Hello, Rebel Max here. Roy asked me to present the Volume I Outtakes and I was happy to step up. I like what he does in the posts, they’re funny and informative, and I hope that I can be as engaging.
First, let me explain what the Outtakes are. When we decided on the stories for Volume I, some were already written and got chopped up into the installments we presented for the issues. In that editing process, some chunks of the stories were left on the cutting room floor. You can think of the Outtakes as the deleted scenes from a movie or TV show, or what’s left out of a written work for the sake of brevity.
Today:
The journal that I keep about my time in Ladoga, NC is an actual journal and I have managed to fill a few with the type of stories featured in Vol. I. Around the time that many of the Vol. I journal selections were written, I came across a handmade newsletter in Ladoga that had apparently existed for a long time, and in my curiosity to discover who had been producing it for so long, I ended up learning a lot about Ladoga’s tragic history, from both its recent and distant past. I’m still developing a lot of the work on that stuff and I hope to feature it in Vol. II. Today’s outtake from the journal was written right before the story that appears in Issue 12, In the Park, and we decided to cut it because it created a tangent that I wasn’t ready to fully explore and we thought it could work well to introduce the stories I’m working on for Vol. II. I wanted to present it as an outtake because it exists in the space between Vol. I and Vol. II in my mind.
Roy’s Stone Hand (leaders and Leadership) also has quite a few outtakes. He explained to me that he’s been writing poems about Stone Hand since 2007 and the poems have spawned a host of characters that were excluded or condensed in the Vol. I run in order to create a clear narrative push for the collection. Today’s outtake is from a series of sonnets that Roy wrote about the Critic character who appears in a couple of the poems that were featured in Vol. I. He said he chose this poem because it elaborates on the personality of the Critic in the same way he elaborates on the personality of Stone Hand, with a series of phrases and images that create a rough sketch of the men that stand as a symbols of the types of people they hope to represent.
There are more outtakes to come and we hope you enjoy. The archives for every serial we’ve featured so far will be available soon, and I should mention that we are working on that printable version of the issues that Roy promised months ago. He’s in charge of the layout design and he’s never satisfied, so its taking some time, but I think it will be worth the wait.
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