All the stuff that got left out…

Boy Toy was a pretty long book when I originally turned it in. After a lot of hemming and hawing and stressing and cursing, I came to realize that the book would benefit from being shortened a bit. I ended up cutting around 150 pages from the manuscript. (The original manuscript was around 630 pages, as I recall.) Some of those cuts took the form of trimming here and there — cutting extraneous dialogue or little “bits of business.” But in some cases, entire scenes got yanked — this page serves as an archive of those scenes for readers who are interested.

And believe it or not, even that original, massive manuscript wasn’t the whole story! There were originally several subplots I had planned for the book that ended up being cut before I even wrote them. I knew that the book was getting long, so I started to cut things before they even took shape.

But the main meat of this page is the scenes that were actually cut. In reducing the book by 150 pages, I cut a lot of extraneous text, but I also removed entire scenes and even two subplots. I thought it would be cool to reproduce them here, for people who’d like to see them as they were originally intended. Each scene contains commentary by yours truly, explaining why I wrote it in the first place and then why I yanked it.

*****WARNING! SPOILERS AHOY!*****

SCENES CUT FROM THE BOOK:

SUBPLOTS THAT WERE CUT FROM THE BOOK:

  • Zik proposes to Michelle after prom, leading Josh to wonder if his best friend has lost his mind. This also causes a rift between the two of them — Zik desperately wants to win the final ballgame so that he has a shot at being drafted by the Major Leagues, but Josh doesn’t care about the game.
  • Josh’s father is seen throughout the book filling out crossword puzzles, almost fanatically. At the end of the book, Josh can’t believe how calmly and rationally his father is handling his mother’s infidelity. That’s when he happens to open Dad’s crossword puzzle book and finds every puzzle filled out with words like, “Bitch,” “Unfaithful,” “Whore,” “Liar,” “Adulteress,” and the like.

SUBPLOTS THAT WERE NEVER ADDED TO THE BOOK:

  • A special study project Josh was working on with his calculus teacher. This was intended to drive home Josh’s math genius and to show that he had at least one relationship with a trustworthy adult.
  • The revelation that Josh’s Dad was obsessed Eve and had a computer archive of all the news stories about her.
  • The full story behind Eve’s time as a high school teacher.
  • Based on things said to him by Dr. Kennedy and Eve, Josh begins to wonder if he was abused when he was younger, before Eve met him, by his own mother.