“Well-Behaved Monsters” — a glimpse at the original draft

Howdy there, dear readers. I stumbled upon this in an old box a few days ago and thought it too coincidental not to share, considering that it’s an early draft snippet of what became Well-Behaved Monsters. With some handwritten notes up top, after I printed it out for a writer’s club meeting.

It’s interesting to look back at old drafts and compare them versus the finished product. What almost always happens — and is the case here — is that you inevitably think, eh, I probably mostly was correct with the edits I made over time…but man, there’s a line or two I kind of wish I hadn’t changed.

And this brings to mind other related topics, too, which I either hadn’t gotten around to mentioning yet, forgot to mention yet, or else forgot about entirely. In the first version of this entire project, it was actually two fully completed books that took the same material and characters and themes from this era and had them separated out, depending upon a few loose categories. As you might gather from the handwritten note above, one of these was titled Flirtation Device. But that “half” of the project (they weren’t sequential, but literally fully segregated, where each book has no “knowledge” of the other) for example didn’t even include the Lily character, not at all, which now seems completely preposterous. As it should, which you…