Pitch Slam Entry 1: Fat Girl on a Plane, YA Contemporary

Title: FAT GIRL ON A PLANE

Genre: YA Contemporary

Word Count: 78,000


Hogwarts House: Cookie Vonn is sure she’d be a Gryffindor. But she’d like to speak with Dumbledore about those old-fashioned robes. Her sketchbook is full of new design ideas that may put Madam Malkin out of business!

Pitch: To be the next great fashion designer, overweight teen Cookie Vonn must take on an industry where thin is “in” and take down a fat shamer who’s after her internship and her crush.



First 250:

Skinny: Day 738 of Weight Watchers
No. You can’t just buy two tickets. That would be easy.

Let’s say you weigh five hundred pounds and know for a fact you can’t fit into a single seat on the plane. It doesn’t matter. One person equals one ticket. You can thank global terrorism for that one.

I watch the fat woman at the airline gate.

She’s in tears, wailing at the flight attendant. “What am I supposed to do? How am I supposed to get home?”

Maybe I should tell her how it works. Two years ago, I was her. Two years ago, I weighed three hundred and thirty pounds. I was too fat to fly.

I would tell her one thing.

You can lose the weight, but you won’t get what you want.

You won’t get home.

Fat: One week before Weight Watchers
Here’s what you have to do. At the airport, you have present yourself to the flight attendants at the ticket counter. They get to decide if you’re too fat to fly.

I’m on my way to New York, to a fashion preview. I’m the SoScottsdale blog’s nod to the brave new world where forty-eight percent of Americans are overweight.

I don’t know if I’m going to make it there.

This is how it starts. There’s a plane change at O’Hare. I get the feeling they’re watching me from behind the counter. I tell myself how paranoid that sounds.





Team Slytherin  Points and Spells