When I originally wrote about the experiences Eric had on Earth that made him wary of forming new human friendships, I created it as a series of small flashbacks. I felt that actually putting the reader back in the past with him would increase the impact of the experiences and help the reader to understand his point of view better. Unfortunately by the end, the book was just getting too long and these scenes slowed down the plot too much, so they needed to go. This is still in a rough, first-draft form.
This little snippet was a bit of play, imagining what effect the Earth venture was having on the residents of Abaddon. Fun as it is, it simply didn’t move the plot forward.
In order to decide how Eric’s government worked, I had to figure out the Caste system and how the Counselors fit in. I needed this information for myself, but it seemed to read more like an info-dump in context, so it was replaced with shorter, more relevant descriptions.