One of the hardest things to do as a writer, other than the actual writing part, is to kill your darlings. No, not the characters (I don’t seem to have a problem with that) but the words. With Que Será Serees, this came with the entirety of one of my favorite chapters, Chapter 4. Augh!
“Mir 4 Arms” is where, in the pre-final drafts, we met Li Rinaldi, his ship’s personality (imaginatively named “Ship”), his daughter, and some ancillary characters. As much as I wanted to keep the Li/Ship thing in the story, the fact is that most of the information was repeated elsewhere. As much as I liked this chapter, the larger story lost little by its excision.
I still wonder if I did the right thing. I liked the last draft of the novel that still contained this chapter. Thing is, that draft as a whole wasn’t polishing up well so I dove in and tightened things up a bit. As a result, yep, the chapter was cut. (The keen reader will note that this is Chapter 4. This means that the next chapter, Chapter 5 “Crashdown”, actually ended up as Chapter 2 in the finished novel. Like I said: tightening.)
Here’s the link if you’d like to read it (or you just like clicking links): Chapter 4 – Mir 4 Arms
This might not be the last you see of Li and Ship. There was more written in earlier drafts than what’s in the above link. I like these two characters together. Don’t be surprised if they pop up again sometime.
And, as always, if you want to read more you can pop on over to Amazon and snag yourself a copy:
