“If you want me to hit you again, you’ll keep talking like that,” Valkyrie said.

Deacon shut up. If looks could kill, he’d be skewered. “I know I did wrong,” he said, hanging his head. “I know I did. And I’ve already paid for it. My brother. My poor brother Dafydd. Foe thought Dafydd was me. He chased him and Dafydd… Dafydd fell into that wood chipper. He was always the clumsy one, was Dafydd. So, so clumsy…”

Valkyrie shoved him to get his attention, and when he looked up she leaned in. “If we ever hear of you doing something like that again, creating an innocent person just so you can hide behind them…”

Deacon held up his hands. “I won’t, I swear. I’ve learned my lesson. I was greedy, and selfish. But now I see that it was wrong to—”

“We don’t care,” Skulduggery said. “Run away before I shoot you.”

Deacon nodded, and started walking.

“He said run,” Valkyrie snarled, and Deacon did just that.

That’s NOT all folks!

Read on for an awesome competition, as well as deleted scenes from the first Skulduggery Pleasan book, chosen and introduced by Derek himself…

Deleted Scenes

When I got the idea for The End of the World it was pretty much as it is now. Skulduggery and Valkyrie, seen from a newcomer’s perspective, a good kid who develops a crush on our teenage heroine. Tragedy strikes, of course, as tragedy tends to do, punches are thrown, jokes are lobbed, and the sneaky, untrustworthy Deacon runs off at the end, free to get into more misadventures.

I had the idea, I wrote the story. I changed little bits, I edited it, and now it’s in your hands. How neat. How tidy. How unusual.

The books aren’t like that. The books you read (and hopefully you will read them, if you haven’t already, because they are by far the best books ever written) do not start out the way they finish. I might get done writing the first draft of a book, then completely change it for the second draft. Characters will be switched, some thrown out. Plots will be scrapped, replaced with something new. As much as possible I’ll keep scenes and chapters, but I’ll just… rearrange them a little.

My original draft of the first book, Skulduggery Pleasant, was twice as long as the published version. A lot of what I took out reappears in later books. For example, my original draft had Vengeous and Sanguine and Scapegrace playing important roles, plus a whole new subplot about Stephanie having a vision of her future. On the final page of the original version she learns the truth about her destiny, instead of how it is now, when she learns about it in the fourth book.