the cutting room floor 0'00'00'01

This is a feature I will call "the cutting room floor." Legend has it in the old days of film editing, one had to literally splice together one's lengths of film in stepwise fashion. The scraps that didn't make it fell to the floor.
On occasion I will post stories I wrote for the paper that either never made it to print, or were pared down by The Man (merciless editors) to the point you couldn't recognize them anymore.

Imagine you're Michaelangelo and the Medici family sends you a letter saying, "yeeeaaaaahhhh, you know what, we're only going to be taking half of your Pieta'.... yeaaaaaaaaaahhhhh. The other half we're going to crush and add to our driveway."

I'm not trying to put myself in the same company of Michaelangelo but hopefully you get my point. We all have stories that we KNOW deserve XX amount of space in the paper, or xx minutes on the air or whatnot. Or we labored so hard on them, outlined the important information to include, paid attention to pacing and story arc, added suspense or little nuggets here and there. And then when the editor gets it, he/she says, sorry, too long.

Then you have to go back and slice and dice and pare and take out everything including the kitchen sink to fit some heartrendingly small space requirement. This usually happens on deadline too. Who knows if the final story sounds anything remotely like the version you turned in.

Of course, I'll be the first to say that EVERYONE needs an editor. EVERYBODY. And almost without exception the final result is better. (this is one reason why I hate blogs. No editing.)
Anyway, whether the final story was better than the draft is not the point. The point is the feeling you get when The Man tells you to chop it in half for space. (The Man isn't necessarily your immediate editor but a person much higher on the org chart who makes the story decisions, in case my editor ever reads this.)

So here we go. See TC 0'00'00'02 for the first installment.