As I writer, I tend to write long....which is not a good thing. Flabby prose can never be excellent prose, and forcing your reader to slog through any more words than are truly necessary is a sin against art (along with being boring, being pretentious, and being imprecise.) I treasure good editing, and was lucky enough to work with Lucia Macro, an editor at Morrow, on both of my novels. Lucia took over 30,000 words out of THE ROMANOV BRIDES and no one will miss them (but me.) Now that the book's publication date is upon us, I have decided to resuscitate one of the chapters that ended up on the cutting room floor. I can justify this! I am giving potential readers a chance to sample the tone of the novel! But also it makes me happy to think these scenes that I labored over are not lost totally and forever. If curious, you can find this excerpt on my website, claremchugh.com.