Behind the
Scenes

Scenes cut from The Rosewater Bookstore

The Rosewater Bookstore was once about 116,000 words long. The novel you will read is closer to 109,000. The seven thousand words in between did not disappear. Some of them are here.

These are scenes I wrote for the novel and later cut. Most came out because the story moved faster without them. A few came out because another chapter did the same work better.

These are first-draft pages. They carry the ordinary faults of a first draft, the telling that follows the showing, the line that explains what the scene has already done. Most of it gets cut or rewritten later. That is part of what I am showing you.

Each scene appears as I drafted it, with a short note on where it once sat in the book. None of them is part of the finished novel, and none of them gives away how it ends.

New scenes will go up here until the novel comes out in October 2027. To hear when the next one is posted, join my newsletter.