The trouble with rewrites

Um, what isn't the trouble with rewrites. After sending my novel, An Unbalanced Line, which used to be titled Cheesy, which if it ever gets published will more than likely be named something else, to my editor, I realized I'd made a horrible mistake.

At that moment I began to realize all the things wrong with the book.

Have you ever done that?

When she wrote back and said she'd read about a quarter of it and there were definitely problems with it that she had every faith I could fix, and would I like it back to do that before she read on, um, yeah, I jumped at the chance.

I realized for YA my protagonist started out too young. Her dad wasn't quite the asshole he was supposed to be. I also decided she needed to be from a specific geographical area instead of some nondescript place.

Thus the rewrite begins.

The beginning was fairly easy, because it was like writing a new book. The first 10,000 words were mostly new writing. Of course with the new geographical area, and the fact that my main character drives across three states made for a lot of research.

Then the harder part began--I caught up to the point I had to rewrite.

Do you know how hard it is to change a 13 year old voice to a 16 year old voice? Well, it's not easy. Not to mention every other kid in the book, their clothing, social activities,yadda, yadda, yadda.

I have to totally rewrite the dad and make him a big fat jerk.

I also changed some other aspects of the book in the new beginning, therefore having to change other things throughout.

I' plodded along.

I stopped for awhile and started a new project, then thought to myself. You already have a finished novel here. Just get it done. So I went back to it. I continue to work through it slowly. I'm on page 73 of 171. Word number 24,464 out of 56,721. I'm almost halfway there.

How do you feel about rewrites? Are you always up to the challenge? Do they frustrate you? Invigorate you? Make you crazy? Inspired?