I can't be completely nice about things, Razor. I gotta be a bit of a dick.

As for advice on pacing, I can only tell you how I go about creating longer pieces, giving you my "creative" process. Most assuredly, it rivals Mad's but is probably not as good as Lews'.

My first bit of advice would be to know your destination. The other main bit is to write it for a particular audience, keeping in mind there will be another audience reading the tale, as well.

The other bit of advice is to edit. I can tell you that, while many of my tales start out sparse, the editing fleshes them out a lot. One of my stories was originally about 5 chapters long. It ended up with around 12 chapters after edits. See, while you are writing you will tend to want to get to the goal line. So, edit and edit and edit and watch your tale flesh out the way you want to.

Another thing you may want to do is to stretch your boundaries or to fix what someone else did wrong. After writing average stories that were within my comfort zone I decided to step out into traffic and try my luck. Well, after doing so my writing improved so dramatically that I actually like reading my writing. Another thing you may want to try is to find a genre that has been done poorly. Step into that genre and do it right. I can tell you that doing these things made me pay better attention to what I was writing and helped me improved dramatically.