Bunny fodder

I hear feminine sobbing and sniffing coming from somewhere in the midst of the crumpled pages that litter my floor. Ms. Wildstar, the most likely suspect, is over at the edge of the room trading beautiful and handsome adjectives with Xander.

Delilah is languidly combing out her lusciously long, curly, ebony hair far too close to the adverb storage crates for my liking. And she's not sobbing. She's casting coy looks at Nekar and Zsmed.

Unless the rabid dust bunnies did a real number on Marin's manly bits, I'm thinking it's not him crawling back into our midst. Everyone else seems to be accounted for.

Hmm. I give up all pretense of writing and dig around in the paper until I uncover the culprit. "Trala?"

She looks up at me with tear-filled blue eyes. "You remembered my name!"

"Yes, well, I do that. I wrote you, for goodness sake. You're right here." I point to one of my character sheets where her name and information are neatly typed. Of course, there's also a big, thick sharpie line through it all.

Her sobs elevate to full-fledged wailing.

"Oh, shut up you whiny woman. It's not like you're the only one cut around here." I point to all the others who are shaking their heads and rolling their eyes at her.

She takes a deep shuddering breath and holds up a scrap of paper—recently cut from the sequel I gather by its position near the top of the pile. "She says I'm sappy and boring."

"Ms. MC never liked you. I thought that was pretty clear from the original scene you played an active part in."

"She was just jealous." Trala balls up the paper and tosses it aside. "Mr. MC bought me a pretty blue dress. It matches my eyes." She batts them at me as if I hadn't noticed them yet.

"Very true. But she was already jealous of the other women Mr. MC spent time with. You were an anvil."

"Are you saying I'm heavy?"

I'm saying you're not real bright, you dimwit. Yet another reason you got cut. "Noooo, I'm saying I’d made the point twice and in this case, the third time was not the charm. It was the anvil hitting the reader over the head."

"What about the other girls, did they get to stay? Are they lighter than me?"

I smack my forehead. "There were a few that floated away, the rest were heavy anvils like you. You're not alone, dear." I pat her little head. Huh, sounds rather like a ripe watermelon.

There are times when a character can be less than intelligent and it works within the story. Trala was not one of them. She was just aggravatingly dim and that made her all wrong as a love interest for Mr. MC. Not only that, but when I decided to add more of a romance twist to the novel, those 'other women' had to go unless they served a major purpose. This one, nope, not one of the lucky two.

Hmm. On second thought, the 'lucky two' both ended up dead, so I suppose they weren't so lucky after all. Hey, I might be on to something here...

"Hey Trala, I hear there are some cute bunnies behind the desk. Maybe you should go look for them and see if they are hungry."

"I love bunnies!" Her face bursts into a grin that reeks of unicorns, sparkly rainbows and i-s dotted with little hearts. She dashes off into the shadows.

Population control at its finest.