I am currently working on The Rat King, the second book in the Changers Trilogy and was bemused to realise that I am approaching it in exactly the same way that I did with Changers' Summer.

When I wrote Changers' Summer (which was a while ago – the first draft was finished in 2001), I wrote the first five chapters and then workshopped them.  I then went back over those chapters and polished them until I was sure of the voice I wanted and that the characters were consistent.

I then wrote the next 50,000 words in first draft mode: straight the way through without going back to revise.  Once I know what I am doing I can write fairly quickly.

With the Rat King, I was fairly sure I had a good outline and had planned to steam straight through the first draft of 50-60k without revising.  When my writers' group meeting came up I put in the work I had done at that point to get a second opinion on it.

That was about 12k and 5 chapters in all. The comments helped and I have now gone back over those chapters and realised a number of things about the characters and the situation they find themselves in.  Most importantly, it has clarified a key part of the world-building for me.

I should now be able to press ahead with the rest of the first draft with confidence.

The discovery that I had approached this book in the same way as Changers' Summer, even if it was 10 years later, made me wonder about the other Young Adult novel I have completed.

Sheldak is a Victorian steampunk fantasy novel about magic, technology and travel between worlds.  It needs a fairly major rewrite to get it into publishable form and I haven't really looked at it since the first draft was critiqued in 2004. But going back through my notes I see that again I revised the first 10k of the book before proceeding with the rest.

I guess that I have a method and that I should stick to it!