Goodbye Sally Fox!

Adventure Eddy: Chapter Eighteen

I've been thinking a lot about what my father said, regarding Adventure Eddy. And I've come to a decision...

When the time comes (when I've finally finished writing the damn thing) the first bit that will be cut will be the first eight chapters.

Snip. No mercy. No reprieve. No re-writes. Just the whole lot gone.

Because, to be honest, they're not essential to the story.

I think writing them was an essential process. It took me with Eddy on his journey from the Wykeham Hotel to the American University of Paris. But plotwise, it established very little.

Eddy lost his job and his girlfriend dumped him. Basically, I wanted to establish that Eddy was pretty pathetic and throw him into Paris with a lot of growing up to do.

But, thinking about it, none of that is essential to the story. The story of Adventure Eddy really begins at Chapter Nine, when the first hotel gets hit by the robbers.

That would be an awesome start to the story.

So it will be.

The focus of the book is on Paris. The real meat of the adventure story is foiling the hotel robbers. The romantic story involves Eddy's unrequited crush on Kat. The eight or so chapter set in Winchester address none of that. They're really not needed.

If I snip them, what do we lose?

Well, in truth, not a lot. The stage has already been set for Eddy to return to Winchester in The Bootleg Boys. Most of the characters we met in the first eight chapters of Adventure Eddy get recycled one way or another. Angus Connelly, of course, is Eddy's best friend and in almost all the Adventure Eddy stories. The borish Tim Pleasant features heavily in unwritten story The Widow of Winchester. Mr B and Chef share quite a few similarities with Curtis Fallon and Chef from The Island Affair, so their fate is secure.

The only person who really falls by the wayside is Sally.

Sally Fox. A unique character. Why? Because she's about the only character I've ever written about who wasn't, in some part, based on a real person.

I needed a plot device. I needed a character to date Eddy, treat him appaulingly and then dump him. That was Sally's only real purpose. So I picked the name Sally because, a long time ago, my then ex girlfriend suggested the name Sally Fox for a character based on her.

But in reality, the Sally in Adventure Eddy isn't anybody. She's a blob, just like she accuses Eddy of being. So she's facing the final, horrible chop.

This now means I can trim a lot of the stuff that happens over Christmas, when Eddy returns to Winchester. You guys haven't read that yet. When the time comes, I'll post my original draft, but I think now the whole sequence set in The Royal Oak, when Eddy encounters Sally again, will face the snip too.

Let's keep Adventure Eddy all about the adventure.