Yeah, we wound up chiseling about 12K out of this one, and even that was pretty heavy-duty work. As for it being more work to do short, I was really glad when FFG stopped printing L5R stories for the card packs and just put them all online! I may not be paid for those extra 178 words over my 3K limit, but the labor of writing them is trivial compared to the labor of scraping them out without weakening the story.

When it comes to things like copy-edits, though . . . oof. Shorter is much better. <g>