The Great Reef Massacre

Good news! I have now finished The Great Reef Race. It is available in three distinct flavours: full version, short version and very short version. The full version is well over a thousand words; far too long for most children's publishers, so I had to hack away at it like Jason Vorhees having at an unsuspecting teenage camper, in order to virtually halve the word count. It pains me to have to cut so much decent material in order to make it a 'saleable' size, and I'm not wholly convinced that the result is an improvement. Sure it's shorter - and therefore cheaper to produce, should it go to print - but is shorter better? I think on this occasion possibly not, as it now seems to lack both the sense of fun and the sense of adventure of the full version. Maybe with some clever polishing I can end up with a cut that I'm "OK" with.
Or maybe I just need to let it rest up a while, give those incisions time to heal...