Lera: How the hell did you manage to do another outline??
I'm not an outliner, typically. I wrote 2 books in this quartet, and then halfway through the 3rd, decided the first two were actually meant to be 1 story with a very different plot. So I went back and read them again, and sat down and outlined.
This time I outlined because I knew a) the weakness in my writing is almost always pacing and rising tension towards a specific conflict and b) because I didn't want to go off track.
Except about 10,000 words into it, I wrote a piece of dialogue, sat back and went, "Whoa." and realized that my rewrite-outlined-story was too close to my originals and that one line of dialogue fundamentally changed how I looked at my characters. I went back and changed a few details, wrote a few scenes down the line, and I'm currently writing the ending (Interestingly, both times I've written this story, I've written it back to front.).
So I'm going to rewrite a very basic outline on my new conflict and what I have so far. It's mostly to think through the middle section (weakest part of my stories plotwise) and make sure that I have written down somewhere how I'm pulling all the strings together. I'm dealing with a dystopia/speculative fiction with very corrupt organizations, a Secret that can save the civilization, a very arbitrary social caste system, and two main characters who are rivals at first until they have a mutual opponent. There are a lot of strings. I tend to forget about certain strings until I reread and then I'm like "EFF!!!!!" and I panic because I don't think I can fix it.
I think this may have been a babbling answer. I should go back to writing.