I know. I have to update my website. It is coming, people! It is on the list of things to do.

Especially since so many of you want to know when Blue Bloods 3: REVELATIONS is coming out. Right now it is scheduled for Fall 2008!!!! FALL 2008!!!!

I am currently writing the book, which has necessitated re-reading Blue Bloods and Masquerade again. Which brings to mind this interview from Nick Hornby, whose new book is a YA novel called SLAM and which I must buy as soon as possible as I love Nick Hornby. (Although I did not love "A Long Way Down" that much. I think I almost hated it. It felt too contrived somehow. But I looooooved "High Fidelity" and "About a Boy" and "How to Be Good" so much that I’m hoping "Slam" is in their league and not in "A Long Way Down" league.)

Anyway, here’s what he says about reading his own work:

RADAR: I read somewhere that you can’t stand going back and reading your own work. Is that true?
NICK HORNBY: I think you can get sick of the sound of your own voice. Especially to
oneself, one’s own voice is so distinctive and whatever it is you start
off doing, it still comes out in your voice and you think, oh, fucking
hell, it’s me again. So, I think it’s analogous with cooking. I mean,
I’m sure even Gordon Ramsay doesn’t want to eat his own cooking all the
time. You just get sick of the way something tastes; it always tastes
of you. That’s what I kind of struggle with. And when you go on a
reading tour as well, you’re very exposed to the same bits of writing
again and again and again for a month, so by the end of it you think,
Jesus, really, what was I thinking of?

—-

TOO FUNNY. Because that was kind of what I was experiencing while I read my own books. WHAT THE HELL WAS I THINKING?

Because I had to remember WHY I put things in there, and WHY I hinted at that, or WHY she does this. And I couldn’t remember! Because I had written Blue Bloods like two years ago and Masquerade a year ago! At the time I was writing both books, I thought "oh there’s no reason to write down WHY because it’s all in my head" and now I wish I had made notes to myself.

Grummppppph.

But it’s okay. I remember everything now. Just had to jog the old noggin a bit. Shake it up.

One of my fabulous readers asked if I could post some deleted scenes from Blue Bloods or Masquerade and I thought that sounded fun, so I’m posting a couple of deleted scenes from Blue Bloods today.

BLUE BLOODS DELETED/CHANGED SCENE – FIRST CHAPTER

AUTHOR’S COMMENTARY: I had a LOT of fun writing the first chapter of Blue Bloods because it was based on true-life experiences. Me and my best friend Morgan used to go to this club called THE BANK which was the only goth club in New York. Unlike a lot of NYC clubs, it was an all-access kind of place, there were no snooty velvet ropes and no annoying traders commandeering tables and ordering $500 bottles of vodka. But a lot of the descriptions of the club was making the story very SLOW. So it had to go. Here’s one of the earlier versions of the first chapter.

Every weekend the club was filled with hundreds of black-clad
teenagers humming, swaying and drifting to the Trance music’s lazy, intermittent
rhythm. Already that night, the line in front of the club wormed down
the block, a raggedy mix of thin, neurasthenic girls swathed in
oversized blazers and gypsy skirts, and pretty, frail boys wearing
eyeliner. 

“Why did I wear this skirt, I hate this skirt,” Schuyler muttered. She didn’t know why she was so worried. The Bank was the last place in Manhattan that wasn’t overrun with celebrities and wannabe celebrities and the gawkers suitably star-struck enough to pay money to be near them. The Bank was too corny, too earnestly weird, and too cheap for that. The days when passed-out WB starlets were found in the VIP room were long gone. Which was the only reason she had agreed to go. That and the promise of dancing in The Pit (a mosh pit behind the teller windows).

Just then, the line began to move.  Oliver grinned. She was glad she hadn’t chickened out on their evening after all. Even though she could never really say No to Oliver. Aside from her grandmother, he was the only one in the world who cared about her. She took a step forward.

She should never have let Ollie talk her into buying a fake ID—her first foray into identity theft! It was a Maryland license, easier to duplicate because unlike the New York kind, it lacked a watermark. Oliver coolly surrendered his Hawaiian one—another easy state, Dylan’s connection had assured, since few bartenders in the city knew what a real one looked like. Schuyler blanched as the stone-faced doorman slid the cards under the infrared machine.

Nothing happened.

It felt like time had stopped. Then just like that, the doorman suddenly returned their cards and waved them forward.

Schuyler exhaled. She and Oliver exchanged a restrained look of glee.

They floated inside the club, feeling heady from smell of the beer-sweat and musk, the music slithering into their blood, already making them dizzy with the sopoforic sound, powerless to the pull of the relentless bassline. They were inside.

_____

BLUE BLOODS/FIRST CHAPTER: ALTERNATE ENDING
AUTHOR’S COMMENTARY: My original idea was to end the chapter with the end of their evening. But in rewriting, I realized that getting IN the club was a good place to end it. Sometimes it’s better to say less than more.

It was almost five in the morning, the technical end of the evening, (since by law, the nightclub had to close, but it opened again at six until noon for the dawn crowd), and Schuyler took one last lap around the balcony, looking for Oliver. It had been a manic, surreal night. They’d wandered around the club for hours, taking in all the strange and delightful sights—the downstairs bazaar that sold all kinds of rubber bracelets and studded jewelry, the hang-out room by the co-ed bathrooms where six-foot-tall drag queens repaired their makeup and gossiped about the DJs, the upstairs lounge, where Schuyler had sat, Indian-style by the floor-to-ceiling windows to get some rest, and two frat boys in alma mater Ts and new Diesel jeans (‘alterno-seeking-tourists from the tri-state hinterlands’ Oliver called them) tapped her politely on the shoulder and asked, “Got any?”

Schuyler was flattered to have been mistaken for a drug dealer. She liked The Bank. She liked the fact that someone had fashioned a bed out of the metal chairs by the balcony and was snoring loudly on it. She liked how empty it was—she and Oliver rattled around the topmost floors like pebbles in a big glass jar, lost in an Alice-in-Wonderland funhouse. She’d been disoriented for a minute there, when she’d turned the corner to the ladies’ room and encountered a blank wall instead. For a moment, she had no idea where she was. The walls were suddenly bright and clean instead of dark and grimy, and in the distance, she could hear the soft sounds of typing.

A tall man came out of the shadows. He was handsome, with a fine crown of silver hair. He was wearing a well-cut English suit and looked completely out of place at The Bank. He locked eyes with Schuyler for a moment.

“Hey where are you–?” she tried to ask.

But as soon as she did, he disappeared into the darkness.

And then the noise faded and when she blinked her eyes, she was in the shadowy recesses of the nightclub again. Still, it didn’t scare her. Absurdly, The Bank felt like home.

She was alone. Dylan had gone for a smoke and had never returned, and now even Oliver was missing. He’d promised to get another round of drinks, but that was hours ago. It wasn’t like him to leave her in the lurch like that—she’d been looking forward to splitting a ride back uptown and having an early, ravenous breakfast of pancakes and milk shakes before he dropped her off at home. She tried his cell again. No answer. She didn’t know what to do. Stay or go? What if he’d already left?

So she bundled up, folding her hands underneath her armpits, cold in her thin sweater, walked downstairs, to the front, past many posted signs that warned NO RE-ENTRY! EXIT FINAL! LEAVE AT YOUR OWN RISK! before finally finding the swinging doors that led outside. She stood in front of the sidewalk to hail a taxi.

Oliver could take care of himself, and she could do the same.

—-

AUTHOR’S COMMENTARY: In re-reading this, I kind of wish I had kept some of it in. Especially seeing the old guy (who turns out to be Charles Force later). But like I said earlier, the chapter really needs to end with Sky and Ollie getting IN the club. After that, it’s just extra…

This chapter reminds me of how much I love nightclubs. The part about some guy sleeping on a few chairs upstairs? Totally true. I always felt very at-home at New York City nightclubs. We used to go to this after-hours club called The Sound Factory (which then became Twilo and now I think is closed). And I looked so at home there that nightclub newbies thought I was a drug dealer! Because who else looks at home at a nightclub right?? Like Schuyler, I felt flattered. It just showed that I belonged there. Sound Factory was the place where Madonna hired all her dancers. We would see them at the club (we knew them from the documentary). It was this illicit, fabulous, only-in-New-York kind of place. I loved it.

Wow. This is really fun. And I found a great deleted scene in another file which I’ll post tomorrow!

xoxo

Mel