The "Other" Ending to Premeditated

A few days before Premeditated hit shelves, I went to Twitter and posed a question: Do you like to know when there was another possible ending to a story that didn't make the cut? It's sort of like asking if people like the alternate scenes on movies, I guess, because all of the answers I got were definite "Yes."

So, guess what? I'm going to discuss the alternate ending to Premeditated. I won't be posting alternate chapters, or talking about the actual end of the novel, however, so there won't be any spoilers for people still or about to read the book. But, just in case, if you don't want to risk spoiling the novel GO AWAY.

Too harsh? Fine. Move along spoiler-haters, nothin' to see here.

Okay, so for those of you who have read the book, you know that the main character - Dinah - has two life-long best friends: Tabs and Brucey. The overwhelming response is that pretty much everyone loves Brucey, the movie-quoting, Star Wars-jailbreaking, klepto-faking, techno-Goth. He's a complicated guy with a loud mouth and a quick quip.

Well, in the "other version" of the story, he's also the one who broke Claire's heart.

You can actually still see some of the set-up for that ending in the story as it is. And yes, it would have been a complete gut-punch of an ending for Dinah to discover that her buddy was the villain rather than the guy she thought it was. Unfortunately, a couple of things happened"

1 - I can't write short to save my life, and the Brucey ending involved a lot more words. Contemporary novels generally top out around 70,000 words, and mine was already over 80,000.

2 - I loved Brucey's voice so much that I decided I wanted him for something else, too, so I didn't make him a "villain." (Villain is in quotes there because the Brucey story was far more complex and involved many, many shades of things both good and bad.)

So there you go -- the thing that might have been.

I'm curious as to which ending those of you who've read the novel think would have been the more powerful one.

(But please, if you answer, do it without using character names so as to not spoil those who don't want to be spoiled.)

Thanks!