These posts are scenes, chapters and other material that I cut out completely during the editing process. I’ll mark each entry with which book they were cut from so if you haven’t read a particular book yet you can avoid spoiling it. If a piece has no spoiling effect I’ll indicate that.

Alternate prologue for ‘Isle of Echoes’: I cut this as it doesn’t start the story, add a hook or introduce any main characters. Instead I switched the prologue to a scene from the past that sets up one of the main plot arcs of the book and series. The pattern of prologue being a past episode related to the main plot will carry over into the other books of the series. It has no spoilers in it.
The chronicling of past events is a source of entertaining stories; the investigation of how people lived in ancient times is a field worthy of study. History though can be more than either of these – more than amusement or academic endeavour. To be most useful to the sentient world, history needs to reveal or to demonstrate the causes of the events it describes – to find the origins of the tale. To expose what motivated the heroes to their great deeds; the ordinary folk to their endurance; the despots to their villainy. It must present those findings to the world, not only as a lifeless listing of what once was, but as a reflection in the mirror of what is now happening, and a gaze into the crystal ball of what may come to be.
It is clear that most surviving records of any given time are written by history’s victors. Those who come long after the heat of battle and revolution have cooled rely on partial accounts and incomplete evidence. If history is written by, at the behest, or relying on the information of those who prevail in its struggles, then inevitably it will be biased and incomplete; its warnings hidden by the hubris of the mighty. What wins wars seldom keeps peace, at least not for long.
These tales upon which we embark, therefore seek to bear the viewpoints of many. A cacophony of voices from across the ages from which, hopefully, a fuller understanding may emerge. If there is entertainment in the reading of them as well, so much the better.
The first task of course, is to decide where the origins of a sequence of events may lie – a matter more difficult than it may seem. Does the story of the house begin with the building of walls? With the foundations? With the rock on which they are built? But that rock was once the sandy bed of an ancient sea – sediments eroded from yet older mountains by Time’s patient allies, ice and water. Mountains which were themselves created by volcanic upheavals, eons before, of a planet born from melted rocks flung out from a distant star, cooled in a time before Time.
Think of a man. Does his story begin with his birth or that of his parents? Of the community they live in? The civilisation, if any, they are part of? But where did civilisation come from? Whence the first people, the first animals, the first life?
Next we consider the motivations for actions. Does anyone truly know why they acted as they did. If memory shapes experience and experience shapes choice, then what we recall of our lives governs in ways small or great what we do in each moment of the eternal present. “I did it without thinking” is said more often than it is true. Even when it is believed true, it is generally not, for much of the mind’s activity is necessarily shielded from the eye of waking consciousness. Deliberate denial is a choice rooted inexorably in our private past. If we cannot know it of ourselves in the moment, how then to ascribe with certainty the motivation of souls long dead, in cultures now extinct?
The gods may know the answers to these questions, but even they cannot know how they themselves came into being – who recalls their own birth or what came before it? The chains of causality, and consequence, stretch to infinity in opposite directions from any and every moment, so even the simplest story truly has no beginning and no end. Perhaps all the chains rejoin into one at some far future point – some believe it is so, but then people have the capacity to believe almost anything, it seems.
Yet we must, perforce, start our story somewhere and if this chosen point may later seem too far back, or too recent, well, those are but opinions, not facts, for this beginning is no more or less valid than any other link in those chains that might have been chosen. That being so, let procrastination yield to convenience, and our story telling get underway.