Busy here, but I have been working on the dystopian a little nearly every day, still working my way through the deeper grounding of the part just before the middle. I can't seem to wrap my mind around what I'm going to do as I move into the middle. I've got a lot of scenes lined up ready to go, but I'm feeling iffy about the transition into them. Iffy as in not knowing what to do.

I think this is why I'm currently compelled to do that deeper grounding. If I can get it right, I should be able to understand this upcoming transition, and also how the middle needs to be paced, timewise. The middle is where more time starts passing between scenes, and I'm not sure how to show that without losing the rapid pacing I've been going for in these first hundred pages. Also, the transition into the middle will set up its pacing and get it rolling--so if I blunder around not getting this transition right, the next hundred or however many pages won't coalesce.

I'm wondering if I need to mentally break the story here and start a new section--like, in my head, call the forthcoming middle "Part II" and treat it as a separate entity as I write. Or it could be that the narration needs to flow directly from one chapter to the next.

What I might do is get these hundred or so pages settled enough that I'm willing to let other people see them, and send them to my agent for a reality check re. pacing while I regroup and dive into the next part. Who knows. It looks to me like I need to trim some of the end of the hundred-page part anyway, and that may take a while at this rate.

I've been considering having brief tags at the beginnings of chapters, to help ease the moment of understanding when the reader finally gets the main secondary character's full story. It might just be sappy and off-putting though. Not sure.