Slashing...

I cut an entire scene where Brendan and Jeremy go to one of Uncle Owen's bars, even though Brendan's underage. It felt wrong. First I tried to shift the place into being a restaurant and bar, like Ye Olde King's Head in Santa Monica. That place has dining on one side and the bar through a door to the other side.

But that was requiring some serious word dancing and seemed too much like busy-work and repetitious, since he does the same thing with Scott, later...albeit into a gay bar. So that's a good 3 pages gone.

BUT...I added in a bit at the gay bar where Brendan almost runs into Carla, a nurse at the doctor's office he was taken to, a few times. She's someone he automatically takes a dislike to, but doesn't remember anything about the visits except for slashing visuals that lead him to believe she molested him while he was mentally incapacitated. It's never going to be specifically discussed, but it adds to his sense of confusion and wariness.

Now I'm at a point where I need to know when Sam Houston Book Shop transferred operations into the Galleria. I know they were there in 1980, but the store had been around for nearly 35 years prior to that. But this is Christmas 1973 and I'm not sure they were there. I don't want to make a mistake and have him reference them years before their arrival.

But all I can find online is lots of discussion about the high-end stores and when they arrived, along with a few of the smaller shops and restaurants. The expansions. Lots of photos of the exterior through the years. But no word about Sam Houston.

I worked there from 1985-1992 before moving to LA. I remember a lot of the place, but that's starting ten years after the point where Brendan is in town. He doesn't like going to the Galleria because the prices are too high for him, but he does like ice skating around the rink on the ground floor of the main part of the mall.

It's the one thing he now has that does not connect him to his past in Derry.