“If I may offer you some advice, Anshinnal,” he said, “taunting the crow is a really poor idea.”

My last story at Clarion West, I wrote a fantasy story about an assassin with painfully heightened senses forced to fight in daylight out of desperation. I spent a ton of time on the world and the dynamics, the sweeping conflict he’s caught up in, the economics of a slavery economy, and most of that ended up torn out to make deadline and focus on the story at the heart of it.

It’s been two weeks, and I still don’t know what to do with it. Putting the larger world in means I’d be running at novelette size immediately, while trimming it down seems like an even more painful cut.