Idea-situation-plot

Nicola Morgan wrote an amazing and awesome post on Help! I Need a Publisher (a blog well worth reading for her glorious snark, down-t0-earth advice and an unwillingness to coddle writers I haven't seen since Stephen King). It's about ideas, not where they come from but how they end up as books. The post on Kidlit she links to is also extremely good: that's about the difference between situations and plots.

I think I figured out what's wrong with so many of my works-in-progress. I have ideas, situations, characters or settings (often some or all of the above) but not the 'and then...'.

So, Arthurian legend meets Judge Dredd. A teenage girl goes into training to become a Cyberknight, squire to a knight who doesn't play by the rules. And then...?

Pirates of the Caribbean...miles above the planet surface, with flying ships. James Colney returns from a three-year stint in the aerial navy to find that his one true love has married someone else. A duel ensues, then a murder, of which he is accused. He and Max flee the floating island they called home. And then...?

The climactic battle between heaven and hell happened, without anyone on earth noticing, but the effects were felt through natural disasters, riots and war. The battle was ended by a great last-ditch effort by the Archangel Michael which destroyed the Antichrist and shattered the angels and demons into pieces, scattered across the world. Their broken ethereal forms joined with the nearest human they could find and now they seek to unite with the other parts of themselves, while still fighting their eternal battle between light and dark. And then...?

A world where the gods walk among men, Paragons arranged into Courts and led by Monarchs. Thousands of years ago, the Monarchs murdered two of their own, one of them the Monarch of Change, the Harbinger, because they did not wish for a potentially cataclysmic change he would bring. Now the new Monarch of Change has arisin, and they must decide what to do about him, or risk losing their power or even their lives. And then...?

It's like playing consequences, but I should already know the answers, with the amount of thought I've put into to every one of these. And yet I don't, which is probably why I'm having so much trouble with them. Thank you, Nicola Morgan and Kidlit, you've shown me precisely what is wrong with my writing method. Now I just need to figure out how to solve it.

Last night I had an incredibly detailed dream about trying to rescue a ginger-and-white cat called Jericho from Queen Elizabeth I who had been resurrected and was running a supertech hospital as big as a small town surrounded by SWAT teams. She needed the cat to take over the world, but by God, me and a group of heroic individuals weren't going to let that happen - I woke up when one of the scientists who was helping us was cornered and jumped through a plate-glass window several stories up, hoping that her body would shield the cat she was escaping with from being hurt when she hit the ground and died. I'm once again baffled by what my brain does while I sleep.