Unpublished Material

The Cutting Room Floor

I've been writing stories set in the Fourlands for a long time - about twenty-seven years at last count - so there's a lot of material from before my first novel, The Year of Our War, appeared in print. The story, and in some cases the characters, of YOOW also changed significantly during the writing so several of the earlier scenes I wrote would no longer fit in with the final cut.

Here are some of the more recognisable unused scenes. I hope you enjoy them.

Scenes cut from The Year of Our War

In YOOW, the scenes from Jant’s past in Hacilith were drawn from a larger, older cycle of stories. However I didn’t want the number of scenes set in his past to overshadow the events happening in the present so many of them never made it into the final novel.

The three Hacilith scenes below tell of Jant when he was a teenage drug dealer; pushing scolopendium in the slum and dockyards of Galt, but trying to save the kids who weren’t already beyond hope. ‘Saturday Night’ is from Felicitia Aver-Falconet’s point of view.

Linnet's Tour Guide for Young Ladies of Awia

Linnet's Tour Guide is a guide book of the sort upper class ladies would take on the Grand Tour, highlighting places of interest, people to meet, and items of artistic and historical interest to further their education. These pages are from an edition published in Rachiswater in the Fourlands, in 2024. I am sure Cyan Peregrine had one in The Modern World but she probably threw it away at the earliest opportunity.

Other scenes

'The Insect Hordes' is a scene written by my partner, Brian, as part of a letter he sent me when I had just started working on YOOW. At the time the story had a swarm of Insects trapping many warriors, including Jant and Lightning, in Lowespass Fortress. This eventually changed to become the Insect siege of Lowespass endured by Tornado and Vireo in the novel.

'Wrought Gothic' is a piece I wrote while enjoying the characters and envisaging Wrought manor house. I usually put characters in situations like this so they talk to each other and in a sense develop themselves.

Poems

Although my main interest is prose, I've always enjoyed reading and writing poetry. So here is a selection of my poems. Some have a 'rap' style and were written for performance - some of these were written for a poetry workshop I ran at the Glastonbury Festival in 1993 and, more recently, for a performance at WorldCon 2005. Others are nonsense poems, for the sheer joy of word-play.

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The Cutting Room Floor

Scenes cut from The Year of Our War

Linnet's Tour Guide for Young Ladies of Awia

Other scenes

Poems