cut scene that I like—it's a nice piece of characterisation, or it makes me laugh, or—probably the most common reason—because it's not bad, but it's just going in the wrong direction—then I usually save it. I have about 90K of cut stuff now, ranging from brief conversations that never got used, to entire cut scenes or alternate version of scenes.

And then there's the big cut: an entire alternate version, 95% complete, of chapter 10. One of the things that made chapter 10 take so long was that there was a massive subplot about Iku running all through it, affecting most of the chapter, and as the chapter got further and further along it became harder and harder to make the subplot work. I finally had it licked, and the chapter almost complete ... and then, at the last moment, I realised that if I kept it in, it was going to make chapter 11 even harder to write, and after that, a big chunk of my outline would have to be junked. So I rewrote large sections of the chapter and tore the whole thing out, and oh how much better the chapter felt.

The inital teaser for chapter 10 that I posted—basically, the opening scene with Beth arriving at school—contained a bit of this subplot: Iku arrived at school looking like she'd been dragged through a bush. That was the only part of it that ever went out publicly. It got changed when I removed the subplot; but if you didn't see it, or have forgotten, it went like this:

It was Iku, all right, but she looked ... different. Her face and hands were smudged with dirt; her hair-braid was loose and ragged. Her school uniform was rumpled and creased, and looked as though she had slept in it; there were grass stains on the trouser legs. Her shoes were caked with half-dried mud. She looked tired. And she—

She was smiling. Faintly, nervously; but she was smiling.

Anyway. Most of the cut scenes I've squirreled away were killed because they were going wrong in one way or another. One had to be killed for a different reason.

In the story of the Fall in chapter 9, I made a rule for myself that either Artemis, Makoto or Rei had to be present in every scene. It was simple logic; in the year 4200, those three were telling the story, and how could they tell what they'd never seen? I did let myself stretch a point a couple of times, to allow brief sections where none of the three was around, but only if they were nearby or they entered the scene fairly quickly. So when I realised that I'd written a reasonably extended Uranus-and-Neptune solo scene ... it just had to go, nice though it was. (A bit of it stayed, but it's trimmed back drastically from the original.)

So that's the story with the omake file. And I'm not going to go posting them all here, so don't ask; quite a few of them contain spoilers, and others just aren't that interesting. And one of them, cut from chapter 9, I may develop into an independent short story sometime ... :)

Well ... okay, one brief example. This was from chapter 2, when Beth asked Bendis if she was supposed to be Minako reborn.

Better make something up, Bendis thought uneasily. Let's see ... "Umm, you see, when Sailor Venus died, Queen Serenity used the Ginzuishou and spent her spirit to join the ranks of the dead Senshi of the past ..." She trailed off. Wait a moment. That sounds familiar. Where have I heard that line before?

"That's so romantic," Venus murmured dreamily. "Just like on the viddy program."

"Uh, yes," said Bendis nervously. "So you see, you can't be her because she's passed on to another plane ..."

Venus nodded agreeably. Then, suddenly, her eyes hardened. "As a matter of fact, it's exactly like on the viddy," she snapped. "Word for word. Are you a big fan of the program, Bendis?"

"Um—"

"Admit it! You don't know a thing about all this either, any more than I do!" Venus shouted. "You're just making it all up! First you follow me home from school, get me into dozens of accidents on the way, you drop a piano on my head, and almost get me run over by a truck—"

"Hey, the truck wasn't my fault! You did that one on your own!"

"And now you're trying to make like you know everything about it all, and you're as much in the dark as I am!"

"I am not either! Artemis has been training me for months for this! Umm, I mean—"

"Months?! Just how old are you anyway?"

"No, wait. Did I say months? I meant years. No, decades. Centuries?" She wasn't buying it. "Damn. Let me put it another way—"

Suddenly, for the second time in entirely too short a period, she found herself picked up by the scruff of the neck

Wayyyy to much, wayyyy too early. (Also, the viddy program didn't turn out that way, obviously.) Snip, snip. 'Nuff said.