As an author, what is the greatest amount of time and effort that you put in, only to eventually decide to completely remove from your story during your own editing? Why did you remove it? Was it a difficult thing to do?

Several months on a collaborative project that just wasn’t working for one of the other authors. At this point, the original manuscript is abandoned, and the rewrite is just sitting there until that author catches fire again. It’s frustrating, because I was pretty happy with most of it, but the point of a collaboration is just that, and if someone on the team is not happy, it drags the entire project down.