Doctor Johnson once famously advised, “Read over your compositions and where ever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.”
Yet there are so many instances of delight, for a writer. Phrases that suddenly uncoil and amaze, marvelous as an Indian rope trick; characters who come barging in and take over whole scenes. And how can the reader not be as fascinated as you are with details to do with tracking the human genome, or the precise use of the theodolite, or the manufacture of gravy-browning in your hero’s great-uncle’s past....
DOCTOR JOHNSON! CODE BLUE.

All the same, we've made a space where the stricken will get a chance to struggle up from the mat from time to time.
Click on any of the names at the top, or in the list below -- or follow the arrows -- to read contributions by writers brave enough to confound Dr. Johnson's famous dictum, by sending in favorite pieces that have been edited out of their published work:

- Angie Abdou
- Caroline Adderson
- Kevin Chong
- Marina Endicott
- M.A.C. Farrant
- Lucy Thora Ferrier
- Zsuzsi Gartner
- Anne Giardini
- Katherine Govier
- Frances Greenslade
- Steven Heighton
- Pauline Holdstock
- Theresa Kishkan
- John Pass
- Leslie Hall Pinder
- Adam Lewis Schroeder
- Sarah Selecky
- Mary Swan
- Susan Swan
- Antanas Sileika:
- Eva Stachniak
- Savannah
- Mary Swan
-Timothy Taylor
- Jessica Westhead
- Kathleen Winter: