Old stuff you thought was crap but actually isn't

Since I'm not writing anything new (for the present) I've decided to revisit all my old novels. Some I haven't touched in years. For example, my first YA book I started writing in early 2009. I queried it, got rejected a bunch, but I did have one agent read the entire book and she told me exactly what I needed to do--work on the beginning, make it more exciting, draw the reader into the vampire world sooner. Plus, the ending was a little corny. Fix that too. Oh, and it wasn't believable that the girl fell in love with the guy so quickly...

I re-read the novel. I edited a few things, took out all the "I love yous" and replaced them with "I care about you." I re-wrote the ending and made it stronger. And now comes the hard part...CHOPPING stuff out. Literally, I've had to cut entire pages of useless crap that makes the beginning sound like a typical teen story (which it isn't at all). My novel was originally 82K. Now it's 75K and I still believe there's stuff from the beginning I could cut out.

Just because it's already been queried, doesn't mean I can't query it again. It's been almost a year since my last rejection for it. And plenty more agents have popped up since then.

I'm glad I'm doing this. I was so in love with the book, the characters, the world I created...now I'm back and I feel at home.