Deleted Scenes

I've always been interested in deleted scenes - the material from your favorite film that never makes into the final cut of a movie. You know the stuff that just sits on the cutting room floor, until the DVD is eventual released.

When I wrote the outline for HIGH MOON, I tried to pack as much action and excitement into 60 screens as possible - but there are one or two bits (not even full scenes) that are in my original outline that never made it to the final cut of the series.

Why did I leave out this material?

Well ...

Although it was an action beat, the first sequence I had written did nothing to advance the plot and revealed nothing to the readers that they didn't already know. The sequence was just filler without consequence - and honestly - I don't want to waste our reader's time giving them something incidental to read. Readers invest their time into the strip - and I want to give them a good return on that invenstment.

The second sequence I deleted from the final screens was also a action bit. Steve and I went back and forth as to whether or not we'd include it. Sure, it might look really awesome - and be a really fun sequence to write - and it'd be a sequence with a whole lot of consequences - but as time went on, we both felt that it revealed too much information, way too soon. We are crafting a mystery/horror piece - and with any good horror piece - you need to leave some of it to the readers' imaginations.

I don't regret taking these bits out of the strip, and I think the story is stronger for it, but if you ever wanted to know about some of the stuff that hits our cutting room floor, now you know.