The one that got away...

...or, Kat Attempts to Originate and Propagate the Self-Crit Meme.

Because I am fearsomely avoidant these days about actually writing, I've been doing some rereading and brooding over stuff I've already written, and it struck me that -- if the rest of you are anything like me, with every story you've finished and posted, there's always, glimmering somewhere in your mind, the Platonic Ideal of the story you wanted to write, and then there's the flawed and falling-short reality of what actually made it into prose. And you rub your face and sip Irish whisky and mourn to yourself about the emotion that you couldn't quite pull off, or the stuff you probably should've yanked out, or the thing that you just couldn't make work quite the way you'd envisioned.

So, my idea -- for one/some/any or all of your stories, let us know what that thing was, what you really wanted to do and couldn't quite achieve.
( My own, put on cutaway because this is actually not likely to be interesting to anyone who's not me... )