Deleted Scenes - Badlands by Gary Kruse


Hi there, please introduce yourself and tell us which book we are talking about today.

Hi, my name is Gary Kruse, I’m a multi-genre author from London, in the U.K. and today I’m talking about the deleted scenes in my debut novel, Badlands. 

Badlands is a dark suspense tale about Megan “Willow” Rae, a wounded runaway with a tortured soul who is searching for her sister, unaware that she’s being hunted down by “Raven” a scarred orphan with a lust for blood. What Willow and Raven don’t know is that Richard Goddard, a man of God with a heart of darkness, is plotting both of their downfalls. 


Getting a book to fit the length it should be can be a challenge as you end up cutting things out so please do tell us about the books deleted scenes -

The first draft of the book ran to 105K words, about 15K above the market length for books like Badlands. When it came to writing the second draft, I had to take a long hard look at the story and figure out where to make changes. In the end, I deleted an entire storyline featuring Goddard and the female detective who has a bit part in the final book, Robyn Pierce. 

In draft one, Pierce and Goddard were lovers, and their relationship was designed to show how Goddard charms people into believing he’s one of the good guys on one hand, and how he then uses the information he gets on them to manipulate and control them to do what he wants. 


How hard was it to cut out the deleted scenes and was it harder with any specific ones?

It wasn’t too hard really. When it came to rewriting, knowing I needed to cut a huge amount of words to make the book fit the target length, I realised that everything that happens in the Goddard/Pierce storyline was covered in Goddard’s relationship with Willow so I took the decision to cut that whole part of the story. It meant that the Pierce character you see in the book doesn’t have much character development, but the finished book is tighter for it. 


If you could go back and change things would you leave any of the deleted scenes in?

No, I’m happy with all the decisions I took with regards to deleting scenes. Plus, the scenes I did delete are still in a word doc, and it would only take a little bit of tweaking to make them work in a sequel. 


Where can we purchase the book?

http://mybook.to/badlandsdarkstroke


Where can people connect with you?

https://garykruse.co.uk/


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