Sagittarius A-Star

I can’t remember if I read this tip from a writer, or started doing it because it made sense. You always write scenes and dialogue you don’t end up using. Before you kill your darlings, copy and paste the work into a separate file called ‘Deleted scenes’. You never know, you may get to dust off your work one day 😎.

In Surveillance, the software used by Erebus Optics is called A-Star, this is why . . .

** Warning - As this is deleted text it hasn’t been through my excellent copy editor or proof reader. **

Straight from the eighteenth green, Webb Fowler, Erebus Group’s Vice President of International Operations, strode into the boardroom. The six people who made up the operations team of the A-Star pilot sat around a glass-top boardroom table. Although they differed in age, sex and ethnicity, they were professionally, expensively and indistinguishably dressed. It was a scene repeated in every corporate head office across the world.

‘What did you shoot, Webb?’ asked one of the team.

‘God damn seventy-five with two in the water,’ he said, taking his seat at the head of the table. ‘The thirteenth gets me every time. What have I missed?’

‘I was briefing the team on future marketing strategies,’ said Andre DeLuca, pointing at the presentation on a large screen that dominated one wall.

‘Carry on Andre. I’ve seen the material, it’s great.’

DeLuca took the team efficiently through potential markets in order of attractiveness. She finished by stressing how A-Star would capitalise on, and enhance, the Group’s focus on becoming a leading security systems provider internationally.

 ‘I love it,’ said Fowler. ‘And we don’t want to be leading edge, we want to be at the bleeding edge.’ Heads nodded around the table. ‘Out of curiosity, who picked the new name?’

‘UPS was a stop-gap name,’ said DeLuca. ‘We couldn’t use it in the market, the other UPS would have stopped us. We gave the task to the new marketing interns to kick around and they said the software reminded them of a black hole. The black hole at the centre of the Milky Way is called Sagittarius A-Star. We loved the story but preferred the shorter version - A-Star.’

‘I love it,’ said Fowler.