writing: harder than it looks

Bah. Have come to least favourite part of writing: when the gaps in the plot catch up with me. I've been writing wonderfully over the last week! Three pages two days in a row! Some of what came out was a bit awful, but it got the story where it needed to go and can always be helped later. And I've got three chapters written now, which is lovely. But alack alack, after five or six pages of Chapter IV, I no longer know what I am doing. Evy's dealt with post-traumatic stress, avoided the press, talked to the Ministry, had Mr Caruthers over for dinner, furtively admired his coat, bantered, had weird dreams, helped to repair things at the library, and now... I need MOAR PLOT. I need 1. Mr Caruthers to do something rather startlingly badass and hastily pass it off as, er, good reflexes? (um, can you kill a vampire with an umbrella? especially if that umbrella is tipped with oak or iron?), and 2. for the Ministry to come back and say, by the way, we want you now. Trouble is, so far she's only accidentally killed a lot of vampires with some sunlight, and while sunlight isn't exactly commonly conjured, I'm also not seeing anything that would scream to the Ministry "LOOK LOOK HERE IS A TOOL YOU CAN SHAPE". Also cos I don't really know what the vampires are up to and maybe it's not even the government that pulls Evy into all of this, it's the vampires themselves, because Something Is Going On, and all I know is that it probably involves the Germans?

WRITING A NOVEL IS HARD.

I'm also not exactly sure how the pre-WWI vampires-and-politics plotline ties in with the Tam-Lin plotline, except that Mr Caruthers is somehow in the middle of both of them. And has a coat. Of awesomeness.