Outtakes always make me a little sad, because deep down, I want to write all the books, not just the one revision narrows the story down to. From the current book-in-progress (the one with the Cheetos and tarantulas and rivers and ravens):
I’m not stupid, and it’s not like you need to be an honor student to know about magic anyway, though I am. But it’s pretty basic: how magic sped the Viking cargo ships to North America, how the moundbuilders along the Mississippi rerouted the river with magic, back when their cities lined its banks, and so on and on. But that’s the thing: magic has always been about the past–the stuff of history class, of records written in stone and on parchment, about archeologists looking for gaps only magic can fill.
Okay, actually, I still want to write the book that this is part of. It just isn’t the current book anymore, because magic can only be hidden in so many directions. But it may well find its way back into something. Eventually.
You don’t want my side of this story. I can tell. You do not want it, though you want me to believe you do. You make notes in your books. Books! Humans always keep everything in books.
I’d come to love your human books. To trust them, more than I trusted the call of sun and sky …
My life, my concerns matter little to you. They have always mattered little to you. And so I will exit this story. If you feel a need of me in the next draft, we can talk about it then. But you won’t. I know you won’t.
These poor scenes, into which I have poured heart and soul and being, were just scaffolding to you, after all.
An outtake that realized it was an outtake even as I was writing it … last of a series of deleted interstitial scenes from a different POV than the main book. The character it belongs to is present though, and bitter for reasons that go beyond my deleting her scenes.