Before I started writing the stories, I played with various ideas and concepts in assorted blurbs. Some ideas made it into the finished version. Some were heavily modified first. And some were utterly rejected. Click their titles to be taken to the scenes.
1. The Lost Ones My first experiment in Ray Norman and Coley Rodman interacting. My original concept called for Coley to be there for several months before anyone else from 1874 appeared, instead of two weeks. He and Ray had a much different type of interaction, largely because at this point, I hadn't even written Lazarus, which softened Coley up for his meeting with Ray at its end. Hence, in this first edition, where Coley hasn't teamed up with Arte, Coley is harder and even more of a wild card, not entirely sure what he wants regarding giving up crime.
2. Unexpected Continuing in this same first edition verse, this is the original stand-off between Coley and Ray's enemy, Jason Everly.
3. New Meeting, New Time; A New Leaf; and Broken There are three blurbs in one post by following this link. Proceeding with this very strange and experimental verse, we have Jim and Arte meeting Coley for the first time in 2012 (with the events of Lazarus not having happened), Jim and Arte talking with Ray, and a thing that was just shameless Ray hurt/comfort and experimenting with character reactions. The first two blurbs ended up being entirely reworked in Time Travel as Ray and Coley's meeting with a suspicious Perry Mason. The third one has not occurred in any form; it is not needed. But I might rework it sometime as a stand-alone, if I ever get the desire.
4. All That I'm Fighting For The original concept called for Coley to be tortured by a nameless scientist when he first arrived, and for Pinto to take him later, necessitating a rescue by Ray, Jim, and Arte, working together for the first time. I regretted omitting the idea, because I loved writing the rescue scene so much, but I knew that for a stronger, tighter story, the nameless scientist should be dropped and Coley should only ever be tortured by Pinto, during the point of the story when the scientist would have had him instead. Some of Coley's conversation with Pinto was reworked into flashbacks in Time Travel.
5. Out of Time and Place The conceptual climax for the conceptual story The Night of the Bounty Hunter. Behold the Lord of Limbo-ish idea in all its weirdness!