Kill Your Darlings

Today, I murdered my darlings.
I plucked them out of existence, consigning them to the land of ghosts and winds.
I felt bad while I was doing it, but afterwards I realized that their absence was actually going to make my world a better place.
Editing.
It's fucking awful, but it's a necessary step in the writing process.  It forces you to look at your story with different eyes and notice things that you may not have before you started.
In this instance, the shock that I had no real way to have my protagonists confront my antagonists.
Also, it's a good way to get rid of filler paragraphs that seemed really cool when you first wrote them but that turned out to be the literary equivalent of tits on a bus: completely unnecessary.
I hate editing.
I really do.
But, as I said, it's necessary.
Sometimes, you have to kill your darlings to build a better story.