One of the perils of being a discovery writer is that you tend to wander off the beaten track and write scenes that really don’t need to be in the book (or worse still, entire plotlines that have to be pulled out because they’re irrelevant). During the course of drafting The Alchemist of Souls I must have written at least two books’ worth of words – for starters, I changed the plot completely, from a murder mystery to a political thriller! It would be a shame, though, to let all that work languish on my hard drive, so in the run-up to the release of The Alchemist of Souls, I’m going to be epublishing a selection of these scenes – for free – via this website.

I’ve selected a number of episodes from the early part of the books, most of which were cut because, although interesting to write, they didn’t move the plot forward quickly enough. That’s often the case when you start writing new characters; you need time to get to know them and their story, and end up writing a lot of “throat-clearing” chapters that don’t make it into the finished work.

First up is a sequence of short scenes between Mal, Ned, and one of Mal’s old college friends, Piers Ingram. It was intended to give an opportunity to reveal some of Mal’s background history, but I discovered I didn’t really have a role for Ingram in the rest of the book so I cut this section, merged him into another character, and dropped bits of information about Mal into other scenes.

You can download the sample in a selection of formats or read it online.

Note that I’m releasing them under a Creative Commons licence, whereby you are free to distribute these files provided you don’t remove the attribution information. Do let me know if you encounter any problems with the files.

Further samples will be released weekly during March – please see my Twitter feed for announcements!