Should I feel sad?

Okay, so as some of you know I've been writing a story in my spare time about ... well ... pretty much the life of a pretty ordinary young woman dealing with some rather tough breaks in life. I killed off her entire family before the book even opens.

Anyway, I started this "little" project when I was fifteen, had a rough draft done when I was eighteen, and I started the slow and painful process of revision. I'm very careful about saving things that I write (especially when I use the delete key a lot) so there's a draft of this saved in the format I printed it off in ... but I just deleted about eleven chapters full of text.

Should I feel sad? I pretty much just indiscriminately kept on highlighting paragraphs and pages and pressing the delete button. It actually felt kinda good, especially because the woman I was writing about five years ago is not the woman I'm writing about today. She's changed as my perception of life has changed.

Before, what I was writing tended more toward the marriage plot romance than I would have liked. So I deleted everything I hadn't already revised and we're started again. This time it's gonna be chick lit. Empowering. Healing. Understanding. I think I might even throw in the random black chicken reference that no one's going to understand.

I've also decided to nix the idea of speeding through her life like it's some show that can be condensed down to 200-300 pages of text. Instead I'm going to be focusing in on a year, possibly two, of her life. The guy she married in the first version may or may not fit her in this one ... not too sure about that yet.

Right now my motto for this is: don't take anything for granted. 'Cause I'm gonna change whatever I want to. And the characters are going to like it!