Second books: the writer’s perspective

I’ve always thought second books are weak. They never carry the momentum of the book as well as the first or third book in a trilogy. As such, I found this article about writing a sequel very interesting. My favorite line is:

Although I didn’t technically write an entirely new book like Bacigalupi did, I was still making major plot changes in my eighth draft, and my final novel bears very little resemblance to my original story. In fact, my earliest draft was such a mess that it frightened my editor, Nancy Mercado. Wisely, she didn’t tell me so at the time. She merely said in her kind way, “You might want to take a closer look at the first one hundred pages. And the last one hundred pages.”