By In other words, stuff that I just couldn’t leave on the editing room floor.
What do you do when you open an erotic romance with an imminently expectant heroine? Slow build-up, for starters. In my case, I originally started Presley Ann Woodworth’s tale, Absentminded Angel, in the days leading up to the delivery of her infant son, Whit. 
I’m a pantser, so in those opening chapters I wove in a lot of character development and worked toward the point where her romance with Kendry and Jared McCulloch would take off and the heat would follow thereafter.
During the pre-submission clean-up, after the book was finished, I realized that readers had a prologue and several chapters of build-up to read prior to the baby ever arriving. The problem there is that she would still have a postpartum recovery to get through. Pacing became a concern and I very carefully wielded the scalpel to streamline the story.
I could’ve risked that readers wouldn’t mind reading those chapters to get to the romance and heat but I opted to cut them in order to get to the action in the story. My rationale was that after release, if I felt like readers were open to reading the out-takes I could always post them on my blog for free.
I asked my street team, the Divine Divas, a wonderful supportive group of ladies on Facebook, what they thought about going back to read them, after they’d read the book. The response was overwhelmingly positive, so here I am.
Because they’re pre-submission out-takes, readers should be aware that while they’ve been beta-read, they have not been line-edited. There may be grammar or punctuation typos that they’ll have to overlook.
There are also bits of content that may seem at odds with the released version. A good example of this is Presley Ann’s Uncle Marvin. In the original story, he figured much more prominently, at least in the beginning. Readers of the out-takes will get a clear look at her relationship with him. There is also the original first scene between Presley Ann, Kendry, and Jared. It’s is a funny, sweet, and hot scene and was probably the hardest one to cut, but was necessary.
Readers may also spot short sections that look familiar because I lifted them from the cut portions and woven them into the manuscript elsewhere. An example would be the description of Whit’s father, True, and character development involving Kendry and Jared. These aren’t pervasive, but they are there.
As with the books, I own the copyright on these out-takes.
The out-takes file is sitting at 54 pages right now (about 25,000 words) It’s obviously too long to comprise one blog post so I’m breaking it into five chapter-length sections and will be scheduling posts at regular intervals. I won’t make you wait long in between.
If you enjoy them, please consider sharing the link to the blog/website with your fellow erotic romance lovers, and tell them about the Divine Creek Ranch Collection.
Expect the first installment later tonight. Sign up for my blog posts via e-mail and it’ll show up in your inbox the moment it posts.
Thank you for visiting. I look forward to sharing more with you from in Divine, Texas.
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Absentminded Angel will be available exclusively at Siren-BookStrand until around the middle of January, after which it will be uploaded to Amazon, B&N, and other legitimate retail outlets.
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