A Somewhat Indecent Proposal

Don’t worry, I’m not going to offer you $50 to play miniature golf at midnight in a Chuck E. Cheese costume or anything. This is a slightly different proposal, one I’ve been thinking of for a few months now.

When I was writing All the Birds in the Sky, I went through a bunch of drafts before I whipped it into the shape it’s in now. And for a long time, the ending was drastically different–not so much the final chapter, but the stuff that leads up to it.

In a lot of ways, this other ending was cleverer. It tied together a lot of the story threads and subplots in a really neat way that might have seemed really cool. It included a huge, surprising reveal, that would have changed everything you thought you knew. It would have built up to a much bigger action-packed climax. I spent months working on this other ending, and the stuff that led up to it, and in some ways I really loved it.

The reason why I scrapped that ending, and went with the one in the book, is the same reason I made a lot of other painful changes: Because it took away from the central story of Laurence and Patricia. There was just no way to give the two of them the emotional resolution they needed, and the payoff to their relationship, while also doing a big, clever, action-packed blowout ending. So in the end, I went with a much simpler climax to the novel, and I have no doubt that was the right choice.

In a couple weeks, I’m going to start posting “deleted scenes” from All the Birds in the Sky, including a lot of really fun stuff that I cut purely for length reasons. But I’m probably not going to post the alternate ending, because there’s so much of it, and it would be kind of a pain to reconstruct. Unless.

Here’s where the indecent proposal comes in. If the book actually hits one of the newspaper bestseller lists, then I will absolutely post the whole alternate ending, as soon as I can get it together. This seems like a total ridiculous longshot, but I figure there’s no harm in throwing it out there.