Sometimes I Hate it when She's Right.

Especially when she tells me I never should have gone to hell, or the whaling station for that matter, if I didn't know where to take it from there or what the point was in going there.  But she's right, and I know the truth when I hear it, and the fact is, a deep and lasting paralysis set in on Motherfucking Pirates, and I think the only way out is back to where I lost the thread.

So.  

Sometimes it helps to step back and look at the things we have come to take for granted and restate them.  So let's look at the Pirates and see what we have.

The Big Conflict:
Red Hull, Queen of the Motherfucking Pirates stole Gem's boyfriend (well, he didn't know it at the time), Qualm's brother, (coincidentally to give to her daughter, Swift) and Gem wants to get him back.  There are some things standing in the way of this.
1) Catching the Strigiform or finding the Floating Island is something that several governments' navies are failing their damnedest to do.
2) Red Hull is WAY out of Gem and Qualm's weight class.  I mean the devil is afraid of her, and he fucking sired her.

The Little Conflicts:
Gem has been born with a gift for and inclination towards violence.  She wants to use this for good and not evil, but isn't sure it's even possible to do, or how it would be done.
Qualm has the hobbit's dilemma.  He will not be going back to the Shire when this shit is all over, and he needs to grow into not being the simple fisher boy that he thought he was and really just wanted to be.
Swift needs to get out from under her mother's shadow, mostly, and figure out what her place in the world is.  She also might like girls more than she likes boys.
Bacon wants to be fully human, at least she thinks she does, but she hasn't considered all the ramifications of humanity and still, I think, thinks she can have it both ways in regards to being human and being a super-science squid.
Ilex hates the whole idea of adventure and has run from it right up until the point where it finally caught her.  Like Qualm, she wants to but cannot live in the Shire, but unlike Qualm, she never was a hobbit.

I wonder if it makes more sense for me to write first drafts in novella form, really condensed, so I get the story out, and then expand it in the subsequent drafts.  I hear that some people do this, and I know my first drafts will never be right the first time.  I know, also, that outlines don't do shit for me but give me a false and poisonous sense of accomplishment when I make them and then give me a sense at between the 50 and 60K mark of how far wrong I've gone.

Does anyone else do this?  Has anyone else done this?  Written a condensed first draft to expand?  How did it work?