This where I ended up with this piece, which is nowhere near done. Its just far enough along to move on to some of the pages I haven't worked on at all.

I find looking at a page in place is more helpful than staring at it within Illustrator. Because of the way Indesign looks after linked files I can keep updating the image automatically. Once something starts to click I just keep flashing back and forth between Illustrator and Indesign, updating the page every few minutes. Then I'll export a pdf with a full bleed and slug, just to see how it all hangs together.