Bitter Legacy's victims -- deleted scenes

Promoting ‘Blue on Blue’ this month, (the last in the ‘Bitter Legacy’ trilogy) I’ve been asked a fair bit about the writing process and what I’ve learned since I started writing for publication. Which has been hard to answer because I don’t usually think about why I’m doing anything writing-wise while I’m doing it, and I don’t think about it after I’ve done it either. That explains a lot, I hear you cry. 

One of the main things I’ve talked about though, is structure.  

When I submitted the first draft of what was to become ‘Bitter Legacy ‘ to Nicole Kimberling at Blind Eye Books, there were so many things wrong with it. But chief among them -- I’d never tried writing a mystery before, so I instinctively went with the way popular mainstream mysteries/crime thrillers are written. There are always other POVs as well as the main cop’s – usually we’re in the victims’ heads before they get the chop, sometimes we hear from the perp too, sometimes random characters… 

So though until then I’d always written in tight third, single POV, in that first draft I went with that mystery structure as I believed it was: I wrote a POV for all the victims, before their swift demise. The first thing Nicole had me do was chop all of that out and write to a totally different structure... romantic suspense, which has its own rules. And now when I read mainstream popular mysteries, I sort of squirm at all those POVs, which seem a bit incoherent and chaotic. To me. Now. Yes, I’ve become the structure police. 

Anyway – the point. I thought since we’re all looking for distractions, and ‘Bitter Legacy’ readers have only seen the book’s victims through other characters’ eyes , maybe some of you may like to hear who they (always) were as people, from their own mouths as it were. So I’m going to shove the original four (embarrassing, but never mind) POVs into the ‘Codas’ section here on the website. A quick warning though - there’s no new info there - they’re the same people as we saw in the book. It’s just a bit of fun 🙂♥️