Very good point @hanen. I think I didn't spend enough time in the pre-development stage and so the book was very stilted and felt contrived. I wouldn't have felt good trying to publish it because it did not feel like my best work. I was able to salvage some of the chapters for the new work. In the end, the book will be published, but the stuff I had written was just not up to snuff. Most of it got trashed, but the effort wasn't in vain because now I understand the characters much better and what truly motivates them.