It’s pretty rare that I delete scenes during the editing process with my books. I’ll add, rewrite, or change key outcomes, but usually I write to a plan. But I had a problem with Scorched. It’s ultimately a mystery… who is this woman, and who wants her dead, and why?

There was at one point a longer (but still short) prologue in the Scorched draft. Karen and I agonized over how much to tell the reader at the beginning. In the end, we deleted this setup scene because the heroine of Scorched starts out in an extremely vulnerable position. If you’ve read Scorched, you know that she is in fact far from helpless, but we decided not to give a hint of that at the start.

After the Spoiler Alert tag below is the deleted text. Did we make the right choice? Hard to say, but it was an interesting circumstance as a writer and a new experience to debate the approaches to the entry into Scorched. It doesn’t give much of the plot away to read the scene, but if you haven’t started Scorched yet you may have a different opinion of the heroine as she wakes up in the slums of Waytown…

Spoiler Alert: Deleted Scene Below

“You don’t understand, Jill. She may have seen everything for the last five years.”

The words echoed in the woman’s mind as she stumbled to the door and left. In her wake, a patient’s bed lay empty in the room’s center, its restraints still tightly bound. A vital signs monitor droned a monotonous tone, searching for signs of life that had been there only minutes ago.

In the corner, a computer screen displayed the greater Kavo-Liao region. A doctor’s notepad next to the monitor hovered askew over the corner of the workstation, its writing stylus fallen to the sterile floor.

A body rested, face down, close to the bed. Its head tilted at an unnatural angle and its right arm stretched as if pointing accusingly at the stray pen. Next to the fallen implement, a man stared sightlessly at a security camera in a corner of the ceiling.