So many writers cling to their first book, to a certain set of words that they spent so much time on. They try to massage those words into a different order. Or keep trying to inject life into a manuscript that is many years old. And it almost never works. Because you are not the person who conceived of that manuscript. You are not the writer who structured that book or wrote those characters or that dialogue.
I’ve embraced the idea that when I revise, I only keep the words that work. I don’t have an attachment to old word or the time that I spent on them. Maybe I do this to an extreme, but I think most writers could work on letting go of the time they spent on past words or past projects. The words don’t own you. The time you spent on those words doesn’t matter. That’s in the past. You have to move forward with the new words today, the new book you can conceive today, as the writer and the person you are today.