Lost and Not Found Book

In the seven years (so far) since I first wrote this novel, I've read it quite a few times. Until I finished writing Forget What You Can't Remember, it was my favorite of the books I'd written. Around the same time my opinion about it began to shift, I was re-reading it aloud as an audiobook. This week I'm going through the entire text again line-by-line to create a cleaner eBook for kindle users and for Smashwords, and I find I'm increasingly frustrated and disappointed with the quality of the writing, especially toward the beginning of the book. The end is great. I love the end, still, and it usually helps me forget about the problems I had with the beginning, but the problems are still there.

Like any creator, I'm having a hard time letting the work be "done" and letting go. I want to keep re-writing it, keep editing it, keep updating it, make it better somehow. But I've got to move on, write new things, new stories, and just try my hardest to make every new book better than the last one. I'll always love Lost and Not Found, but in recognizing its flaws, I'm downgrading my rating from 5 stars to 4. This used to be my best novel, but now I can accept that it isn't as great as I'd thought it to be. And that's okay. It's still worth reading.