Have been tinkering with the former GN. Pulled the ending to the front...and am stuck there, not knowing how to lead into the old beginning.

I seem to keep running into the same problem of balance in all three of my current WIPs. All three require world-building and backstory, and I keep hitting the same wall, over and over again: at some point the story slows down too much.

And now that I think about it, this probably relates at least partially to my old nemesis, transitions. Either I'm leaping around from scene to scene, or I get immersed in the minutiae of the characters' daily lives and have trouble thinking outside that natural progression. There isn't much middle ground in my head, and that middle ground is where the transitions are. It's also where the world-building needs to be, I think.

Maybe the thing to do (with the former GN) is to keep tabs on what idea needs to come next. Usually every scene needs to carry one main idea. This ms is not a normal format with normal scenes, but maybe trying to think in big-picture terms of scenes would help.

Technically maybe this book shouldn't be possible, since the MC has no goals, positive or negative, and doesn't want anything at all until the very end. But now I'm thinking that surely there's a way to get the structure to carry the story forward, since the content apparently can't do it. That's what I'm looking at now. I'm thinking I might be able to use structure rather than content to pose the "questions" that keep the pages turning, if I mess around with this long enough--and if I can keep from falling into the same old mental rut.