OK, so I think I finally have a grasp of where my series as a whole is headed. I have worked out the overall premise for what I think will be a trilogy, including how my hero confronts my villain at the end of it and what her moral choice will be.
I have established a weakness and basic action that will help her overcome it and realize both internal and external change.
Now, I just have to have the skill to write it!
But while I have this overall concept in place, my next step is to figure out the major tent poles along the way. Particularly, I need to break the action into three separate novels, each with their own action, growth, and conclusion. For the individual novels, I can’t have my hero grow personally too much in each of them, that needs to be something that comes over the whole series. So, for the individual books, I need to look at a change in her external circumstances that represents progress toward that eventual character growth and final conflict.
Right now, I don’t know how she gets to the conclusion besides the first step – the goals and ideas I had established for the first novel that I got partway through before going back to the drawing board. I think for that novel, her endpoint is more or less the same, but I also need to understand what happens from that point forward to the end in order to make sure that I don’t write myself into any corners in the mean time.
That’s the next step.