Today's approach worked out pretty well. So far, anyway. I made a list of the main ideas/plot points that belong where the hole in the middle is. Then I moved the pieces that are in the hole right now (about seven pages worth of chunks ranging from a few words to a third of a page), grouping them according to which part of the list they belong under.

As I was doing that I saw chunks that were notes and explanations to myself about theme (what I want the book to say), so I added "theme" to the list of main ideas/plots points and moved all those together, too. Somehow as I was doing this, I saw that I could use some of the theme chunks to end the previous section and make it stronger (it has been just fading out because I didn't know where I was heading). From there I started to see how the middle might fall into line and make sense on a thematic, character, and plot level. I think it helped seeing that extremely annoying blog entry yesterday, because my mind is on readers who need things spelled out. I've been reading too much Heian literature, which is crazy because they don't use names, or care about time and order of events, and they don't like to say anything straight out when they can hint at it or just leave it blank. And I mean that literally; I know I exaggerate sometimes for effect, but really Heian literature leaves most stuff out. The degree of trust in the reader is astronomical. And I think that's very cool, and it's definitely influencing me, but I'm writing a thousand years later in a more specific language to a different potential audience, so I have to remember that spelling things out is good. Compared to Heian writing, anyway.

I hope that I can move on from here and get the middle at least sketched out. There's no telling, though. Sometimes you look at something that made complete sense the day before, and suddenly you can't understand what your line of thought was. I hope that doesn't happen with this.