The Night Huntress series is a New York Times, USA Today, and internationally bestselling series that has been published in twenty different countries. Just writing that is humbling, because originally I hadn’t intended for it to be a series at all.
Although I had wanted to be a writer since I started fashioning stories out of my dreams at age twelve, I’d never had the fortitude to finish an entire novel. Fast-forward to age twenty-nine when I had a dream about a half-vampire woman arguing with a vampire man about why she’d left him. In the dream, I knew the half-vampire woman still loved her fanged former boyfriend but didn’t believe they could make it as a couple. I also knew the man had been looking for her for years and wasn’t about to give up now that he’d finally found her. Over the next several days, I couldn’t stop thinking about the dream. Who were those people? Why had she left him if she loved him? Why had he kept looking for her even after years of no word? How did they fall in love, and what tore them apart? And how did a half-vampire come to be, anyway? Answering those questions eventually became my first novel, Halfway to the Grave. Thus, Cat and Bones’s story was born.
Much to my surprise, Halfway to the Grave didn’t finish Cat and Bones’s story. In fact, I hadn’t even gotten to the scene from my dream yet. So as soon as I finished the first book, I started the second one. When I reached the end of that, I realized I was still nowhere near done with their story, so I started writing the third novel. When I finished that, I immediately started the fourth one.
At this point, my husband suggested that I should see if I could get the first novel published before I kept writing more in the same series. I agreed, albeit reluctantly because I wasn’t optimistic about my chances. Still, pursuing publication would be a good way to keep writing while also pacifying my husband, so I began looking into how to get published. This was back in 2004, and I knew nothing about the process, nor did I know anyone in the industry. The digital market didn’t exist at this point, so self-publishing wasn’t a viable option. My chances seemed limited to having a major publisher take a chance on me or never being published at all.
I’ll sum up the next two years by saying that I learned about the industry the hard way, such as being scammed by a pay-for-service literary agent. I also learned the hard way that finishing a novel did not mean the novel was ready to be shopped for publication. Since I had written Halfway to the Grave for my own entertainment, I didn’t think about things like pacing, sticking to the main plot instead of exploring side stories, staying within genre constraints, or a host of other things that resulted in many, many cuts and rewrites. In 2006, I signed with a legitimate agent who sold the first two Night Huntress novels to Harper Collins. In late 2007, preorders for Halfway to the Grave were strong enough that Harper bought three more novels before the first one was officially released. Their prediction proved correct: Halfway to the Grave debuted on both the New York Times and the USA Today bestseller lists. No one was more surprised about this than me: I made my editor e-mail me a copy of both lists before I believed her.
I ended up being ridiculously blessed by having all seven novels in the Night Huntress series hit those and other bestseller lists. Cat and Bones’s story came to its conclusion in Up from the Grave, although they have and will continue to appear as side characters in spin-off novels from the Night Huntress series. For all the reasons listed above, a lot of scenes from Halfway to the Grave, One Foot in the Grave, At Grave’s End, and Destined for an Early Grave ended up on the cutting-room floor. Putting them all together made me realize that they equated to more than the size of a full-length novel.
As mentioned, when I originally wrote the books, I didn’t only write scenes that advanced the main plot forward at the most brisk pace possible. Instead, in those first drafts, I took more time to explore the characters through alternate scenarios, multiple side plots, additional backstory, and increased revelations. I also wrote several love scenes that never made it into the final versions of the books. It was very, very hard to take those scenes out and to make a choice between different versions when the time came, which is why I saved those old versions instead of deleting them. Over the years, readers requested that I post some of the deleted scenes and/or alternate versions, and I did release a handful of them. Much to my surprise, the overwhelming response I received was that readers wanted more. That is why I decided to compile the best of the deleted scenes and alternate versions into an anthology of sorts, so that readers could see the untold side of Cat and Bones’s story in addition to the official, published novels.
This was a big task. I had several different versions of each of the first four novels spread out across old disks, CDs, and/or backup files on my hard drive. For added amusement, some of the files were password protected, and in the decade-plus since I wrote them, I forgot what the passwords were. That meant I had to comb through over ten years of Sent files on my e-mail to see if I’d e-mailed the story to any friends for feedback (I had, thank God!) Then, once I had versions that I could actually open, I had to comb through them to pull out the scenes and alternate versions that people would hopefully want to read. I also wanted to include commentary as to why a particular scene or version didn’t make it into the official version so that readers would get a glimpse into the process. Finally, I sent the entire compilation to be professionally edited and proofread. Needless to say, in its original state, there were grammar and spelling errors galore.
The result is Outtakes from the Grave, which includes both previously published as well as never-before-seen deleted scenes and alternate versions with behind-the-scenes commentary and explanations. Where necessary, I’ve also included bits of scenes that ended up in the published versions to provide context for the deleted/alternate scenes so that they’re easier to read. I hope you enjoy getting a chance to explore the adventures of Cat, Bones, and the Night Huntress gang more deeply with these stories and that you enjoy seeing “what might have been” with versions of events that differ from the ones in the books.
The scenes and versions are listed in chronological order according to the series timeline. Each scene or alternate version is broken into its own individual chapter, so you can read them all or skip to the ones you’re most interested in. As always, thank you, readers, for taking this journey along with me. I hope you’ve enjoyed the ride as much as I have.