Starting Over: What I Learned Scrapping 94 Pages

There’s a special kind of heartbreak that comes from deleting thousands of words you’ve poured your soul into. But there’s also a quiet kind of triumph. A freedom. And sometimes—if you’re lucky—a better book is waiting on the other side.

I want to talk about what it means to start over and why I decided to discard my original draft of The Monk of Thanatos.

I had written 94 pages of the sequel to The Novice of Thanatos before stepping away to write Jezelle: Thief of Oaks. Jezelle is raw, dark, and visceral—some of my best work. It pulled something out of me I didn’t know was missing. A grittier voice. A keener edge. And when I came back to Monk, that edge was nowhere to be found.

The writing wasn’t bad. Some scenes still sparked. But it felt like I was just going through the motions. The tone didn’t align with the world I had built. It felt… safer. Smoother. More distant. And Thanatos—the death-haunted city at the edge of the known world—should never feel safe.

So I started over. Not entirely from scratch. Chapters One and Two survived—barely. Heavily edited. Re-angled. But by Chapter Three, it had become a different book.

In the original draft, Mishal—the novice psychopomp—arrives at Thanatos, encounters some early conflict, and is then brought to a solitary room. That made sense at the time. I was going for introspection. Loneliness. A haunted, monastic feel. But I’d forgotten something: The Novice of Thanatos repeatedly references how crowded the school is. An unknown boy stumbling into Thanatos and getting the luxury of his own room? It rang false, especially with how he entered Thanatos in the first place.

Worse than that—it was boring.

The book is already a fictional memoir written in the first person. Mishal needs other characters to reflect off of, to spark against, to challenge, or support him. Without them, he isn’t growing, he isn’t dynamic—he’s just narrating.

So I scrapped it. In the new version, Mishal is crammed into a stinking dorm with seven other boys, each with their own voice, quirks, and banter. Suddenly, the story breathed. Conflict and camaraderie replaced stillness. A hierarchy formed. The atmosphere changed. Thanatos became not just a place of silence and shadows, but also a place of survival, of proving oneself, of being forged among others. He finds allies and enemies. And in that crowd, Thanatos becomes the school many of us recognize—brutal, strange, but alive. Suddenly, the cuts I’d made didn’t hurt so much.

When you’re early in your writing career, every sentence feels like gold. Once it’s on the page, it seems sacred—like carving runes into stone. Highlighting almost 100 pages and pressing delete? Unthinkable.

But after twenty years of writing—after hard drive crashes, botched saves, lost drafts, failures, and restarts—you start to understand something profound: the words will come again. Better ones, even. We don’t lose our best ideas. We find them through failure.

That’s not to say scrapping all that work was easy. But it was liberating. Because in the end, what matters isn’t the labor—it’s the story. And The Monk of Thanatos is becoming what it was always meant to be: not a meditative solo journey, but a gritty, soul-clashing tale of survival, death, and the cost of truth. Not to mention: sometimes the loneliest place to be is in a crowd.

What surprised me most was how easy it was to begin again. And I think it’s because, for the first time in my writing life, I have something I’ve never had before: breathing room.

We’re at the halfway point of the year, and I’ve already written two books and published three, with two more on the way. That’s more than I’ve ever accomplished in a year, let alone six months. And because of that, I’m not racing the clock. I don’t have to chase daily word count quotas like they’re finish lines I’ll never reach. I can slow down. I can listen to the rhythm of the story. And The Monk of Thanatos will be better for it.

I’m no longer trying to hit 3,000 words a day just to prove I’m working. Now I’m asking: what does this chapter need? What am I saying with this scene? That kind of creative clarity only comes when you give your story—and yourself—the space to grow.

If you’re new to writing, you might be wondering: When do I know it’s time to start over?

There’s no formula. But here are the signs I’ve learned to trust. Your tone has shifted. Maybe you’ve grown. Maybe another project changed your voice. You know in your gut the current draft doesn’t match who you are now. This was precisely what happened here. Jezelle sharpened me. It focused my style. And now I want to bring that intensity to Monk.

You’re bored by your own story. That’s a massive red flag. Sure, editing fatigue is real—but if you reread after a break and it still doesn’t spark, something’s wrong.

You’re compromising logic for plot. I kept Mishal alone because it served a mood, but it broke my own worldbuilding. I wasn’t about to go back and change a published book to make the sequel work. So I changed the sequel.

And finally, an idea becomes an itch you must scratch. If a new direction pops into mind and it just won’t go away, listen to it—even if it changes everything. The universe sometimes has a strange way of communicating with us.

Trust me, the longer you write, the less precious your words become—and that’s a good thing. What matters is not how quickly you write or how long you labored over a chapter. What matters is whether that chapter deserves to be in the final book.

The Monk of Thanatos is now 36 pages into its rebirth. It’s sharper. It’s darker. It’s alive. And I’m more excited to write it than ever before. Writing is like bonsai. Sometimes the best thing you can do is prune back to the trunk. Sure, it’ll look ugly for a while—but with time and care, beautiful things can happen.

And sometimes, the best thing you can do for yourself is pause, exhale, and remember: you’ve already done the hard part. You made it this far. Now let the book grow. Give it the space it needs to become something great.

Cheers.