From my writing journal, back in January:

Julia is being very hard to nail down. I guess that I shouldn’t be surprised. For a main character, she’s entering the story quite late. So, while the extras of her world have been getting attention, histories, and the beginnings of character development, she’s only showed up as a cute and flirty waitress at a pool hall.

So, she needs to hit the ground running. Maybe? All the cool facts about the life she leads or her flaws or whatever won’t make her feel living as you read. They won’t make the reader feel like they already know her. Because they don’t know her. So, I guess I’m trying to cheat.

Long back and forth isn’t going to do that. Conversation is great, but it doesn’t get you inside the character’s head. The other characters are being put through a gaming device – the dreamscape – and we’ll see deeper into them through their reactions. The hand-off to Julia should be abrupt. Writing it from her point of view, so she’ll be internally flipping out about the dreams, but she’ll refuse to work in a group. She’ll say that she’ll take the case, try to get the gun, get zapped, and shoo them out of the pool hall. Then we’ll follow the group for a bit, and follow Adam until he *OMGSPOILER*. If it’s going to be that long until we see her again, am I introducing her too soon?

And more, from this past Sunday:

I don’t like the hand-off of Adam from Seth and Susan to Julia. It’s forced. It feels fake. It’s preventing me from moving forward. What would happen if Julia wasn’t at the pool hall, if her shift was over? I’d have to send Sol and Jonah, and have Seth be the one that hustles over to Susan’s apartment. That would also allow for some physical intimacy between Seth & Susan. Maybe this would work better:

I then proceeded to re-outline the progression of the entire novel, starting from switching Seth out for Sol in rushing over to Susan’s flat.  Since then, I’ve been writing like a fiend.