I've hit a slight snag, but a good one. I started trying to expand and flesh out some in-between parts that aren't on paper currently, but that are needed for transition. The gaps they need to fill are big enough that what I fill them with will probably end up being important for itself. These gap-fillers will be about characters and events that come up again much later in the ms, so I need to set them up anyway.

So I started looking at one particular bare-bones piece of dialogue I have--or rather, I had two bare-bones pieces of dialogue and pulled them together and started trying to figure out how to play them and what slant to give them and what the story needs to cover and emphasize right now.

But then I went off on a tangent and took this image/piece of info from my head that I had been planning to use much later, and I stuck it in here. I like it here. It ups the tension and starts darkening the story, but we don't know why yet, or what it means.

My snag is that I don't know exactly where to put it, for pacing. I'm looking at the first 50 or so pages, and it needs to be in the exact right place. It could be carved down to a paragraph or two of narration and stuck in somewhere around page 30-35 as a nice thought-provoking hint. Or it could be part of a larger conversation around page 45-50. I had the thought that page 45-50 is too darn late to use something that could be so strong to draw the reader on. But then I look at how fast this reads, with the pages so short--the reader would be to page 50 within 15 minutes probably, or maybe less. I don't know. I realized I don't have a feel for how the pacing is right now. I don't know if it's sagging anyplace in that first 50 pages or not. And I don't know where this piece needs to go. So I can't really work on it, because I don't know if it's in its own scene with dialogue, or if it's a passing point in an earlier scene.

So here I sit. And I think I'm going to set this aside for now and go to the Y.

I wonder if I should try to print out and read it later tonight, or just not work on it anymore at all today. I really don't know what to do. Perhaps it will come to me at the Y.