The evolution of a novel

Over the past few years my writing style has changed in weird ways: I tend to write part of a novel, set it aside, come back to it, redo it from scratch at least once and see where it goes. It's probably wasteful on a lot of levels, but I find it gives me a better grasp of the characters and what works and doesn't work in the story. 

In the case of what is now going to be nanowrimo 2011, it began life as Rites of Exorcism, which took place over 2 drafts of Aiden Nel, an exorcist in high school and his attempt to cope with the deaths of his parents, graduation, his own future and some entity that had begun murdering cheerleaders. Eventually I realized I didn't have a workable ending for it and rather than force something realized the entire story actually worked better as a backstory. I began another draft, dropping it because it didn't fit and eventually began work on another project involving a man named Zeth who had done something utterly terrible in his past and gained power for it: an examination of what happens to someone who hits rock bottom and then starts digging deeper. 

Eventually the two concepts congealed in my head along with an old idea about a world where the egyptian gods were real that I'd first done up as a quick rpg game. I began work on what was by then The Book of Going Forth by Night, with the stated goal of sequels, and while busy travelling I realized that one of the major characters in it should really be in the sequel instead. Which meant redoing it from scratch as well, so my old nano idea was scrapped in favour of bloody well finishing a draft OF this story, since it's been about four years now. 

On a practical level, this means I've written over 120K of words that are either backstory or possibly plot stuff for the second novel in a series without a first novel. Because that seems to be what I do.