Banagrams Revision

You know how sometimes when you're playing Bananagrams, there's only three tiles left that don't fit in anywhere, the clock is ticking, your competition is getting closer to figuring out his/her own crossword, and you make that brave choice -you know, the one where you choose to dismantle a few words so that you can make new words out of them?

I hate that feeling.

It does have its purpose: I've won games that way. But the risk of dismantling words makes your skin crawl as those seconds tick by, as your opponent's eyes flit from one word to the next, and you ask yourself, "Is this really worth it?"

Welcome, my friends, to the feeling of revision.

I'm currently revising a part of my novel for the Amtrak Residency. It's a perfectly okay scene where Constantine walks to Denny's after finding a dead girl by the dumpster at the Outback in the middle of the day. After he gets to Denny's, he meets Kimy, who will be come -as she says- "the Sherlock to his Watson."

But I don't want a scene that's just okay. Publishers don't publish okay. Readers don't do okay. So here I am dismantling paragraphs that I liked, paragraphs that were amusing and now are falling "to the cutting room floor," as it were.

 Kill your darlings.