Cold cuts

I haven’t been posting much, not because I’m off on vacation, but because I’m in the middle of one of my busiest weeks in recent memory. Since last Monday, I’ve been doing a final read-through and edit of the mammoth 770-page Roll the Bones manuscript. I’ve really streamlined the book, cutting about 80 pages so far. I’m contractually prohibited from giving you a sneak peek at the actual manuscript, but I think I can show you a few things I’ve cut. Here goes:

It was this kind of publicity that led Dostoyevsky to declare that the press expiated on the splendor of Rhine resorts and the huge sums of money waiting to be won there. Such appeals may have been crass, but they were effective.
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A large part of the attraction, both for vacationers and the cash-strapped margrave, was gambling.
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Others tried to shift the credit of the invention of gambling. Socrates, speaking in Plato’s Padres, credits the Egyptian god Thoth, whom he called Theuth, with inventing a host of things, including numbers, mathematics, astronomy, writing, and gambling at “draughts and dice.” Interestingly, both Palamedes and Thoth were considered personifications of wisdom.
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Just as the Alps allowed cards to pass over them, they did not shield the Rhineland from the bonfires of the vanities directed against gambling in Italy. John Capistranus, a disciple of the eloquent St. Bernardin, continued to preach against gambling. In 1452, he embarked on a mission to Germany where, at Nuremberg, he delivered a three-hour Latin sermon (helpfully translated into the vernacular by an acolyte) that soon had the audience whipped into a frenzy. Not to be outdone by their Christian brethren to the south, they created a bonfire of vanities to rival any in Italy, in which 76 jaunting sledges, 3640 backgammon boards, 40,000 dice, and an unknown but considerable number of cards were charred.
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and future generations of sadists would torture poultry only for their own twisted pleasure, and not for profit
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You’ve got to read that last line in context, which no one ever will, because I cut it, but it made sense.

My biggest challenge is to finish the editing tonight and get my column for the Business Press in by tomorrow’s deadline. Think they’ll want a page worth of random, garbled sentences that I’ve cut from the manuscript? I’ll probably go with a “year in perspective” thing instead.

If anyone wants to see it, I’ve put together a poem by re-arranging some of my discarded lines. Know any literary journals who take unsolicited submissions?