Stuck

Argh. My fairy tale chapter book Plain Kate is stuck.

The prologue "in which our hero is orphaned but acquires a cat and goes to live in a drawer" is finished. And a biggish chunk of the first section "in which our hero makes a terrible mistake" is written. I know exactly what happens in the first section, Mysterious and up-to-no-good stranger comes to town: Linnay. Plain Kate accidentally reveals her wish that her cat Taggle could talk. Linnay offers to trade that for her shadow. She refuses. He turns the town against her – not too hard as they already sort of think she's a witch. She decides to flee. She trades her shadow for the things she thinks she will need to survive – oil cloth and a camp hatchet and so forth. And Taggle ends up talking in the bargain. Now, clearly marked as magical (even though she's not), she really does have to flee. And there's nowhere else for her to go, either.

It's mostly done, even, except for the "he turns the town against her" part, and the crucial "so she decides." Now don't you think I could write that?

But no. I continue in my usual course of writing the pretty shiny bits from random parts of the story without much idea of how they fit together. This has always worked out for me in the past, and it wouldn't usually bother me.

But, unexpectedly, an agent wants to see my young adult fiction. And I don't think I can send her the random shiny bits. So I try to write the missing bits from section the first. Do they come together? Oh, no, of course they don't. Do they seem plastic, or at best wooden? Yup. Do they in general suck? Rocks.

Maybe it's because I'm trying to write to specifications – to my own outline – which is just not how I work.

But what am I going to do? It seems rude to keep an agent waiting.

Temporary plan: will send the agent Otter, Sir G, and a note that Plain Kate is coming along soon.