Throwing out my completed novel and starting over

I managed to finish a novel five years ago, and while it was fun while it lasted, I don't much like it. It's a little too boring/common, and the more I tried to revise it (several times through the years), the more I felt like I was trying to make a quiche out of boiled eggs. I could pull it off, but it wouldn't taste good.

My protagonist was going to kidnap and run off with her foster daughter before the child could be returned to an abusive parent by social services. Protag would then meet up with a fascinating (naturally) man who would see her on America's Most Wanted and have to decide whether to help her or turn her in.

Not the worst, but kinda...meh. Some time later, I read a writing exercise on Stephen King's website that gave me a new idea: switch genders for your protagonist/antagonist. I think this book would be fresher, with more complicated internal conflicts, if a man (widowed after the foster placement) did the kidnapping, and a woman had to decide whether to trust him or not. We tend to suspect men in single caregiver roles.

So, I may be crazy, but I'm going to start over. *Gulp.* Wish me luck?

That's obviously VERY good to know ahead of time--thanks. Before I go blundering around to find it, do you happen to recall the title? Maybe I'll discover that my take is different enough to be do-able anyway.

I developed the idea because my parents took in foster kids, and we've known people who had to send a child back to a situation that they knew would harm her. After I'd already written my book, I saw a news report about a couple who had kidnapped their foster child in such a situation, raised him to adulthood, and then turned themselves in. So yep, "no totally original stories" is right!

I also had a friend write a great short story that he'll never sell because it was essentially the plot of The Matrix a few months before Matrix came out. Then again, The Matrix wasn't a totally new idea anyway, just a fantastic take on an old one.