Doing rewrites... Yuk!

First of all I want to thank the 300ish people who've checked out my site since it's inception. Thanks so much for the support and all the positive messages from all my buddies around the world and close to home.

I'm going to make this one a quickie today because I'm madly trying to prepare for a Hawaiian party I'm off to tomorrow night. (I will take lots of pics ;-)

At the moment I'm getting ready for the Golden Claddagh and I really want to re-enter a story I put in last year. Of course it needs a total rewrite on the first 30,000 words. So I was wondering what happens when the first 60 pages of your ms turn out to be crap? This was the very first story I started when I was working 12 hour security night shift. I got to the stage where I could read an entire book in a night and still smash my own Freecell record. When the sun eventually came up I was bored out of my brain and down a story on my dwindling TBR pile. I was reading faster than I could find books to keep me entertained and I was not going to resort to playing Playstation with the guys.

Anyway, one night I had an idea and decided I could write my own historical novel. Five years and two babies later, I'm told the first 25-30k are pretty much crap. (Okay they didn't use that exact word, but I can take a hint.) So now with the competition looming, where the final judge is Esi Sogah from Avon, do I rewrite those first words that I penned in a Winnie the Pooh exercise book and put some of the skills I've learned into practice? Or do I scrap my unique premise and enter something different? I'm torn between what I should do and what I want to do.

I love my first hero and heroine so much that I'm rewriting. Yes, I'm rewriting and it's crap! (Not the story but trying to get the original one out of my head so I can think of new predicaments to throw them into.) For over six months I've had to wage a not-so-silent war with myself not to open the document and read my original storyline. Do you have problems rewriting? I do. I find it really hard not to keep remembering what I already had, and when I really liked what I already had, it becomes even more of an issue.

Three and half thousand words in, I have my fingers crossed that I'm onto a winner but I only have to the 15th May so I better get busy.

Just for extra luck, can you cross your fingers too?