So, new question for my fellow creators: What was a scene that you planned and really wanted to have in your story, but then had to cut, and why did you have to cut it?
I'll go first:
Three or four chapters into writing Re:Apotheosis, I came up with this scene that I thought would make a really funny aside as the narrative got serious going into the second half of the book. The three main antagonist characters (The Destroyer, Jenny Calhoun, and Jack Death) need to get from Tokyo to Osaka, so, being reasonable fictional characters who have fallen into the real world, they wave down a cab.
And here is where the comedy would begin. The Destroyer is an underdeveloped devil king from a bad fantasy story - he has no concept of money, and thus doesn't carry any. Jenny Calhoun is an expy of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and is thus an American teenager - she's carrying around $40 in American money, which a Japanese cabby isn't going to take. Jack Death is a rip-off of John Wick (literally - in-story, his creator was a B-movie production company that saw the John Wick movies and decided they wanted in on that action) - he's carrying underworld coins that NOBODY is going to take. So, after turning out their pockets in front of a very confused cabby, Jack Death pulls out his gun and just steals the cab. They all get in, and then we get somebody saying "Does anybody know where Osaka is?"
(There was going to be a follow-up to this scene as well - as it turns out, Osaka is around a 6-7 hour drive from Tokyo. So, when they got there, I had planned to have either Jack Death or Jenny Calhoun say something like "We will never speak of this again" or "Next time, we catch a train.")
Why was it cut? Once Jenny Calhoun actually appeared on the page, she turned out to be the sort of practical person who would recognize and solve the money problem immediately. And, the bank robbery scene that followed as a result of this ended up carrying a lot of narrative weight that's needed for the chapters to come. So, the only way to put the scene into the story would have required me to ignore a fairly major plot point and derail a key character, all at once. And, thus, it got cut.
So, who's next?