Open any novel to the middle and read the content. Somehow, at this point, the protagonist has a revelation. Through the first half of the story, our hero has worked her fanny off chasing a false goal. Things didn’t pan out the way she expected but suddenly it hits her–there’s something she has to do, something she’s needed to do all along but has only seen vaguely.
Now, she must get to work, not chasing will-o’-the-wisps, but getting to the core of the issue. In my work in progress (WIP), Raisa has been in a reactive mode ever since the plague in Mombasa. She blamed Ai-mei, then al-Shabaab, and then the Transnational Crime Syndicate, but now the International Court of Justice has summoned her to account and she feels guilty.
Actually, no one is blaming her, but now she realizes she has been fighting back and not fighting forward–retreating instead of advancing. Armed with knowledge of who is the true enemy and the will to use her knowledge to defeat Nikolai Kabulov’s scheme to destroy civilization, she can develop a superior organism that can destroy any nanobot plague and advance civilization to a new future.
How does it all end? There’s a bright side and a dark side to everything. With a baby on the way, Raisa wants to make sure her daughter lives in a better world than that into which she was born.