Would you rather have a perfect half of a book or a flawed whole?

Such was my dilemma at the start of this month.

Last spring I had started a novel and managed to churn out about 35,000 words by August. But the novel was flawed. Very flawed. I shelved it. Put it aside. Figured it would be my Frankenstein novel, a half-done, mished-up mash of parts that never quite went together. But the characters stayed with me. They hung around my house and my home and they were present when I do my best novel-planning — when I walk my dog. It was as if the characters...