Guest Post: Flame of Surrender

Flame of Surrender by Rhiannon Paille

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Author Rhiannon Paille is stopping by with a guest post in the spirit of release day for her new book Flame of Surrender, Book 1 in the Flame and the Ferryman series. Be on the lookout for the review of this wild fantasy ride!

About Rhi:

Rhi was never a normal girl. She tried, but she couldn’t get rid of the visions, the voices in her head, and the hallucinations. When she was on the edge of crazy someone pulled her back and explained it all. She wasn’t insane. She was psychic, really psychic, too psychic. Her life was an urban fantasy wrapped in a paranormal romance and served with a side of horror. To escape her everyday weirdness she began writing fantasy. She frequents twitter and facebook, and can be found at www.rhiannonpaille.com

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Flame of Surrender Deleted Scenes

There were A LOT of things that got deleted in FoS, so let me try to sum them up and then tell you roughly why.

1) The Villains POV 

There were about 20,000 words from the Villain’s POV that went away. Salvaged from the wreckage was that crazy disturbing torture scene. I loved it, but my BETA readers kept saying the same thing, “I was getting into it and then I hit the Villain POV and it went blah on me.” So I had to take them out because they didn’t work with the flow. We’re not living in the 90’s where Epic Fantasy Authors write 1100 page books and simultaneously follow three or four different storylines at once. We’re in the digital, technology age and we like our books to be one story at a time because there are so many of them out there to read. It’s much friendlier to the reader to divide up all those subplots and do spin offs and separate stories than to build this entirely huge network of a book right off the bat. Plus, agents and editors will go cross eyed if you send them something that’s 250k words and it’s your first book. So I axed this entire thread because it didn’t keep the book flowing.

2) The Tower Scene

This was a scene that originally I hadn’t planned for and then it just happened and then when I was reading the book through and checking all my p’s and q’s I felt like it was just too much. The characters are in turmoil, having this sexy moment between all the stuff on their mind is nice and all, but it’s two pages in the midst of close to four hundred and I didn’t see the point of it being there when there’s all the other kissing scenes and making love scenes already in the book. Plainly, it seemed like overkill, but that doesn’t mean it can’t exist somewhere else right?

3) Krishani destroying things in Amersil

This was crafty of me because in the beginning chapters I talk about five different instances of Krishani destroying things, but I don’t go into vivid detail of these things. That was an earlier version of the book that had the scenes where Krishani destroyed things in the present instead of having flashbacks of destroying things. The reason this was removed was because it didn’t fit into the timeline of the book, and I didn’t want to do any flipping back and forth in the time line. It’s confusing enough chronicling three years of Kaliel andKrishani’s lives without me taking liberties with my author prowess and heading back in time as well as forwards. I always hated it when books would jump around and I had to pay attention to figure out if this scene is from the past, present, or future. The way the book is now, it’s always the present, and time only moves forward, signified by me talking about the seasons, the festivals or straight up saying it’s been six moons. (moons being months)

And that was all the major cuts to the book, I tried to keep my cutting light because the book is 105,00 words now, the first draft was 170,000 words, and then my second draft was 135,000 words. A lot of that was grammar, spelling and sentence structure stuff. I got rid of A LOT of fluff stuff that made no sense and sounded funny.