Just putting this here because I always think it’s interesting to watch a story evolve in editing:
Draft 1:
The ball room was engorged with luxuriant pageantry. Wealth, pettiness and excess dripped from every surface, every person. Light flashed from fabrics and jewels in a thousand colors. People glittered in costumes both oversized and overly-revealing, men and women alike discarding every social norm in their clothing and behavior. As he worked through the crowd, Arthur pushed past men in sweeping ball gowns and women dressed as pirate kings and fairy princes. Expensive colognes wound together with the rich fragrances of delicacies rising from the banquet tables, and with pungent sweat. Even the rich still smelled human, he thought with nasty satisfaction. Here and there, he smelled the smoke of marijuana and opium. On a dais on the far wall, a chamber orchestra played, adding to the noise.
vs Draft 2:
The ballroom was bloated with luxury. Just…just look at these fucking people: wealth, excess and pettiness oozing from their every rouge-powdered pore. Dressed in costumes dripping in jewels and precious metals that flashed as they sailed and spun through the room till Ezra felt dizzy from walking through a living kaleidoscope. Some of them were more boat than clothing: acres of glossy, lush fabric swathing a single person, with collars that needed scaffolding to support them and skirts so wide they had to turn sideways at the doors. The cost must have been ridiculous. Just one of these outfits could have fed his whole town for a day.
When he had a town, that was.
The buffet tables groaned with more food than a community of miners or railroad workers could have polished off. Expensive-looking foods Ezra had never tasted, some he couldn’t even figure out how to eat, sitting out on tables getting cold—or warm—till some tuxedoed waitstaff came sweeping by to scoop it up and replace it with a new tray of the same thing. What happened with the old one? Maybe the staff ate it. Maybe they threw it to the dogs.
The rich smells of the food and drink wound together with the clouds of expensive cologne wafting from overheated, over-adorned bodies. Flowers and roast beef and sweat. Just fantastic. Really mouthwatering. Here and there it wound together with the additional dizzying smell of somebody smoking something that wasn’t tobacco.
On a dais on the far wall, a chamber orchestra played, adding to the noise.