Susan Beth Pfeffer

It's True What They Say About Good Deeds

2012-02-01T14:39:00.021-05:00

I am not a noble person. And from now on, I'm not even going to pretend to be one.

I read in the paper that there was going to be a blood drive, and since I couldn't come up with a good excuse not to go, I felt I had to. I've given blood twice in my life, and both times it was a bit of a struggle, but that wasn't going to stop me.

So I bought a chicken salad sandwich at Panera Breads, and went on to the blood drive, in front of our brand new hospital. Our brand new hospital turned out to be quite busy and I parked way at the end, but it's a gorgeous Feb. 1 day (more like April 1), and I was full of noble thoughts.

I went into the There Will Be Blood trailer, had my blood pressure taken (100/70) and answered a lengthy questionnaire, which mostly asked if I'd had sex ever with anybody even remotely interesting. Apparently I answered correctly and since they weren't concerned about my week in Germany or the baby aspirin I take nightly, I was cleared for takeoff.

Takeoff took quite a while, which is one reason why I never give blood. Apparently I have very shy veins (although the blood taker person thought it was because I hadn't drunk enough this morning). Eventually one vein volunteered, and I squeezed the rubber ball every five seconds, and my blood dripped out at a socially acceptable rate.

Next came the part all sensible blood donors anticipate-the eating of the donut. I went to the front of the trailer and was offered orange juice, apple juice, or water. I went with OJ, and checked out the many sweets alternatives. Since I didn't want them to think I had donated my blood just for a donut (although that was true), I selected the small donut rather than the far more appealing big donut. Having treated a mirgraine with a box of donuts last week, I felt obliged to go with small size today.

The orange juice wasn't very good either.

I left the trailer and my blood behind, and began walking through the parking lot to get to my car and my chicken salad sandwich. Only about a few yards from the trailer, I realized I was feeling very woozy. Then I realized I was feeling very very woozy. Then I realized I'd be much better off sitting. The next thing I knew, I was lying on the pavement with a half dozen people surrounding me.

I give blood and I end up being a Code Blue.

It seems when you faint in a hospital parking lot, they take it seriously. There was much concern over whether I'd hit my head (I said no, but the truth of the matter is, I have no idea) of if I'd had a seizure (again no, this time with even more certainty). They rammed me into a wheelchair and then a stretcher, and zoomed me over to the emergency room.

My blood pressure there was 100/44, which is probably why I fainted, and it was 100/44 because I gave blood. I may not watch Grey's Anatomy, but I have some idea of cause and effect.

It was decided that the best treatment for me was a chicken salad sandwich. They brought me one and I ate half of it, grumbling about the far better one I had in my car. They agreed that a Panera chicken salad sandwich would definitely be better than what they were serving me, but they insisted I eat what was in front of me so I could be cured.

We all agreed I should have had the big donut. Chocolate with yummy crumbs. A definite blood pressure picker upper.

After a while, I hopped off the stretcher and said I was going home. They said I couldn't without discharge papers because then my insurance wouldn't pay. Think about the injustice of all this. I didn't even want to go to the emergency room, and now it would be my financial responsibility.

Eventually the doctor came. He wanted to give me an EKG, but I pointed out I was perfectly healthy and had a chicken salad sandwich waiting for me. I guess that convinced him, because I was given some papers and shown out. I walked the long way to my car (a lot longer now, because I hadn't parked in the emergency room parking lot, not having anticipated being an emergency), hopped in, drove home (five minutes or less) and ate half my sandwich.

I will never give blood again. All you A+ types can find your blood somewhere else.

One good thing came of all this though. I was given my very own hospital ID bracelet, and as a result, Scooter has a brand new toy!

Things You Find Out When You Think About Things You Wouldn't Be Thinking About If You Had Other Things To Think About

2012-01-23T16:26:00.013-05:00

For some reason this afternoon I started thinking about the first names of the presidents of the United States.

I wasn't even thinking about Mitt or Newt. Honest. I try not to think about them every chance I get.

No, I think I was thinking about Franklin Pierce, although I have no idea why, since I doubt I've ever thought about him except maybe in 11th grade history, taught by the worst and most memorable teacher I ever had, Big Mrs. White. Although to be honest about it, probably the only thing I remember from 11th grade history was Big Mrs. White (I'm told Little Mrs. White was an excellent teacher).

Back to Franklin Pierce. I thought about him and how ironic it was that there was another president named Franklin, and then I started thinking about all the different first names presidents of the United States have had, and the next thing I knew, I was off to Wikipedia, making a list.

It turns out (thank you Wikipedia) that there have been 43 guys who at some point or another were presidents of you know where. Out of these 43 guys, 20 of them had names unique unto themselves. And it would be 22, or more than half, if Thomas Jefferson and Woodrow Wilson weren't both named Thomas.

In case you're wondering, James is the most common first name, with a big bouncing 6 and then there's John with 4 and George and William tied with 3, and Thomas and Andrew and of course Franklin at 2.

We've had more presidents named Millard than we've had named Matthew, Mark, Luke, Peter, Paul or Mary. One Grover (elected twice) but no Robert. Yes to Dwight, no to David. Hooray for Harry, but hisses for Henry (unless you think of William Henry Harrison as having two first names and I don't). Hello Chester, goodbye Charlie.

Heck. Even if Ulysses Grant got elected president under his original first name, Hiram, he'd still be the only Simon. No Harolds or Harveys.

(We will not discuss the lack of Marys and Lindas and Susans and Hilarys, or why there's a Gerald but no Geraldine, since I choose not to screech in public).

Because of my intellectual curiosity (a friend of mine told me I had that, and I've been enchanted by the thought ever since), I decided to figure out if this quirky name business was more a recent development (in my admittedly lengthy life, there've been 7 presidents with names all their own, and 4 that had to share, of which, sadly, 2 were George). So I whipped out my cute little calculator (kept by the desk so I can determine how much of my money goes to me and how much to my agent), and I subtracted 1789 (our first George) from 2012 (the one and only Barack). I got 223 (I know because I just did again to make sure). I divided it by 2, which is 111.5, in case you're too lazy to get your own calculator.

Now comes the truly terrifying part. I subtracted that 111.5 from 2012, and discovered that the United States Of America reached the halfway mark in presidents in 1900.

I know the Declaration of Independence was 1776, and if you use that as a starting off point, then the halfway mark is securely in the 19th century, where it belongs. But if you scoff at the Revolution and those silly Articles of Confederation, which I never actually learned about because Big Mrs. White didn't teach us that stuff, then the halfway mark is 1900, the very start of the very century at least one of us was born in.

A little more than half (11 to be accurate about it) of the independently named presidents postdate 1900, so it's not all that decisive a factor. Let's hear it for Zachary and Rutherford and Grover.

My guess is there's a reason why so many presidents have had quirky first names. There's certainly a reason why so many have had boring last ones, but that moves me too close to screeching territory.

Hmmm. Now that I think about it, the other most important elected position in the United States, American Idol, has also had its share of unique names. From memory (which I couldn't do with presidents, because I can never remember Rutherford B. Hayes), they are Kelly, Ruben, Fantasia, Carrie, Taylor, Jordin,
David, Kris, Lee, and Scotty.

Forget Mitt and Newt (and how I wish I could). Let's hear it for President Fantasia!

Does Anyone Have A Good Cure For Insomnia?

2012-01-20T09:59:00.003-05:00

Or a bad cure, for that matter. I'm not fussy.

As you know, because I tell you everything, I'm weaning my way off my beloved sleeping pills, trying to use them only when I have insomnia. My insurance company, my doctor and I all think this is a good idea.

I've become very Silas Marnerish about the pills, taking pride in the not using of them. But then insomnia pops in, and I lie in bed and fantasize about taking just a little half a pill and falling asleep, and the next thing I know, twenty minutes have passed, and I give up, get out of bed, and take the darn half pill (and by golly, fall right asleep).

I know the following things about insomnia. It doesn't kill you (at least not directly). It's very boring. It's usually stress based (but not this time, since this is an extremely non-stress time in my life, except for the insomnia). It has an element (at least in my case) of self-fulling prophecy. And it's very boring (well worth mentioning again).

I have no idea how many people read this blog, or who any of you are (except for Marci), but I figure there are enough of you out there that it can't hurt to ask for insomnia (or lack thereof) advice.

So what do you suggest for warding off insomnia? I may already be trying some of your possible suggestions (going to bed at a reasonable and regular time, winding down before then, reading a little, deep breathing), but I could use some help, and who better to turn to than you?

Let me thank you in advance, and please know I'm going to read each and every one of your comments (and I hope there's at least one), and I'll try the ones that might work for my jolly sleep loving personality!

The Return Of Susan The Clipping Queen

2012-01-18T14:23:00.013-05:00

I come from a family of newspaper readers, and my mother was always fabulous about f sending clippings of articles she knew you'd enjoy.

The Internet provides a universe of article clipping possibilities. So get your linking fingers ready, because here are a few things I think you might find interesting.

For starters, YARN with Figment has posted the winner of the Family Gatherings Essay Contest that I helped judge. This essay was my first choice, and I'm very pleased it won.

I really really really liked this article from the New York Times about what themes and endings in movies leave the audience most satisfied. Parts of it resonated with me and the choices I made writing Life As We Knew It:

What this suggested to her is that "the accomplishment the audience values most is not when the heroine saves the day or the hero defeats his opponent. Instead, she said, "the accomplishment the audience values most is resilience."

I got a letter recently from some middle school students who asked me, "Why did you make the meteor hit the moon instead of a planet?"

I replied that the moon got hit because I thought that could cause more damage than hitting Mars. Well, what did I know? It turns out this very planet of ours recently got hit by meteorites from Earth's Red Planet neighbor.

Those rocks should only have hit one of those nasty astronomers who maligned my sweet darling Pluto, the solar system's cutest onetime planet.

I think I liked this story about finding Charles Darwin's missing fossils because of everything I found when I cleaned out my file cabinet. There's gold in them thar files, if you're willing to look for it.

I'm off to read today's New York Times in search of even more interesting things to clip!

Now Is The Winter Of Our Content

2012-01-13T11:17:00.009-05:00

This has been the easiest, and therefore most pleasant, winter I can remember.

Of course much of that is weather based. We've had a grand total of one snowstorm, and that was in October. Now I like snow (a lot actually, since it always reminds me of snowdays and I loved snowdays), but it's a real pleasure not to have to crawl over mounds of dirty frozen deadsnow, to get to my dirty frozen deadsnow car.

My parking lot is black ice capital, but not this winter. No snow and also no sleet, and above freezing temperatures practically every day. I've worn my winter coat and gloves four times (I'm giving the winter jacket I bought for Buxtehude a lot of wear), and I've scraped ice off my windshield maybe twice.

Now I know this easy weather isn't going to last, but neither will winter. Last winter, which was a long nasty one, started freezing over in December and didn't melt until March. So even if the snows start falling (and nothing serious is expected in the ten day forecast), the messy part will be over in six weeks or less.

I love this winter. I really do.

Everything else is going smooth and easy as well. I'm reteaching myself the joys of living on a budget, with the help of websites like Hot Flash Financial. I'm reading a lot (I started The Secret Life Of Houdini yesterday, and as part of my joys of budget, took it out of the library). I'm plowing my way through my backlog of DVDs (last night, Philadelphia, tonight The History Boys),weaning myself off my beloved sleeping pills, and I've even lost a couple of pounds. Friday evenings I write down five things I'm grateful for, and so far it hasn't been a struggle to find things to write down.

Oh, and thanks to owning a new computer, I've won 100% of my FreeCell games. How's that for an ego boost.

When I wrote Kid Power, my extremely good editor, Jeanne Vestal, taught me several things, one of which is characters can't have things completely easy. They have to have problems to solve, woes to feel. So I don't want you to think everything in my life is jim dandy. I have serious vacuum cleaner and toilet issues. One won't start and the other won't stop.

But I'll take that over sleet and freezing rain any day!

The Return Of Harry The Sofa King

2012-01-09T13:57:00.005-05:00

I spent much of last week clearing out and organizing my file cabinet (a January kind of job). I went through every file of every book I've written, including a few I got paid for but the book never got published.

It turned out my favorite things to discover were reversion of rights forms, when my book hadn't sold enough copies for the publisher to want to have anything to do with it, so back all the rights came to me. I'm sure every time it happened, I felt, if not depressed, then at least saddened, but now I look at those pretty little letters and say, I can put this book on Kindle! Or Nook! Or anyplace else I want, once I learn how!

Learning how is among my January jobs, although with January flying by so fast (thanks to the incredible warm sunny weather we've been having all winter), it may end up being a February job. But it's definitely on the to do list, and should I ever succeed in doing so, you'll be the first to know.

I found a lot of other things in my files, but one of the things that made me happiest to locate was a copy of my manuscript, Harry The Sofa King. I told you all about it quite a while ago, but for those of you who don't commit my blog entries to memory (and shame on you if you don't), here's a link to the entry where I mentioned it (and a few other things).

I really truly loved Harry The Sofa King, but the last time I mentioned it to my agent, she said there was no market whatsoever for it. None. Nary a one.

I trust her to know these things, but that doesn't keep me from true love. So what I figured I'd do is type out the entire manuscript right here and right now, so anyone who stumbles by can read it. It was meant to be a picture book, so you'll have to imagine the illustrations.

All right. Here goes. Harry The Sofa King by Susan Beth Pfeffer Herself.

Once there was a small country with a king named Harry. Harry was very lonely for a king.

Harry knew why he was so lonely. He could never invite people to his castle because it was full of sofas. There were wall to wall sofas, sofas floor to ceiling.

When Harry wanted to take a bath, he had to carry seven sofas out of the bathtub.

No wonder Harry had no friends.

One day Harry had a great idea. The best thing about being a king is you got to order people around.

And now Harry knew just what he wanted to order people to do.

King Harry sent word throughout his land that every man, woman, and child in the kingdom had to come to his castle and bring all their money.

Soon all the people in the kingdom had lined up with their money. King Harry took their money from them and gave each of them lots of sofas.

By the end of the day, King Harry had a big pile of money and an empty castle.

It was wonderful to see his floors and walls again. King Harry found two rubber bands, five paper clips, and a sour ball.

He also saw his cat had had kittens.

Harry found a mop, a bucket, and some soap. He scrubbed the entire castle until it gleamed.

Then he took a long long bath.

Without any sofas, the castle looked kind of empty. But King Harry was sure once he made friends, the castle would be full and busy.

Harry stood at his window looking outside. But nobody came to visit him in his nice clean castle.

Harry spent every day cleaning his castle and taking baths. Sometimes he played with the kittens. But he grew lonelier and lonelier.

One afternoon, after taking his bath, Harry got dressed and went outside. He took some of his money with him, so he could buy an ice cream cone.

Harry walked over to the ice cream stand. On his walk, he saw people carrying sofas.

The man at the ice cream stand looked very nice. He smiled at King Harry.

"I'd like a vanilla cone please," King Harry said.

"That will be four sofas," the ice cream man said.

"I don't have any sofas on me," King Harry said. "Just money."

"I'll give you a cone this time," the ice cream man said. "But you'd better go home and get some sofas if you want to buy anything else."

King Harry went back to his castle and searched for sofas. But all he found were rubber bands and kittens.

The ice cream man had to be wrong, King Harry decided. He'd walk around his kingdom and find out just what was going on.

First he went to the supermarket.

"Here's your change," the grocery clerk said. "Two plaid sofas and a loveseat."

A street vendor was selling jewelry. "Ten sofas for this watch!" he shouted. "Twenty at a store."

Lots of people were buying his watches.

"Mommy, mommy, can I have a sofa?" a little boy cried. "I want to buy some gum."

Things were really busy at the bank.

All throughout the kingdom King Harry saw people with sofas piled on their heads.

They all seemed to have headaches as well.

King Harry wanted the people of his kingdom to be happy. So he sent out word that everyone in the kingdom should come back to the castle and bring all their sofas.

This time King Harry took the sofas and gave everyone back their money.

People smiled and laughed.

King Harry scattered all the sofas in the backyard of his castle. He put big signs up in the kingdom next door.

DISCOUNT SOFAS!!! the signs all said.

Harry put a large neon sign in his yard. it said SOFAS R US!!!
All the people from the kingdom next door bought the discount sofas.

King Harry kept two sofas for himself. One he kept in his living room for himself and his cats.

And he put a plaid sofa bed in the den for when his friend, the ice cream man, slept over.

Not Everyone Spends A Year Reading Shakespeare And Samuel Johnson

2012-01-03T10:59:00.006-05:00

I certainly didn't.

Actually, my primary reading matter in 2011 was showbiz biographies/memoirs.

In case you don't believe me, here's the list of books I read from Jan. 1-Dec. 31, 2011. When necessary (i.e. when I feel like it), I'll add a note or two.

Death and the Virgin Queen- Chris Skidmore
Jane Addams- Louise W. Knight
Never Let Me Go- Kazuo Shiguro*
Cage Of Stars- Jacquelyn Mitchard
A Student of Living Things- Susan Richards Shreve
The Blind Side- Michael Lewis
Duplicate Keys- Jane Smiley
American Rose- Karen Abbott
Cain- Roy Hoopes**
The Killer of Little Shepherds- Douglas Starr
This Laugh Is On Me- Phil Silvers
And The Show Goes On- Sheldon Leonard
Unsolved- Richard Glyn Jones ed. (The only book I read all summer)
Dick Van Dyke- Dick Van Dyke
The Descent- Fritz Peters
Mary Tudor- Anna Whitclock
Funny Woman- Barbara W. Grossman
Hide And Go Seek- Andrew Garve
The Lennon Sisters- A. H. Parr (Marci, knowing my taste, gave it to me)
USA- John Dos Passos (reread; I read it in high school)
Ladies Man- Paul Henreid
Snips And Snails-Louise Baker (also read in high school)
From Sawdust To Stardust- Terry Lee Rioux
Iron House- John Hart
Sybil Exposed- Debbie Nathan
A Skating Life- Dorothy Hamill (also given to me by Marci)
That's Not All Folks- Mel Blanc
The Litigators- John Grisham
The Silver Seven- Rita Ritchie (another Marci gift)***
The Garner Files- James Garner****
Spencer Tracy- James Curtis (very long and very entertaining)
Star Trek A Choice of Catastrophes- Michael Schuster and Steve Mollmann*****
Wandering Stars- Jack Dann ed.
Lost In Shangri-La- Mitchell Zurkoff (tied for my favorite book of the year)
Robert Ryan- Franklin Jarlett (missing 20 pages, but I'm claiming it anyway)
A Quite Remarkable Father- Leslie Ruth Howard******
Dark Tide: The Great Molasses Flood of 1919- Stephen Puleo
Who Killed Mr. Crittenden- Kenneth Lamott
Hedy's Folly- Richard Rhodes
11/22/63- Stephen King (really really really long)
Cold Heaven- Brian Moore (reread)
Destiny of the Republic- Candice Millard (my other favorite book of the year)

* I don't read a lot of fiction, but this one was really stupid.
** It has the best line of the year. James Cain wrote of one of his books,"It must have been a saga, because it sagged all over the place."
*** And don't you wish Marci was your friend also!
**** James Garner doesn't mention it, but he was rumored to have had an affair with Lauren Bacall and you have no idea how long it took me to confirm that fact via Google.
***** Now this is what I call great fiction.
****** I bought this book in high school and have carried it around with me ever since. When I realized it was coming up on the 50 year test, I figured I'd better actually read it, since I'd hate to have moved it from place to place over so many decades without having bothered to.

New Year's Greetings From Scooter And Me

2011-12-28T15:19:00.021-05:00

Wishing a happy, healthy and all around excellent 2012 to 0123, Abigail, Ale, Ali, Allie, Amanda,Amy, Andrea, Andre G, Anonymous, Anonymous AZ, Anonymous Santa Fe, Another Susan, April, Arik, Ash, Ashley, Asian Swag, Austin, Ava, Bailey S.,beachbum15, becci, Becky, Bee, Begins With M, Bethanie, bjr 711, Bonnie Jacobs, boros 1124,
Brandi, Brenda Shorten, Buchgestaltung,Carolyn Watson-Dubisch, Cassie, CBM, Cecilia, Celeste, Cheryl, Chris, Christine, Cori C., Damian, Dawn M. Debra, Diane, Didie, donna, Donna, Donna Cash, Elaine Marie Alphin, elise, Elizabeth, Emily, Emily B, Emily Rachelle, Erickold, ex BFF, Fear Death By Water, Friendly Neighbourhood Bookseller, Gabby, Gaelle, Gillian, Glen, Greenbird, grrlpup, Hailey, Hanna B., Hannah, Heather, hewitt.eu.comj, Hooked in Boston, Ing, Ita, Jamie, Jamie Cline, Jane, Janet, Jasmine Alicia, Jarvis, Jeff Vincent, Jenny, Jenny S. Morris, Jess, J. F. Kirk (Tari), JKA, J M Cooper, Joe, Jon, Johanna, Jordan G., Jordan Gehrung, Judith, Julie,Julie B, Juni Wolfspirit, Karen ShamaLamaMama, Karin, Karis Jacobstein, Kate Karyus Quinn, Kathy, kay, Kay, Kellee, Kelly, Kelsey Cheung, Kerry, Klishr, Krazy Kay, Kristin, L, Lee, leftwriter, Lexa, Lexi, Lia Sato, Librarina, Lilly, Linda Jacobs, Lisa, Lisa Mandina, Lisa-Marie Jordan, Liz Hamblyn, Lizz, lizzieTC, Luker, MacKenzie Marie, Madison Field, Marci, Maria, Maria T., Margaret,Meggi M., Melanie, mericate, Mindy, Mirandawrites, Misrule, Mo, Moon Lover, Morgaine, Mr. Cavin, Mr. Platyperson, Mrs. Corbett, Ms. Donna M., Ms. Yingling, mykake, natalie, Nate, nathan, never_say_forever, NewEditionFanClub.com, Nina, Nina Permata Sari, non sk83r b01, Nora Durbin, Nora Garcia, number plate makers, online ged, Paige Y., Parlantes Nocturnos, Paul, Phanie, pokemecreator, princessbubbah, Project Journal, qwertyuiop, rbcca, Reader 901, Rebecca, Regina from Texas, Renee Carter Hall, Robin L., Robin Talley, Robyn, rock4ever95, Rosa Alvarado, Sarah, Sarah TKD, Sara Reed, Sebekos, Sean, Shelby, Shirley Shimer, shm, Starr, Stephen Squires, Stephanie, Sue, Susan, susancolebank, Susannah, Susan Pennell, Susan S, Sydne, Tanya Collins, Tara, teenreaderexpress, Teresa Barrett, Terri B, Tez Miller, thatchinskykid, The "L" in ELF, tigerlily*, Tosha, Tyler, Unknown, Walter, Wanda Vaughn, W. Slezak, Wax Beach Artist, Xavier d'Almeida, Youryoungestbiggestfan!, Zach Roland, Zoe, and everyone else who's taken a moment or two out of their lives to read my blog.

Scooter says to tell you if any of your names are misspelled, it's not his fault. He's exhausted just from watching me do all this typing!

Happy Blinking Day!

2011-12-26T10:28:00.012-05:00

It's a brand new holiday. It combines the better features of Boxing Day (an event whose name I know if not its purpose) with Linking Day (an event I just created, because there's no point doing a blog entry of links right before Christmas- not even I in my most glorious egotism think anyone would be interested just then).

So put on your boxing gloves. I'll do the linking.

For starters, I'm going to be one of the authors at the USA Science And Engineering Festival and Book Fair Sunday, April 29 in Washington DC. There are going to be tons of writers there, all of whom know considerably more about science and engineering than I do. Actually, I know nothing about engineering, and not much more about science.

Being invited to such an extraordinary event has given me pause to think about whether my Junior High School science teachers are spinning in their graves or not. When you're 13, all grownups look pretty much the same age (old). But if they were 20years older than me, they could well be enjoying themselves without any thought of grave spinning. Even 30 years older, they could still be alive and kicking. But no matter how old they are, they would never have anticipated my being invited to talk at a festival devoted to science. Trust me on that (without links to my junior high school report cards).

A couple of interviews I gave have slipped past unlinked to. Well, we can't have that. In this first one, I talk about blogging, a dangerous thing to admit to on this my very own blog. In the second one, I list the three books I'd take with me if the world comes to an end, none of which, as it happens, I wrote.

Finally, while I don't have a link for this, I know you'll all be happy to hear that on my brand new computer my FreeCell winning percentage is a glowing 100%, and I intend to keep it that way. Failure is impossible at least in one tiny aspect of my life!

ETA: Whoops. I was visiting my mother when I realized I'd forgotten to mention that I got an email from my publisher saying the paperback of Blood Wounds will be coming out in the fall of 2012. It'll cost $7.99 (so much less expensive than $8.00), so I'm giving you at least 9 months to save the necessary 799 pennies (more if you have to pay sales tax).

My mother is fine and sends her regards!

In Germany, August Is Right Around The Corner

2011-12-19T17:22:00.006-05:00

Only because the holidays are rapidly approaching, I'll spare you the long version of how my computer died so I bought a new one and the new one didn't work so I took it back to Staples which refused to believe it was the computer's fault, and made me bring in the new monitor I bought to go with the new computer, even though I told them repeatedly it was the computer not the monitor that was faulty, and then after I brought in the monitor, they attached a new monitor to the computer, and by golly, I was right and it was the computer, so they finally agreed and let me exchange the computer, but they thought I should get a new monitor to go with the new new computer so I got a new new (and slightly bigger) monitor, and ironically enough, the monitors cost the same, and but the computer was on sale this week, so I actually saved $40.

Trust me. That's not the long version.

Long or short, it's comforting to have a working computer. And two good things resulted from all this.

The first is I have a whole new new computer to play Freecell on, and since it doesn't remember the tragedy of my previous losses, I'm now at a 100% success rate, which will remain forever, since there's no reason to lose at Freecell, given I can erase any games I'm in process of losing.

In 2011 I wrote two books, neither of which will ever be published, so I'm particularly in need of a 100% success rate at something. I'm not fussy about what.

The second good thing has to do with my perfectly healthy morning ritual of checking my Amazon and Barnes and Noble numbers. So when I bought the new new computer, I had to find all those numbers to make favorites of them.

This was not difficult or time consuming. But because I'm internationally renown (at least in my fantasies), I also check the French and German versions of my books every morning. Therefore, I zipped over to Amazon France and Amazon Germany and put Pfeffer into their search boxes and located my books.

But while doing this, I discovered the German version of This World We Live In is available for pre-order.

I never would have found that out except for the new new computer, since the book isn't coming out until August and I wouldn't have thought to look for months. Silly me.

The German title for This World We Live In is Das Leben, das uns bleibt, which my beloved Google Translations informs me means The life that we are left, which is actually a good title.

I saw the cover when I was in Germany, and it's my favorite of the three German covers. And while it makes no sense for me to check the Amazon number for a book that isn't coming out for another seven and one half months, we all know I will anyway.

So join me. Here's the listing for Das Leben, das uns bleibt. What better way to start celebrating the holidays!

Three, It Turns Out, Is The Best Number For A Trilogy

2011-12-15T10:56:00.006-05:00

My publisher and I have mutually decided not to pursue a fourth moon book. I won't be writing any new versions of The Shade Of The Moon.

This decision was decided so mutually that I don't even know who mutually decided it first.

I've been a writer for a long long time, and during that long long time I've figured out what I can do and what I can't. I can do rewrites. I may gripe and complain about the process, but I've worked with quite a number of excellent editors who've helped guide me as I've tried to make my book better.

What I can't do is write to please someone else. It's simply not a skill I have. Even when I've written books pretty much just for the money, they've been stories I've enjoyed figuring out, with characters I've wanted to get to know better. For better or worse (and it can go either way), I write for myself.

Emily Bronte wrote a poem that has a couple of lines I've always loved.

I'll walk where my own nature would be leading:
It vexes me to choose another guide.

I could devote the next few months of my life to trying to figure out an approach for a fourth moon book that would please my publisher, but frankly, I avoid being vexed. Therefore yesterday afternoon I dug through my file cabinet, found the unsigned contracts for the fourth moon book, and mailed them back to my agent. This wasn't a foot stomping whining tantrumy decision. It was simply an awareness that a fourth book wasn't going to work.

So if you want to know what happens to Miranda and Alex next, you'll have to decide for yourself. Maybe they'll be happier in your mind's eye. Maybe they'll be sadder. But either way,you'll take them where your nature would be leading. And that's just where they should go.

Crass And Commercial? Not Moi!

2011-12-13T12:37:00.005-05:00

The New York Times had an article today about how bookstores are doing an excellent holiday business.

The article focuses on sales of adult books, and I don't write adult books (lacking, as I do, sufficient adult genes), but it still made me jealous of all those writers who get a holiday season boost.

I'm not totally oblivious to what it is I write, and I do understand that in my last four books, I've killed off all humanity in three and an entire family in the fourth. And while Christmas isn't my holiday, I have reason to believe books where all humanity and/or entire families get slaughtered may not automatically appeal to the holiday spirit shopper.

It's too late and I'm too lazy to rewrite all four books, so I've decided instead to give them holiday-appropriate titles. That way people won't notice all the suffering and horror.

Life As We Knew It With Santa

Sleighbells* Ring For The Dead And The Gone

This World We Live In At Holiday Time

Blood Wounds But Really Nice Gifts Heal!

I can hear those cash registers jingle with that happy holiday sound!

*Get the clever play on words? Sleighbells? Slaybells? Maybe it's too subtle for the harried holiday shopper.

Here's A Writing Contest You Might Be Interested In

2011-12-09T17:19:00.005-05:00

I'm not giving you much notice, since the deadline is Dec. 12 (and I apologize for that), but if you're 13 or older, and you'd like to write an essay about a family gathering and you're willing to have me judge it,scurry to this link and find out all about it!

As Virtues Go, Patience Is Severely Overrated

2011-12-07T12:18:00.007-05:00

Think about it. Have you ever heard a eulogy that includes the phrase, "And the deceased was truly patient." Or a politician saying, "I don't want to blow my own horn but I'm a lot more patient than the other candidates."

In fact, I don't even think we'd know patience was a virtue if there wasn't a cliche declaring it one.

Bad cess on patience. That's all I've got to say. Well, bad cess on patience and on the possibility of 2-6 inches of snow tonight, especially since just yesterday, I was bragging to a friend of mine in California about how mild a December this has been.

Way way back, all the way back to two full days ago, I patiently pointed out that no decisions are made in December about books or the suchlike, and I knew, because of how extremely and nobly patient I am, that I wouldn't hear anything until 2012, which is three weeks from now, if not more, given that New Year's Day is on a Sunday, which practically stops the new year from starting until Jan. 8 at the earliest.

Patient Griselda. That's what they call me. Except for the Griselda part. And the patient part.

All right. I know better than to expect my editor or my agent to let me know how wonderful my story is, since it would take them at least 5 minutes to read it (maybe 7 minutes if they sneeze in the middle and don't have a tissue on them). Add another minute to write me an email to say how wonderful it is, 2 minutes if they need to use the thesaurus for additional awe inspired adjectives (sure, I know marvelous and fabulous and the greatest thing ever written, but editors and agents might need a little extra help to come up with them). Fine, 3 minutes, if they need to pick and choose, and there's always a chance that they get so involved in the subtle differences between fabulous and marvelous that they forget who they're sending the email to, and have to look it up.

Seven minutes with sneezing and three minutes with searching and forgetting, and it still adds up to ten minutes, which the last I saw, was a mere 1/6th of an hour, and not very much time at all.

In reality (stop giggling; I know what reality is), I don't expect to hear any words of praise or loathing (I'm accustomed to both) for a while, especially since it is December, and nothing happens in December. But I'm a tad peeved that neither my editor nor my agent has bothered to send me an email to say they got the story and summary. That's a one minute event, even with a sneeze (assuming they have a tissue on them).

So if you should happen to run into my editor or my agent, could you suggest to them that they email me to say the story and summary arrived, and it's positively breaking their hearts that they won't get a chance to read it until 2012, and possibly even 2013, given the Olympics and the election and other time consuming events, like having to buy a box of tissues?

Severely Patient Griselda would appreciate it!

Scooter, Guardian Of The Spoilers

2011-12-05T12:08:00.009-05:00

I tidied up my Alex story and wrote a one page summary of what I intend The Shade Of The Moon Short Story Version to be, and zipped them off to my editor and agent.

Now it's up to my publisher to decide, and given that this is December, a month where no decisions are made, I doubt I'll hear anything definitive in 2011.

But I've done my part, and can resume obsessive playing of Freecell (my winning streak at a tidy 606) with a clear conscience.

For those of you who are curious, I'm going to put the one page summary here. For those of you who might regard the one page summary as a spoiler (although how it can be a spoiler when there's no guarantee the publisher is going to say yes, and even if the publisher says yes, who knows what changes might be made between now and when I write the book, and then it'll take at least a year before the book is published, by which time you will have surely forgotten every single word of the summary except my name, which I trust even a year from whenever you'll remember and know how to pronounce, like Pepper only with "F"s, I don't know).

But for the sensitive to spoiler ones amongst you, I'm going to put a brand new taken for just this occasion picture of Scooter. If you want to be spoiler free, or you just don't care to read anymore, then say hello to Scooter and leave my blog behind (at least until the next time I have something to blog about!).

The Shade Of The Moon Short Story Collection
Susan Beth Pfeffer

Ever since the publication of This World We Live In, I’ve received daily requests for a fourth book, one that tells what becomes of Alex and Miranda.

I want to know what becomes of them also. But it’s very important to me that any fourth “moon” book be different in structure, if not style, from the other three books.

What I’d like to write is a volume of “moon” stories, focusing on four teenagers, Miranda (from Life As We Knew It) , Alex (from The Dead And The Gone), Lark Frasier, a British girl left stranded in the United States, whose life intersects with Alex, and Shawn Delaney, a boy who has had to fight for every moment of survival, that Miranda meets through her friend Sammi.

The book would be chronological, with each story indicating who the main character is and when the action takes place. The stories will be independent of each other, but the volume will interconnect, leaving the readers with a strong sense of what the world has become, and what Miranda and Alex’s future will hold.

The Story Is Written! It Is! It Is!

2011-12-02T15:59:00.003-05:00

No amount of dawdling kept me from writing the sample Shade Of The Moon short story. And believe, me, I'm top notch at dawdling.

It's an Alex story and it takes place a few months after the end of This World We Live In, and it would be nice if it had a title, but currently it doesn't. I'll polish it on Monday and send it off, and maybe before I do, a title will come to me. Something better than Alex Story.

Then again, almost anything would be better than Alex Story. That's a label, not a title.

I know you won't be shocked to hear I love the story. If you know me, you know I love everything I write, at least for the first ten minutes after I've finished. But this one I'm going to still love on Monday.

After that, it's up to my editor and publisher to see if they love it like I do!

There's The Bulle. Now Where's My Brain?

2011-11-28T14:47:00.016-05:00

The Buxtehude Bulle (or, as I tend to think of it, My Buxtedude Bulle) has been wandering around my apartment since it got here, waiting for someone strong and tall to put it on top of a bookcase. This weekend I had a visit from someone strong and tall, and up it went.

I feel sorry for the Horrified B Movie Victims. It used to be they only had the Bride Of Frankenstein to fear. Now they have a giant (and very heavy) Bulle as well.

And since you're admiring my bookcase, isn't that picture of the solar eclipse fabulous? It's one of my favorite things in the world. I found it in a junk shop bin and paid a dollar for it. It's from the January 24, 1925 eclipse.

It's good that the Bulle is where it belongs. I wish I knew where I put my brain. I used to be able to use it whenever I needed, but lately it's developed a mind of its own.

I've been thinking about short stories, in case I write The Shade Of The Moon The Short Story Version, and in an effort to understand how they work, I read an anthology (Wandering Stars, edited by Jack Dann). I have a better grasp of them now (they seem, for the most part, to be extended anecdotes, with beginnings and middles and most of the time ends), although I still don't have a grasp of how to turn a bunch of short stories into a cohesive volume.

Also, last night I was remembering one of my story ideas (a Miranda story), and I remembered the beginning and the ending, but, alas, completely forgot the middle. My guess is middles are important in short stories (in books, you can kind of tap dance around them if necessary), and it would be helpful, should I write that Miranda story, to know what happens in between Once Upon A Time and They Lived Miserably Ever After.

Then, this morning, I was thinking about how many stories and how many characters and all that, when I remembered that my editor had suggested my actually writing a story and sending it to her to see if a volume of short stories was a good idea after all.

Now if she doesn't think it's a good idea after all, there's no reason to worry about middles and cohesiveness and how many characters and all that. As you can see, my brain isn't what it used to be, and there's no point sacrificing my limited number of brain cells on a project that might die aborning. Or shortly after aborning.

Therefore I'm going to write a single story and send it to my editor and see what happens next. I know a lot about the story already. It's an Alex story and I sort of remember its beginning and middle and end. Tomorrow I'm bringing my mother her clean laundry and Wednesday I'm going to New York City to see an exhibit about the Dead Sea Scrolls and a matinee of Follies. But there's minimal reason not to write a story on Thursday, and no reason whatsoever not to write one on Friday, so I think I might just do that and send it to my editor and find out whether she likes it or not and whether I need to worry about cohesiveness, etc. or whether I can spend the winter searching for my brain, which I probably put in the back of the closet, along with my extra blankets and pillows.

Anyway, that's the plan. Since I've committed to it in a place filled with Anonymouses who are waiting for me to do something, I have to go through with it.

Assuming the Bulle doesn't fall on my head first!

Yes It's Hokey But The New York Times Endorses It

2011-11-23T12:03:00.010-05:00

The New York Times had an article on Tuesday about how being grateful for things improves your life. These kinds of articles show up regularly around Thanksgiving. I love them, just as much as I love the articles on how to survive your family during holiday get togethers.

This particular New York Times article says if you write down five things you're grateful for a mere once a week, then after two months you'll sleep better, exercise more, and have a greater chance at winning the lottery (okay, I made the lottery part up).

As it happens, Scooter has no problem with sleeping or exercising. I'm the one with the problems, since he sleeps when I'm awake and exercises on my bed when I'm trying to sleep. Still, I felt I should ask him to make a list.

Scooter's List:

1. Cat food
2. Cat food
3. Cat food
4. Cat food
5. Cat food

Scooter is nothing if not a traditionalist.

To be honest, I could make a list of ice cream, cake, cookies, candy, and caramel coated popcorn, but that's probably not what the New York Times has in mind, even if I do regard caramel coated popcorn as a health food. So I'll limit my five things I'm grateful about to five non-fattening things that are every bit as wonderful to me.

Susan's List:

1. Everyone who reads this blog
2. Everyone who votes on one of my polls
3. Everyone named Anonymous who leaves a comment
4. Everyone named something other than Anonymous who leaves a comment
5. Everyone who emails me about my books (well, except for some people who email to tell me how they don't like my books, and I bet they have terrible times at holiday family get togethers and it serves them right)

Whoops. See how easily I slip from grateful to cranky!

So let me add how grateful I am to all of you for putting up with this cranky but deeply appreciative freelance children's book writer. You mean more to me than you can ever imagine.

Die Verlorenen Von New York (The Dead And The Gone) Is Nominated for A German Award

2011-11-21T08:19:00.011-05:00

When I checked my emails this morning, I found that Die Verlorenen Von New York (a book I think of fondly as The Dead And The Gone) has been shortlisted for the prestigious German book award, Der Leserpreis- die bestern Buecher 2011, in the Krimi (Crime Thriller/Thriller) category. It is one of 35 books in that category, and the others all look very impressive.

Here's what Google Translation told me, since I still haven't learned German.

Voting for the Readers' Choice Award

Up to 20 November you had the opportunity to nominate a book for each category proposed. The rush was tremendous! Numerous books have earned the title of your opinion and have been proposed - a big thank you!

Among the many entries we have now asked to choose the books that were mentioned most frequently, to be exact, 35 per category.

Vote
You now have the opportunity to 27 To vote in November per category for your favorite book!
Note: each category can be voted only for a book. Think twice before he kicks your voice.

What is the Readers' Choice Award?

On the bestseller lists are books that sell well. Critics prizes books that a jury finds convincing. The reader, however, determine price alone readers, what books they liked this year very well. Join us and become part of our judges!

Why the Reader's Choice Award?

The Reader's Choice Award is a thank you the readers to the authors who enrich with their exciting, touching, entertaining and disturbing stories of our lives.

Books offer fans "The Reader's Choice Award" an orientation, a recommendation by readers for readers who clearly says that in 2011 books are really worth reading.

The Reader's Choice Award will be awarded this year for the third time. The reader response Awards 2009 Reader's Choice Award and 2010 was enormous: Nearly 30,000 votes were cast last year. This makes the Readers' Choice for biggest, awarded by readers

If you want to see the list and cast a vote, here's the Krimi Category.

And if you're curious about all the books nominated in all the different categories, start here.

Even if Die Verlorenen Von New York comes in 35th out of 35, I'm still delighted it was nominated. And maybe now I'll learn how to spell Die Verlorenen without having to stare nervously at the book jacket (I'm pretty good at the Von New York part!).

The Bulle And I Are Home

2011-11-15T14:39:00.044-05:00

Generally, I'm one of those people who has no interest in looking at anyone else's travel pictures. As a result, I try not to show my pictures to too many people. But that's not going to stop me now! Here are some pictures, and a couple of teeny tiny videos, from my recent trip to Buxtehude, Germany.

Pretty much as soon as I got off the airplane, I was taken to the unveiling of the Buxtehude Bulle Award Plaque for Life As We Knew It. That's the mayor helping me out.

Then it was off to my hotel room, which had a spectacular view.

I was kept very busy during my time in Buxtehude and Hamburg, but I did watch a little bit of TV. Thanks to the various time zone differences, I got to watch some figure skating live from Japan. The only thing I didn't like about the hotel was the bathtub, which I called The Bathtub Of Death. Every time I climbed out of it (don't panic- no one took any pictures), I knew I was risking my life.

(You know, if people showed me travel photographs of their bathtubs, I'd be delighted to look at them).

In Hamburg, I was taken to meet my publisher. It was there I finally came to understand that German and English are two different languages.

Here are two tiny videos of me receiving the Buxtehude Bulle from the Deputy Mayor. You might want to lie on your side for the second one.

For those of you who prefer a photograph of the event, here it is:

If you're looking for an article in German about the event, here's one that showed up on Twitter.

The Bulle was given its own very pink suitcase to go to America in.

I think it preferred the view from my dining room table.

Of course Scooter was happy to see me when I came home. And he always likes making new friends.

I feel as though I made many new friends both in Buxtehude and in Hamburg. The trip was a once in a lifetime experience, and a memory I'll cherish forever.

The Bulle is Mine!

2011-11-12T02:58:00.004-05:00

I am now officially the proud winner of the 40th annual Buxtehude Bulle Award. And they weren't kidding when they said it weighs 25 pounds.

Not only did they give me my own bull, but they also gave me two certificates for my Wall Of Ego, a check, and an extremely pink carryon bag for the bull to travel in. Clearly this is a bull secure in his masculinity.

I had my own surprise for those in attendance. I gave my multi-paragraph thank you speech in German. Given that I don't speak German, this was quite a challenge. I couldn't have done it without the saintly assistance of my friend Renee. I wrote out the speech and then she translated it. But even more importantly, she taught me how to pronounce the words, and she endured rehearsal after rehearsal, including one a half hour before I left for the ceremony.

I have never been so nervous in my life. But the speech seemed to go well. At least they let me keep the bull!

Today I'm being taken on a tour of the area, and tomorrow I go home. Be prepared for lots of pictures of Buxtehude, bulls, and extremely pink suitcases!

I'm In Germany! I Am! I Am!

2011-11-09T09:24:00.002-05:00

I'm actually writing this in a German newspaper office, because I didn't bring the right kind of plug converter to use with my little portable computer. So I'm using a German keyboard, and the Z is where the Y should be and vice versa. You never realize how many Ys you use until you start seeing Zs all over the place.

So far everything has been wonderful except for the weather which is kind of grey (or grez as the case may be). The flight was smooth and easy and all my planning was for naught, since they gave every single one of us our own pillow and blanket. I did get a little bit of sleep, which was a good thing because as soon as I reached Buxtehude, I was taken to meet the mayor, and then to the incredibly fabulous Plaque With My Name On It ceremony. I am delighted to report that the plaque is right in front of a bakery, which given my fondness for baked goods, is extremely appropriate.

It occurs to me that part of this Y problem is because of my fondness for the word My. But I don't have the energy to switch to the Regal We.

Today I visited at a high school and this evening I'll give a talk at a library. Tomorrow I'll visit another school and go to Hamburg for another appearance. Friday I get a tour of Buxtehude, and in the evening I get my award. Saturday I go on a tour of the area, and then Sunday I fly back to America, to Scooter, and to keyboards with the Y where I'm used to it.

Be prepared for a much longer report then and lots of pictures. And just maybe the Regal We!

PS- I'm not sure how to spell plaque (I keep thinking maybe there should be a C in there) so I just used spellcheck, and the only word it says I spelled right is Buxtehude. This really is a German computer!

I'm Off To Germany Tomorrow To Get The Buxtehude Bulle

2011-11-06T21:49:00.005-05:00

So I'm writing this blog entry tonight.

Don't expect coherence. I've already packed it.

First of all, thank you for your thoughtful comments and for voting on the poll. I found the votes really interesting. The majority of both age groups favor keeping Alex alive (so do I at this point), but not by enormous margins.

Poor Alex. My guess is if I'd put up a comparable poll about Horton the cat, a lot more people would have demanded his survival.

Oh, I put something new on the right side of the blog, a link to a really good essay about using Life As We Knew It in a science classroom. My ninth grade science teacher would have been stunned (I flunked Rocks. I'd flunk it again if I took it again).

Here's what I bought for this trip: A coat, a jacket with a lining to double as a pillow, six pairs of socks (I'm only taking five of them; the sixth was a bonus), a pocketbook, a ladybug luggage tag, a passport holder, the most expensive one of those things you need to plug American stuff in European sockets, plastic bags to put little plastic bottles in, and a suitcase, because when I went to pack everything in my suitcase I discovered I didn't own a suitcase. Did you know suitcases can cost $400? I didn't, and I'm relieved to report I found one extremely discounted for $90.

Also I've learned how to say thank you and please and good day and sausage in German. I don't like sausage, so now I know how to avoid it. But since I don't know the names of any other foods, who knows what I'll end up eating.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, my Christmas cactus has six buds, and my Freecell winning streak is at 504. Now that I can undo all bad Freecell moves, it's kind of impossible to lose.

I'm hoping to be able to blog while I'm in Germany, and if I can find where I packed my camera, I'll take pictures to bore you all with when I get back. In the meantime, enjoy yourselves. I know I will!

Decisions, Decisions

2011-11-02T07:57:00.009-04:00

I woke up at 5:30 this morning and instead of concentrating on important things like should I take brown shoes and black shoes to Germany or two pairs of black shoes, I started thinking about stories for the possible Shade Of The Moon Story Version.

I'm not opposed to thinking about stories, since I'm hoping to write one today. That, laundry, and the neverending exploration of my closet for travel clothes are the only jobs I have scheduled.

But the story idea that popped into my mind even before Scooter popped onto my bed was very La Ronde, moderately Lulu, and all kinds of bleak and dark. Naturally I loved it, but sadly it involves the death of Alex.

Since not a single word has been written, I'm not committed to anything (truly not committed; the contract remains unsigned in the file cabinet, where it's being buried by other unfiled papers). And the previous ending I'd worked out for the possible potential maybe I'll write it maybe they'll like it volume of stories has Alex alive and at relative peace by book's end.

But I do love this bleak dark story, which also ends with Alex at peace. And both versions of the book's ending (for those who worry) have Miranda going on with her life (she has nothing to do with Alex's death, should he die)

Anyway, I figured I'd put up a poll. It's only going to be until Sunday, since I don't know how much checking up on things I'm going to do next week. And it's just to give me a sense of how willing you are to have Alex die at the end. I'm going to divvy the poll into 4 possible answers, yes and no, and under 18 and 18 and over.

Feel free to leave comments. Again, this is just to get a sense of whether this story idea is worth working on, or whether, like several other ideas, it should die aborning.

And no matter what you respond, thank you!

Instead Of Thinking About Writing I'll Write About Thinking

2011-10-31T20:19:00.015-04:00

Every morning Scooter offers me the option of lying in bed for half an hour and thinking about a sample story for The Shade Of The Moon The Short Story Version. This is very generous of him, since what he really wants is for me to get out of bed and feed him (a message he communicates by a great deal of purring and head butting and stroking and clawing and biting).

But I'm finding it hard to concentrate on stories. At least not my own stories. I'm reading constantly these days. I read nothing all summer long, and now all I want to do is read.

It's not like I'm reading great literature (although I did reread USA by John Dos Passos, which is my intellectual achievement of the past 3 years give or take a decade or two). In the last month or so, I've read memoirs of Paul Henreid, Dorothy Hamill, and Mel Blanc, and (how I wish Blogspot would let me underline- that and really deserves special emphasis)a biography of DeForest Kelley.

Sadly, these all get kind of smooshed in my brain. I seem to remember Bugs Bunny skating pairs with Ingrid Bergman on the Starship Enterprise (you'd be astounded how far those throw triple axels go in a gravity free environment).

When I'm not reading, I'm obsessing over raincoats with removable linings. To be honest, this obsession is roughly 24 hours old, but it's really taken over what little remains of my brain. As you know, in a week I'll be flying over the Atlantic (and I'm delighted to report not only will they feed me dinner, but something resembling a breakfast, and how I wish I drank coffee, because I'll sure need caffeine to keep me awake when my body is yelling, Hey it's 2 AM!). Given that it's an 8 hour flight (I thought it was 6 because I subtracted wrong), I'll definitely want to sleep, which is close to impossible when you fly 99% Class. But rumor has it airlines no longer offer blankets and pillows, since they figure 2 meals and not crashing is sufficient to satisfy us lowly folk.

So I figured that if I got a raincoat with a removable lining, I could use the raincoat as a blanket and (another and worthy of underlining) remove the removable lining and use it as a pillow.

Is that not the cleverest thing ever?

Today I went to Burlington Coat Factory to examine their raincoats with removable linings and while they had a few, none of them fit me. There was one that was super big on me (I call those Dondi coats), and if I can't find one that fits, I guess I can buy that one. These are essential decisions, because I bought a new pocketbook to take to Germany, and while it's more than big enough under ordinary circumstances, I'm not sure it can hold a sweater to use as a pillow, which is why the removable raincoat lining is such a darn brilliant idea.

Let's hope Kohls/Marshalls/Sears/Penney/Macy's has one that fits.

Ooh. If I can fit a pillowcase in my pocketbook, I can stuff it with the raincoat lining on the flight over, and then I can put the pillowcase in my suitcase and shove my dirty clothes in it.

I'm so smart it scares me. Well, I scare easily.

I also have yet to figure out what clothes to take with me, although I did discover I owned a black blazer, which has been hiding in my closet for at least 7 years.

The thing is I have to look presentable Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday, and that's asking a lot of a wardrobe that generally doesn't have to look presentable for more than two days in a row. And while the temperature in Buxtehude should be about what it is here (without, I trust, mid-autumn snowstorms), I don't know if the buildings will be well heated or moderately heated or not heated at all. So I have no idea what I should wear under that black blazer.

Then there's figure skating season to focus on and excitement that one of the Presidential debates is going to be held in Hempstead, Long Island (a mere 8 miles from Woodmere, where I grew up), and trying to analyze why it is I'll believe that anyone on death row is innocent while any Republican accused of anything is guilty, guilty, guilty.

This is actually quite a lot to preoccupy me, and it doesn't even include making a list of all my passwords so if the plane crashes and I have to swim across the Atlantic Ocean in my raincoat without lining, someone I love and trust will be able to answer my emails as I do the backstroke to Greenland.

Well, at least there's one thing I can cross off my list. I don't have to decide what to send Kim Kardashian and Kris Humphries as a wedding present!

It Might Be Easier Just To Learn German

2011-10-24T16:43:00.017-04:00

I'll be going in a couple of weeks to Buxtehude, Germany to receive the Buxtehuder Bulle Award for my novel Die Welt, wie wir sie kannten, which I usually think of as Life As We Knew It. On a scale of 1-10 in personal excitement, this is roughly a 12. I'm already devoting vast amounts of time and energy on shopping for the trip and trying to figure out what to take and will the airline feed me (the answer to the latter is yes, so now I'm trying to decide if I want one of their regular meals or a kosher one or a vegan one).

But I'm not alone in my excitement. Google is thrilled for me also. It lets me know about German articles that mention my upcoming trip (although they don't mention that the airline is going to feed me). Since the German articles are invariably in German, I take them over to Google Translations and let them tell me what's up.

The only problem is sometimes the translation could use a translation. Here's the translation of the first article I saw, last night:

An awards ceremony with pizzazz

Buxtehude Bulle: On 11 Susan Beth Pfeffer November is celebrated on the stage Halepaghen
Hannelore Aldag Buxtehude.

On Tuesday, 8 November, flies Susan Beth Pfeffer in Hamburg. Will spend a short week, the American in Buxton, where she was winner of the 40th Bulls will be celebrated. For the ceremony, on Friday, 11 November, starts at 19:30 on the clock Halepaghen stage, has put together the cultural office one intriguing program with interesting protagonists.

Susan Beth Pfeffer learned this summer that she has for her thrilling science fiction novel "The world as we know it" the won with 5000 € prize Buxtehuder children's book prize, she got joy ecstatic: "This is fantastic I am. very happy to Germany. "

With readings in high school in the South and the 63-year-old writer Halepaghenschule the conversation with the young people will seek. A dialogue with the adult Susan Beth Pfeffer leads on Wednesday 9 November, at a public lecture, which begins at 19 Clock in the town library. There, visitors dive into "The world as we knew it," Miranda learn and know their family and their desperate struggle for survival. An asteroid strikes at the moon. The Earth's satellite is catapulted out of its orbit. Extreme weather changes, floods and earthquakes are ravaging humanity, whose blue planet has fallen overnight from the joints.

When it comes to the infinite reaches of space, he knows his stuff.

With Professor Dr. Erich Übelacker the Cultural Office of the awards has won one award presenter, who has made himself a name with his profound knowledge. One of the many milestones in his professional vita led the scientists to Hamburg, where he headed from 1975 to 2000, the planetarium and in that time for the tripling of the number of visitors saw - a result of its innovative management and planetarium concerts, lectures, navigation courses, children's shows, exhibitions and even weddings under the stars. Erich Übelacker hosted TV shows about astronomy and space, the combination resulted in an NDR report and starry sky, wrote for magazines and newspapers and has written for children and youth-oriented textbooks on the subject of stars and space.

They "verrappen" classic press and masters such as Goethe, Schiller, Heine and Fontane their own personal stamp on - with great success. And it happened: On a Sunday morning, the Casper family sat at the breakfast table and Nicola was the poem "It's him" recite by Edward Möricke. Then the girl had absolutely no desire to. Nicola found it much more fun to give to verse in a kind of chant for the best. Quickly she had supporters behind him and shortly afterwards "The young poets and thinkers" were born, four young people from the area of beech wood, bring to the awards ceremony an unusual program to Halepaghen stage. The audience experiences the "Erl King", the "Sorcerer's Apprentice" and "Mr. von Ribbeck on Ribbeck" with a difference.

Staying in Buxton Susan Beth Pfeffer also leads to the neighboring city of Hamburg. There she reads on Thursday evening, 10 November, as part of the series "Young American literature in the Harbour City" from her new novel "The Lost New York", a sequel to "The world as we know it", which is also in the Carlsen Verlag. Before the New Yorker on Sunday 13 November, will fly back to the States, her on Saturday, 12 November, once again honor. Then, on a bronze plate Buxtehuder BULLEvard sunk with their name on the pavement.

Admission to the reading and during the awards ceremony is free. Who wants to secure a seat for both events should be on time cards in the Cultural Office at City Hall, get into the city library in the street and in the fishing town in the Viverstraße information.

24/10/2011

Fortunately for me, there were additional articles this morning. Thanks to this one*, and to Google Translations, I think I have a better idea of what's going on (except this one leaves out the bronze plate, which on a scale from 1-10 is a minimum 14):

Buxtehude. Susan Beth Pfeffer, this year's winner of the Youth Book Prize "Buxtehude Bulle" is on Friday 11 November, the award in the form of bull sculpture personally accept. The American woman has succeeded with its World Under goose scenario "The world as we knew it," which was published in 2010 in the Carlsen-Verlag, to appeal to the primal fears of the people and to remind them of their helplessness before the forces of nature.

Presenter is the longtime head of the Hamburg Planetarium

As a presenter for the awards ceremony, which begins at 19:30 on the clock Halepaghenbühne, Konopkastraße 5, won the Cultural Office of the Buxtehude astronomer and longtime director of the Hamburg planetarium, Erich Übelacker. For the accompanying program provides the group "Young poets and thinkers" from Hamburg.

The group consists of children and young people who enjoy it, and classic poems by Goethe, Schiller, Heine and Fontane not only to recite, but to bring it as a rap on the stage. Well known are the "young poets and thinkers" among others from the film "Rabbit Without Ears".

In addition to the evening event is Susan Beth Pfeffer, which on Tuesday 8 November, arriving in Buxton, is read in high school on Wednesday and Thursday at the South Halepaghen school from their work. Live she is in a public lecture on Wednesday, 9 November, experience of 19 clock at the town library in the fishing road 2. She is also on Thursday 10 November, from 19 to clock in Hamburg America Center, the Sandtorkai 48, a guest. There it is in a public lecture about her sequel "The Lost New York".

Admission to the ceremony and is free to the readings. Tickets are available at the Cultural Office of Buxtehude, phone 04161/501 23 23 04161/501 23 23, in the town library, telephone 04161/99 04161/99 90 60 90 60, and in the city Buxtehuder information, phone 04161/501 23 48 04161 / 501 23 48, available.

The decision to nominate, pepper novel with the bulls Buxtehude, is already on 28 June this year appealing: the jury awarded 83 points for her novel, 36 of which came from the young people and 47 from adults. "The world as we know it" is the first book published in German by the author who in the U.S. has already published more than 60 books for children and young adults.

Winfried Ziemann has set the price in 1971 to life

The prize of 5000 € Buxtehude Bulle is one of the most prestigious German literary awards. He was initiated in 1971 by the late bookseller Buxtehuder Winfried Ziemann. Every year since then, the best narrative, published in German youth book awards. This year the award is the 40th Given time. The aim of the prize bull is to move young people to read, while promoting good children's books. The town of Buxton has agreed to take ownership 1981st (tau)

So this is what I know is going to happen. In thirteen days,I pack my camera and prepare to say "danke schoen" and "guten tag" every chance I get. I eat (badly) on the airplane, and then I arrive in Hamburg and am taken to Buxtehude, where the mayor will greet me (approximately a 16 on the 1-10 scale). Then I go to sleep so I can be ready for school visits and library visits and award winnings over the next three days. On Saturday I'll be taken to see the sights and on Sunday I fly home, to be greeted by Scooter who already seems somewhat concerned about my leaving him.

And in the thirteen days before I go, in addtion to more shopping and packing, I have to obsessively check ten day weather forecasts for Buxtehude, and clean my apartment, including the downstairs hallway, which has cobwebs you would think are Halloween decorations but alas are real and genuinely yucky, and finish reading Dorothy Hamill's memoirs (she just won the Olympics and there's still half a book to go) and buy some euros and maybe write a Shade Of The Moon short story to see if I can do it.

Cobwebs notwithstanding, on a scale of 1-10, I'm a 20 in joy ecstatic!

*The link no longer works for me, so you may have to take it on faith.

Looking For Answers In All The Wrong Cookies

2011-10-17T17:26:00.012-04:00

I took my mother to Dr. Hearing Aid this morning (she has successfully adapted to her new hearing aid and no more appointments are called for), and afterwards we had lunch at our favorite Chinese restaurant.

Since my life is a neverending succession of questions (What book should I read next? Should I hold it against the Texas Rangers that George Bush goes to their games? Will I ever get around to cleaning the downstairs hallway? How much more can I shove into the freezer?), I naturally turned to the fortune cookies for answers.

Here's what my mother's cookie said:

Slaying the dragon of delay is no sport for the short-winded.

My mother, being 100 years old, is kind of past the dragon of delay situation.

Here's mine:

We treat this world of ours as though we had a spare in the trunk.

Now that's probably very profound, and no doubt I could learn something from it, if I understood exactly what it meant. Do we drive the world over nails and shards of glass? I never drive my tires intentionally over nails and the suchlike, and even worse, I never learned how to change a tire, and nowadays they don't put really good spares in the trunk anyway, just those scrawny scary things that you know aren't going to last until you can get your car to someplace that knows how to change a tire.

But I am very good about recycling, and I think the fortune cookie should give me some credit for that.

Speaking of recycling (this transition is so brilliant I'm darn near dumbstruck by it), I've been thinking about recycling some of the characters from Life As We Knew It and The Dead And The Gone and This World We Live In in The Shade Of The Moon Take Two, if I ever write it.

One of the characters under consideration is Miranda's friend Sammi, who leaves midway through LAWKI, never to be heard from again. I've always been interested in what becomes of Sammi, and a couple of people have left comments on this very blog suggesting a Sammi story, should I write TSOTM Take Two volume of short stories.

This morning as I snuggled with Scooter, I thought about a Sammi story, and I realized two things. The first, and most dazzling, was that Sammi specifically tells Miranda she's going to Nashville, which is in Tennessee, the same state that Sexton, Tennessee is in, even though I made up Sexton, Tennessee and didn't make up Nashville. I've been very reluctant in my ponderings to have characters bump into each other, since that feels far too coincidental, but if Miranda is in Tennessee anyway, she could legitimately decide to look for Sammi in Nashville.

With that in mind, I tried to work out a Sammi/Miranda story and here's the second realization. If I tell the story from Miranda's point of view, it's a chapter. If I tell it from Sammi's, it's a story.

Last night, mostly to see how things stand, I made up a listing (I can't call it a chapter outline, since I'm hoping to have stories, not chapters) of the stories I sort of know about. This morning I added Sammi to the list.

I have minimal concern about people reading this list and figuring out the plots of the stories because most of the things on the list don't have plots yet, and even if they do, my handwriting is so bad there are a couple of words even I can't read, and I wrote the list less than 24 hours ago, so you'd think I'd remember what I wrote.

Oh well. The dragon of delay doesn't stand a chance against me. Whatever else you might think about me, I am definitely long-winded!

Short Story Collections, It Seems, Put Scooter To Sleep

2011-10-12T13:01:00.007-04:00

Of course, one advantage for Scooter in napping is it allows him to wake up at 6:40 in the morning and subject me to some rousing (in both senses of the word) purring. Since it's against this particular self-employed person's code to get out of bed before 7:00 AM (I mean, what's the advantage of being self-employed if you have to get out of bed before 7 AM), this gives me some time to nestle with Scooter (it's the only time of day he's even remotely affectionate)and ponder.

Lately what I've been pondering is Shade Of The Moon short stories. I have several things to work through before I even begin to remove the unsigned contract from its happy home in my file cabinet.

First amongst these things is the difference between a story and a chapter. I'm good at writing chapters. I've understood chapters ever since one of the many excellent editors I've had the good fortune to work with explained to me that characters have to do something in each chapter. It's not enough for the characters to talk about what they did in the previous chapter. The characters have to continue to do things.

Of course in stories characters have to do things too. So here's the difference between stories and chapters. Stories have beginnings, middles, and endings, while chapters are mostly middles, with a little bit of an ending, enough to either give the reader a chance to go to the bathroom or to make the reader decide to read one more chapter before going to the bathroom.

For me the real difference is chapters are easy, stories are hard.

But that doesn't mean stories aren't fun to think about, especially with a purring cat curled up beside you. I have completely arbitrarily decided there should be 14 stories, plus the prelude and coda (previously known as the prologue and epilogue, but prelude and coda are prettier words and much easier to spell).

This is what I have in my mind so far (I have nothing on paper, or computer, or whatever):

1 story about a boy who lives in a house that's being taken over to be used in a safe town and the Marines are doing it so the boy meets Alex's brother Carlos. This is the only one of the stories that has a beginning, a middle and an end.

2 stories about Alex's friend Chris Flynn, who's the character I most want to know what happened to. One when things are relatively okay for Chris and one when maybe things have gotten a whole lot worse.

2 stories about Alex, one with Miranda and one without.

3 stories about an as yet unidentified girl who seemingly has no connection with any of the characters, but at the end of the third story there's some kind of surprise connection. For a while there, the unidentified girl was a Duke's daughter, and while she might not end up quite so noble born, I do think she'll be a child of privilege and possibly not an American who happens to be here so she's stuck. Dukes' daughters, by the way, are Ladies and not Dukettes (I did research).

1 story about Miranda, because there's got to be at least one story about Miranda. Or maybe 2, if Alex gets 2. But don't ask me what the stories will be about because I don't have the slightest idea.

While I'm willing to turn my back on the vast majority of The Shade Of The Moon First Effort, there are a couple of things I mention happening while the family was on the way to the safe town that I would prefer to keep. One was Matt and Syl going off on their own and the other was Dad dying before they get to the safe town. So I'm trying to work those things in. Dad dying is particularly tricky, since I don't want to devote a story to it. Or maybe he won't die. I don't know.

What I do know is for any of this to work, I'd better figure out a whole lot more beginnings and endings and a whole lot less middles!

I Would Take My Brain To The Dumpster But It's The Only One I've Got

2011-10-06T11:42:00.017-04:00

Hmm...Change "brain" to "heart" and there might be a country song there.

What I should do is take the unsigned contract for The Shade Of The Moon to the dumpster, because my bad wicked brain is coming up with short story ideas and book structures and all kinds of things that take time and energy and bring back insomnia. Not stress, because the contract after all is unsigned (and probably already buried under a pile of things in the file cabinet, which isn't the tidiest place in my apartment).

I don't like insomnia and I'm still trying to regain my energy, and while I have plenty of time, I ought to be spending it on cleaning my apartment and atoning and useful stuff like that. Not in making up Rules For A Volume Of Short Stories, when I'm the one writing the stories, so why do I need to make up rules?

Wanna hear the rules? Every story has to have a character with a stated connection to a character in Life As We Knew It, The Dead And The Gone, or This World We Live In. For example, a story could be about Alex's friend Chris Flynn (that's one of the ones giving me insomnia), or it could be about a figure skater who casually mentions knowing Brandon the figure skater. And the stories will take place over a 2 year (give or take) time frame, so it can end with Miranda and/or Alex making it to the safe town, because lots of people want to know what happens to Miranda and Alex. The stories would be chronological, and have some kind of date (like March Year 2), so the readers will have a sense of when it's happening. I even have a prologue story and an epilogue story in mind and I remembered a moment ago a middle of the book story that would connect in its way with the prologue and the epilogue, but I'd almost forgotten it, which is what happens when you have insomnia and an unsigned contract and you really really need some time off.

Really.

Anyway, there's a big difference between coming up with ideas for stories and actually writing stories, and then there's another good sized difference between writing stories and having your publisher like the stories you've written. So the contract will remain unsigned (although I did notice when I took the file cabinet pictures that it's right on top of the files, and easy to locate, at least for the time being).

Oh how I love killing off all humanity. Which is probably something I should seriously atone for!

Status Report (Low On Status, High On Report)

2011-10-03T12:35:00.006-04:00

As you know, because I griped about it all summer, I had a Sept. 1 deadline for The Shade Of The Moon, my title for a fourth moon book (the first three, in case you've forgotten, having been Life As We Knew It, The Dead And The Gone, and This World We Live In). As you also know, because I crowed about it at the time, I met the Sept. 1 deadline and submitted the manuscript to my editor.

Then came the waiting time, which no doubt, felt longer to me than to you.

I've been writing for a living for over 40 years now, and I've learned a thing or two in that time. I've learned the checks never come as fast as you want them to, and that editors dawdle about telling you bad news, while generally telling you good news pretty swiftly.

So as the waiting time progressed and my editor told me nothing, I figured out she and my publishing house didn't like the book. Maybe they were trying to like it. Maybe they were trying to figure out how to tell me they didn't like it. Maybe they were trying to figure out what could be done to make it a book they would like. Lots of maybes, but all leading to they didn't like what I'd written.

During the course of September, the contract (contracts move as slowly as checks) finally arrived at my apartment. But I'd had enough time to think about it to decide whenever it came, I wasn't going to sign it.

My reasoning went as follows (and it never changed): My publisher doesn't like the book. If there were no contract, they'd simply reject it. Because there's a contract, they have to figure out what to do about it, and that's going to mean a lot of rewriting and time pressure and general dissatisfaction both on my part and theirs. But if I don't sign the contract, there's no contractual obligation on anyone's part. So what if they reject it? I've had lots and lots of rejections in my life, and most of them have come at moments far more financially vulnerable. I've got money in the bank and Social Security beckoning and why should we all be miserable?

I guess what I did was reject the rejection.

I left the contract on the kitchen counter, gave myself a weekend before emailing my agent to let her know my intentions, and waited to hear from my editor. A week or so later I did. She sent me two lengthy, well thought out emails about the manuscript, with lots of suggestions about how to make it work. She assured me Houghton Mifflin Harcourt wanted a fourth moon book. The email was pretty much as I imagined it would be.

I gave myself a few days just in case I was going to change my mind, and then I emailed her back and said the contract was unsigned and would remain unsigned and no one had anything to worry about. What I didn't tell her was my biggest worry was how I was I going to tell all of you.

My editor emailed back and said she'd call me in a day or two, and in a day or two, she did call. We had a very nice chat. She said they really want a fourth moon book and I should feel free to sign the contract. I said the contract had made its way from the kitchen counter to the file cabinet, but I wasn't going to sign it unless HMH and I were all on the same page about what a fourth book should be like. I said the one thing I knew about a fourth book was it had to be completely different from the first three, and the only thought I had was one I'd played around with for quite a while and that was a volume of short stories, some of which would have Miranda or Alex or other characters from the books and some of which wouldn't.

My editor said that short story volumes were a hard sell, but teachers and librarians were always asking for them and in this case it was an established concept and she liked it.

I said that was good but the contract was staying in the file cabinet. Then we talked about family and the suchlike.

So that's where things are now with The Shade Of The Moon. Those of you who've been reading this blog for a while may remember I had a completely different third book that I rejected before anyone had a chance to read it. These books are a lot of fun to create, but they're very hard to get right. I see the world as darker and darker and darker still, and I get way too dark and violent and depressing (while having a darn fine time doing so).

What I do know is I'm very close to brain dead right now. Between pushing to meet that Sept. 1 deadline and dealing with serious mother stuff, I've been on a high stress level for several months. Now my mother is settled in at the nursing home, and I have no professional obligations other than going to Germany to get my award, and staying in touch here, and answering emails.

If my brain starts coming up with short stories, I won't stop it. I'll write one or two or three, and if I think they're good enough, I'll send them to my editor. But I'm not pushing myself. There are books to read and movies to see and I've been neglectful of my friends for months now. I have to do my mother's laundry (not to mention taking her to Dr. Hearing Aid later today and to the dentist tomorrow morning). Not to mention Scooter's current obsession with twist ties, which don't toss themselves.

So thank you all of you for your support and interest in The Shade Of The Moon. If there's a fourth book, I'm keeping the title. And if there isn't, I'm keeping the title anyway. It's a part of my life, just like you are, and I don't give up things I care about easily.

The Wall Of Ego Has A Lovely New Addition

2011-10-02T15:35:00.013-04:00

I went to Tennessee this weekend for the Tennessee Association Of School Librarians annual conference and while I was there, picked up the 2010 Volunteer State Book Award Young Adult Division for Life As We Knew It.

This was not a coincidence. They were kind enough to invite me, and even kinder to me while I was there. I had a great time.

I've known for a while that the Wall Of Ego was going to need some redecorating with the new arrival. It is the 2010 Volunteer State Book Award, after all.

So this afternoon, and after a mere 7 additional nail holes, the Wall Of Ego has been completed.

Well, completed for the time being. My ego is ever expansive, and I suppose the Wall Of Ego could expand accordingly!

May We All Have A Happy And Healthy New Year

2011-09-28T12:05:00.005-04:00

Tonight begins Rosh Hashanah for the year 5772.

Speaking only for myself, 5771 was a complicated year, certainly filled with its share of joy and celebration, but maybe a little more difficulty and aggravation than I would have cared for.

You'd think after 5771 years, they'd have worked out the all pleasure no pain concept.

But until they do...have a wonderful new year, filled with good news, good ideas, and good times!

Discussion Topics For Life As We Knew It, The Dead And The Gone, and This World We Live In

2011-09-26T10:07:00.008-04:00

When I was writing Life As We Knew It, I fantasized about its being used in book discussion groups. To my delight, after it was published, I found that to be the case.

I thought it might be interesting if someone were looking for book discussion topics about any of the moon books to get some ideas from their author (aka Me). So last night I worked on it, and came up with 5 discussion topics for each of the three books. Feel free to use them or to use them as starting off points or to refuse to use them because your own ideas are better!

Life As We Knew It

1. Does Miranda's family do enough to survive? Is there anything else you can think of to do that they didn't?

2. Matt, Miranda, and Jonny are all athletes. Do you think that helped them? If so, how?

3. What everyday thing would you miss the most? What would you be most worried about?

4. How would things have been different in Mom hadn't made them stockpile all the groceries and supplies on Crazy Shopping Day?

5. Did Miranda skate with Brandon? What do you think the author thinks?*

* The author thinks they did skate. She was actually surprised when she learned some people thought it was a fantasy. Then she reread the book and discovered Miranda wasn't so sure herself!

The Dead And The Gone

1. Alex has an older brother Carlos who is in the Marines. How would the book have been different if Carlos were still at home?

2. New York City was being kept alive so valuable books, paintings, and documents could be saved. If you could save something that represents the world you know, what would it be?

3. Would you have sent Bri to the farm? Would you have let your aunt and uncle take Julie?

4. Alex learns there are places rich and powerful families can go to. Do you think there's a way of saving everybody in such a disaster? If not, who would you protect?

5. Are Alex's parents still alive? What do you think the author thinks?**

** Sadly, the author thinks both Mami and Papi are dead. She was actually surprised to learn some readers thought one or both might still be alive.

This World We Live In

1. Miranda learns that Dad and Lisa wanted her to go with them when they made their abortive trip out west. What might have happened to her if she'd gone?

2. Electricity comes on long enough for Mom to play some music. If you hadn't been able to listen to music for months, what would you play?

3. How would the book have been different if Matt hadn't brought Syl home?

4. Miranda takes on the responsibility of what to do with Julie. What would you have done?

5. The book ends with the characters starting their journey to Tennessee. What do you think happens to them?

Yay! An Excellent Review For Blood Wounds

2011-09-21T10:47:00.005-04:00

My editor forwarded this review to me just now, and I love it!

Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books - Oct. 2011

Pfeffer, Susan Beth Blood Wounds.
Harcourt, 2011 256p ISBN 978-0-547-49638-2 16.99
Reviewed from galleys

R r. 8-12

"We’re a happy family,” states Willa’s stepfather, Jack, and Willa agrees. Or she thinks she does at the time, but soon her blended family is thrown into chaos: Budge, the father that sixteen-year-old Willa barely remembers, goes on a murderous rampage, killing Willa’s never-met half-sisters and finally being shot dead himself by the police. Willa horrifies her family by traveling back to small-town Texas for the memorial and to learn about the relatives she never knew, and in the process she finds herself questioning the price of her seeming family happiness.

Pfeffer’s had some interesting science-fiction explorations lately (Life As We Knew It, BCCB 12/06),but this is a return to her classic form, with headline-worthy melodrama a vehicle for exploring family dynamics widespread even in more ordinary households. Willa’s dawning understanding that she’s been “Quiet-Never-Make-A-Fuss Willa,” going along with her mother’s acceptance of the fierce inequities of her household in order to keep the family together, unfolds subtly but effectively.

Pfeffer avoids reductivity, however, making it clear that Willa’s mother and stepsisters have paid their own price for the family bargain, with unfairness being spread around so thoroughly the situation almost comes back around to being fair. There’s also the looming tacit reminder, in Budge’s truly horrific crime, that there are worse things than having fewer advantages than one’s stepsisters.

The sheer drama of the plot will draw readers, and they’ll stay for an insightful exploration of the way families go both right and wrong. DS

What's Done Is Done And Cannot Be Undone (Except When You Play Free Cell)

2011-09-20T17:24:00.019-04:00

Not having heard yet from my editor about The Shade Of The Moon (notice how I cleverly avoid beginning this blog entry with a certain pronoun I'm unduly fond of) I (there it is) have been keeping busy with jobs that must be done.

The most important of said jobs (am I in a classy mood or what) was clearing out my mother's apartment. Fortunately for me, and thanks in part to the power of my whining, my brother and my friend Marci did more than their share (well, Marci didn't have to do any, but did because she's a good and true friend). Thursday morning I'll officially turn the keys over. Then I'll go to my mother's room and swap her clean clothes for dirty ones. Apartments come and go but laundry is forever.

I've also spent a certain amount of time marvelling at my goddaughter Allison's new business. Allison is a national award winning cheese maker, and already quite a number of restaurants and gourmet shops are carrying her Ricotta.

When I'm not doing my mother's laundry or cheering Allison on or winning at Free Cell (thanks to the Undo button, I have a 281 game winning streak), I've been cleaning out the outside storage closet (aka The VCR Burial Ground). One of the things I took from my mother's apartment was her paper shredder, and for a while I was shredding old electric bills and the suchlike. Eventually I got bored with shredding and simply dumped all the old bills at the neighborhood recycling center (for any of you interested in stealing my identity the papers are on the bottom of Bin Number 2).

But in the midst of all the old bills, I found my even older account books. I recycled the pages devoted to how much I spent on electricty, but I kept the ones that had the records of my (pathetic) earnings. Here's how I did in 1977-79:

I have to admit I was pleasantly surprised to find out I'd earned royalties for Whatever Words You Want To Hear. As you can see from its current one cent pricetag, it wasn't the most successful of my books.

Let's hope my current books do a tad better. I enjoy being able to spend money!

Blood Wounds Is Now Published

2011-09-12T19:35:00.039-04:00

Today is the official publication date for my newest book Blood Wounds.

I read a blog review that said Blood Wounds is a love it or hate it kind of a book. Personally, I love it and I hope you'll at least like it.

Amazon likes it. They named it one of their best YA novels for the month of September.

As my way of showing my appreciation for your support, I had new bookplates created just for Blood Wounds. If you'd like one, for yourself or your library or your bookstore, email me with your name and mailing address (and if you need multiple ones let me know). I'll sign it and off it will go.

It's an exciting day for me. But I am kind of sorry to say goodbye to the countdown clock!

The Dead And The Gone Is Alive And Right Here

2011-09-07T17:10:00.015-04:00

I'm pleased to report that my copy of Chroniques De La Fin Du Monde L'Exil arrived the other day.

I have every reason to believe it's a Poche Roman. Which kind of sounds like it should be a character on Happy Days.

Thanks to the back of the jacket, I know what the French version of This World We Live In will look like, a stress reducer right there.

Naturally all the versions of The Dead And The Gone decided to get together. I did what I could to help them along.

Scooter did his part as well.

For a book with such a sad title, these are happy days indeed!

In Honor Of My Mother's 100th Birthday On September 5

2011-09-04T07:57:00.003-04:00

Here's her official 4 days short of 100 years old picture.

Happy 100th Birthday Freda Pfeffer!

September First Fell On A September This Year

2011-09-01T10:43:00.009-04:00

I am very impressed with September's ability to fight off August's efforts to appropriate a few of its days. Bravo September, plucky 30 day month.

September is always a significant month in the Pfeffer family, since it hosts my mother's birthday (100 years of birthdays to be celebrated Monday Sept. 5) and my brother's birthday, and my parents' wedding anniversary. In addition, my father had emergency open heart surgery on Sept. 7 and regarded that as a second birthday. I used to spend a lot of money in September on gifts.

Speaking of my mother and my parents' anniversary, my job for September is to clear out my mother's apartment. She has made the official move to the Health Center, where people look after her and bring her three meals a day and comment regularly about how cute she is.

Clearing her apartment out is a good stress reducing job for me, since it distracts me from thinking about my editor reading The Shade Of The Moon. My editor had been under the impression that August had an extra 5-7 days attached to it, so she was taken by surprise when the book arrived on schedule.

My new term for The Shade Of The Moon is domestic dystopian, and my new excuse for anything my editor might object to is, "It's all Princess Summerfallwinterspring's fault!" I always like being blameless.

Back to my mother's apartment, which is where I'll be going back to soon enough. We have 30 days minus 2 at this point to clear it out. It's not that bad a job, because my mother had done a great deal of downsizing throughout the years, so it's not like an 8 room house with a hundred years of memories. And there are the hidden treasures that make this sort of job worth doing. I have found over $1.57 in loose change already (I think it was $1.58, but I didn't count the pennies too carefully). We found some kind of silver coin collectible that my brother priced on the open market, and if the market is open enough, we stand to make at least $12 from it. And my mother has an extraordinary collection of slipper socks from her various stays in hospitals. Green and grey are the favored colors.

What I did find are my parents' ledger books from the time of their engagement and marriage. Apparently they wrote down every penny they spent on groceries. Boy, did they use a lot of butter. My mother said she gained 20 pounds that first year of marriage, and now I know why. The ledgers were kept in marble composition books, full of useful information on the back. The English pound sterling was worth $4.86.65 and 24 sheets of paper=1 quire. Who knew?

Here's a list of purchases my parents made to set up their kitchen. Notice how they bought two different kinds of can openers and a flashlight. They knew someday their daughter was going to write Life As We Knew It, and encourage those kinds of purchases to people around the world (granted, not including their daughter, who waited about five years after the publication of her novel to buy a flashlight to call her own).

Now if only I could find that 10 cent square grater. I'm certain it could bring in at least 2 bucks on eBay!

L'exil (The French Version Of The Dead And The Gone) Finally Has A Cover

2011-08-30T11:25:00.004-04:00

It's probably had a cover for a while now (since its publication date is Sept. 1) but now I can look at it on French Amazon.

I love how the Harcourt designed covers look with French words on them. Tres elegant!

A Very Short Post Irene Report

2011-08-29T13:00:00.002-04:00

Scooter and I and the apartment we share are fine. One small unattractive tree that I can see through the window is sideways, probably not the best direction for a tree to be.

My little impatiens garden, which earlier this summer suffered a vicious groundhog attack, got battered by all the rain.

My brother and sister-in-law, who live in New Jersey, didn't have electricity for much of yesterday, but it's back on.

My mother's nursing home has lost telephone service, so I haven't spoken to her today. I'll be seeing her tomorrow and Wednesday and Friday, so (bad daughter) I'm not driving over today to reassure her.

My flashlight, which I didn't have to use, is still working. I have lots and lots of batteries, except Ds, which for some reason are hard to find. I did buy a couple of those weird square ones, in case I had a desperate need to weigh myself in a blackout.

My kitchen seems to have been declared a fruitfly evacuation center. My hope is when they find out they can go home again, they'll pack their bags and get going. Neither Scooter nor I will miss them!

I've Got A Working Flashlight. I've Got A Radio With Batteries.

2011-08-26T18:17:00.002-04:00

I've got a completed manuscript.

Yes, in honor of the upcoming Hurricane Irene, I finished The Shade Of The Moon and sent it off to my editor approximately 8 minutes ago.

There's nothing like an impending hurricane to make you beat a September 1 deadine.

Have a good and safe weekend everyone!

Blood Wounds Doubled Its Sales!

2011-08-25T11:29:00.016-04:00

Thanks to Amazon's Author Central, I can proudly announce (and show you) that my not quite yet published novel Blood Wounds doubled its sales in a single week.

See. It went from 1 book sold! to 2 books sold!!

If Blood Wounds continues to double its sales every week, my estimate is I'll be able to buy the New York Yankees in 27 years!!!

Watch out A.J. Burnett. Your 9,855 not including Leap Years days as a Yankee are numbered!!!!

Thirty Two Days Has August

2011-08-23T10:47:00.014-04:00

Those of us in the northeast think it's very kind of January to sacrifice one of its less necessary days to August, which on the whole is a month that can use a bit of expanding.

At least I feel that way as I come up against the infamous September 1 deadline for The Shade Of The Moon.

The first draft is actually completed and on Sunday, I edited/polished/rewrote the first 62 pages (the length of the book keeps shifting but it was at 293 pages when last I looked). Perhaps because of my current Hurricane Irene obsession, I've decided to add a weather element.

It gives away no spoiler information to say The Shade is written in two parts, Part One and (you'll never guess it) Part Two. Even I thought those parts would look nicer if they had names, so one of the first jobs I'm going to do today (after I play Free Cell a few more times and eat some more) is going to be naming them. Part One will be named something like The Faint Glow Of Sun, but Part Two's name I know: West Winds.

Alas, after I name Part Two, I'll have to put some west winds into the book itself. Le creative sigh.

Speaking of names, and speaking of reasons I'd actually like it to be September 1, Google was kind enough to tell me (no one else has bothered) that the French version of The Dead And The Gone is scheduled for a Sept. 1, 2011 publication, which the last I looked is a little over a week from now, whether I want it to be or not. I'd love to know what the cover design is, but since the design they gave Au Commencement was the Harcourt cover for Life As We Knew It only with a lot of classy French words,

probably the cover for d&g will follow suit.

I do admit to finding the Google translation of the information a bit disconcerting.

Here's what it says in French: L’exil, le second tome de Chronique de la fin du monde de Susan Beth Pfeffer, le 1er septembre

And here's what Google translation claims it says: Exile, the second volume of Chronicle of the late Susan Beth Pfeffer World, September 1

I really like the L'exil/Exile part of it, but the not quite late yet Susan Beth Pfeffer would prefer to stay that way, at least until August 33!

ETA: I felt the earthquake. I was sort of hard at work on the rewrites and the computer monitor shook a tiny bit and my chair shook a tiny bit, enough that I looked beind me to see if Scooter was using the chair as a scratching post. I had a Cleveland Indian baseball game on TV and they felt it and were wondering what happened, and then they said it was an earthquake. So now I'm watching CNN and not getting any work done.

Blood Wounds Sold Its First Copy!

2011-08-18T12:40:00.024-04:00

Yes, I should be starting the rewrites on The Shade Of The Moon, and I have an embarrassing number of emails I need to answer, and the fruit flies are back (trust me, I didn't invite them), and the apartment is one week overdue for a cleaning, and Scooter remains Scooter,

but I'm ignoring all that to announce the sale of the first copy of Blood Wounds.

I'd tell you who bought it, but I have no idea.

This is how I found out. Amazon, bless its sweet little heart, has this thing set up where writers with a healthy (i.e. obsessive) interest in their book sales can go on Thursdays to find out how their books sold the previous week.

I put in my fabulous secret password, and Author Central lets me in. It claims it knows 75% of all the previous week's book sales, only I don't think it includes ebooks or institutional sales, but what do I care. A number is a number.

Since the vast vast extremely vast majority of the collected masterpieces of Susan Beth Pfeffer don't sell anything, I only look at the three moon book titles. Then I add their sales and divide it by 2 and create a make believe royalty number (it's make believe because royalties aren't based on how many books actually sell in bookstores but by how many books bookstores buy in the first place, but I never allow reality to get in the way of a good Ooh I'll Be Able To Retire! fantasy).

Of course I don't only check on Thursdays. Up in the right hand corner, the sweethearts let you know if the book's Amazon ranking has gone up (pretty green numbers) or down (nasty red numbers)in the past hour.

But Thursday is the big day. They even sort of tell you where in the U.S. of A. the copies are marching out of bookstores (or in this case the copy is marching out of a bookstore). They have it sorted by 99 major American locations and everyplace else, which they call Combined Areas.

The very first sale of Blood Wounds happened in Combined Areas, my new favorite part of the country.

Oh, and see that big blue bar towards the bottom of the page? The graph runs from 0 all the way up to 2, and since Blood Wounds has now sold 1 copy, that bar goes exactly half way (my guess is James Patterson's graphs don't start at 0 or end at 2, but then again James Patterson probably doesn't have the harsh reality of fruit flies to deal with, nor most likely does he have a really ugly black spider in the middle of his shower curtain and even if he does, I prefer not to imagine how he looked when he discovered it).

I wouldn't mind the spider nearly so much if it were eating the fruit flies.

But back to Blood Wounds and its many sale. According to my conveniently located calculator, Blood Wounds now only has to sell 11764 copies (down from 11765) to earn out its advance and start paying me royalties.

Now if I can only convince Scooter to move, maybe I'll start working on those rewrites!

Guess Who Finished The Shade Of The Moon

2011-08-15T18:10:00.007-04:00

If you didn't guess me, you must be looking for some other Susan Beth Pfeffer.

That reminds me of a little known (or remembered, since I almost forgot myself) fact about Susan Beth Pfeffer (aka me). Way back, I lived in New York City and one reason why I moved away was because another Susan Pfeffer moved in. This is all extremely hazy in my mind (it having been the 1960s), but I think I got a phone call or two from guys looking for her, and I didn't approve of them (they worked in the stock market or something else far too respectable for my 1960s taste). Anyway, I felt NYC wasn't big enough for two Susan Pfeffers, and rather than having a shootout, I packed my bags and my cat and left.

All of which has nothing to do with the fact that I finished The Shade Of The Moon Saturday night, and except for rewriting a small section Sunday morning (which I intend to unrewrite), did nothing Sunday except kill one of two Piles That Will Not Die (the kitchen counter pile; this afternoon I killed The Pile That Will Not Die in the den).

Oddly enough, no matter how often I kill The Pile That Will Not Die, another one takes its place. But for the day or two that my kitchen counter is clear, it's very exciting.

Today I did something planned for Wednesday and read The Shade Of The Moon from page 1 (which I offered up here a while back) to page 289, which you'll have to wait to read until the book is published a year from now. The biggest problem is some chapter or another (I'm far too lazy to look for its number; this is a book with a lot of mostly short chapters) which I completely rewrote and now I have to return to its original form, which is probably in a file somewhere, allowing me to cut 'n paste (my best skill) back in place. Even if I can't find it, I can rewrite it pretty much from memory, so it doesn't really matter, and what makes me glad is I can now use the chapter that follows which I had to eliminate because of the soon to be unrewritten chapter.

If you couldn't follow that, ask the other Susan Pfeffer.

Speaking of page 289 and what precedes it, after I finished the book, I called Princess Summerfallwinterspring, who was so stunned by the sound of a ringing telephone that she forgot to answer in Romanian. I told her the ending I'd worked out and she liked it a lot. Me too, which is a great relief all around.

There are rewrites to do, but mostly of a polishing nature because I really worked on this book (as I'm sure you know because I've whined about it for months now), and then I'll magically transport it to my editor and to my agent, well before the September 1 deadline, which just goes to show something, although I don't know what.

Oh and it's not any kind of spoiler to say that one of the main characters in the book is named Keegan (Connor in the brilliant 12 page synopsis, but changed to Keegan before I began writing because a very big word in the book is community and I didn't want a Connor and a community fighting it out) and yesterday a golfer named Keegan won some big golfing tournament, and if that isn't a good omen, I don't know what is.

The character was much nicer in the synoposis when he was named Connor than he is in the book when he's named Keegan, but such is life.

I'll probably begin the rewrites on Thursday and get them finished by early next week because sometime next week there will most likely be the Official Meeting about my mother and the day that meeting happens, the 30 days to clear out her apartment clock starts ticking.

I admit to being curious about some boxes that have been sitting unopened in my mother's bedroom closet since she moved in to the apartment 15 years ago.

Who knows? Maybe I'll find proof of even more Susan Pfeffers in them!

Things Should Calm Down Around October 22

2011-08-11T12:35:00.008-04:00

Or so I keep telling myself.

My mother is now genuinely semi-officially a resident of the Health Center, where she gets a lot more attention and three meals a day brought to her room. In two or three weeks there'll be papers to sign that will turn semi-official into official, and the minute the papers are signed, we'll have 30 days to clear out her apartment.

I'd tell you what a mess my apartment is but you don't want to know.

Clearing out my mother's apartment won't really take 30 days (I hope), but it could be a little tricky working on it while finishing up The Shade Of The Moon. So my hope is the 30 days will start at the earliest as soon as I finish the book, and ideally a day or two later so I can breathe for a moment before tackling the next big job.

I like breathing. I used to do it quite regularly.

Meanwhile The Shade Of The Moon is moving along. Sadly, I think it might have cost me my friendship with Princess Summerfallwinterspring. After I worked out seventeen different versions of the ending with her, all on her phone bill, and in spite of her battling double pneumonia and triple digit temperatures (both hers and the climate's), she's taken to answering her phone with a thick Romanian accent, saying, "Ve provide no book writing helping here!"

I suppose I could be getting a wrong number. What's the area code for Romania?

Anyway, to distract you from the fact that instead of writing, I've discovered the joys of Undo on Free Cell and am winning, winning winning, I'll include the links to a couple of New York Times articles.

This first one is about improved book sales (thanks in part to YAs).

The second is about the Hobbit House, a guest house in Montana (where all the best hobbits stay).

I'll now win another game or two of Free Cell and return to work. Either that, or I'll have to move to Romania!

A Little Bit More About Blood Wounds

2011-08-06T11:56:00.004-04:00

I just discovered Blood Wounds will be available both for Kindle and NOOK readers.

Barnes and Noble was also nice enough to include a reasonably good School Library Journal review (don't read if you don't like spoilers):

School Library Journal

Gr 7 10—"We're a happy family. But we're not identical to other happy families." Willa is one of a family of five—her mother, stepfather, and two stepsisters, Brooke and Alyssa, who are supported generously by their wealthy mother. But the McDougals' happiness is shattered when Willa's biological father kills his current wife and daughters and then embarks on a cross-country trip toward the McDougal home. The police insist Willa and her mother go to a hotel to hide, just in case Budge Coffey goes to their house. When he does show up, he attacks a policeman and is killed, and the lives of the McDougals are changed forever. Despite her mother's objections, Willa insists on going to her father's funeral so she can learn about him and his family, not the most popular people in their small Texas town. From Willa's secret cutting to the discord of custody arrangements within a blended family, all the topics that the family usually tiptoes around suddenly explode and are brought out into the open. By the end of the story, the once-taboo topics result in full discussions, and the McDougals do seem to be a more functional family unit. As in Life as We Knew It (Harcourt, 2006), Pfeffer uses enough realistic detail to make the story believable while adding a good dose of teen angst. The novel ties up all the loose ends a bit too conveniently but not enough to ruin the story. A good read that should appeal to those who want realistic fiction.—Diana Pierce, Leander High School, TX

My First Copy Of Blood Wounds Has Arrived!

2011-08-05T08:35:00.029-04:00

My dear sweet UPS person delivered my first copy of Blood Wounds yesterday.

Here it is.

Its back is all about the Moon books.

For that matter, so is its back inside cover.

Scooter chewed over whether to read it.

He then settled down with it for a good read.

He found a lot to think about as he read.

I must say Blood Wounds looks very good on my bookcase.

I hope someday it will look very good on your bookcase also!

Fruit Flies Don't Bother Me

2011-08-03T11:03:00.004-04:00

Yes, I know I should be working...

But I'm sure you're breathlessly awaiting the latest fruit fly bulletin. Actually one just flew past me, so I guess the fruit flies are awaiting the latest fruit fly bulletin as well.

A couple of days ago, Begins With M, after consulting with her mother, suggested placing a banana peel in a bag and tempting the fruit flies with that. My immediate and ridiculous response was I hate bananas (well, I do, I mean really really really hate bananas).

But the next morning I came to my fruit fly senses and realized one fruit fly's banana peel is another fruit fly's mango peel. I have plenty of those. So I placed a mango peel in a plastic bag, and the fruit flies loved it. Just as much as they would have loved a banana peel (bananas get a real bad rep when it comes to fruit flies; most everyone I've mentioned the fruit fly issue to have responded, Oh Bananas!).

I have a feeling bleaching the living daylights out of Cujo The Garbage Pail probably helped as well. It's back in the kitchen and so far seems uninfested.

I took yesterday's mango peel bag and put it on the patio. I'll try to remember to throw it out when I go for my mail. I put a brand new mango peel in a brand new plastic bag (I have finally found a use for the plastic bags my newspapers are delivered it), and left it on the kitchen counter as an enticement, but when I checked a couple of minutes ago, it was fruit fly free.

Then again, since I did see a fruit fly by the computer just now, maybe they've all migrated to the den in search of new excitement.

They can search to their hearts' content, but they're not going to find any bananas!

In August A Freelance Children's Book Writer Buys Bleach And Writes Books

2011-08-01T11:32:00.003-04:00

Not even in that order. I went back to writing The Shade Of The Moon yesterday afternoon, spoke to Princess Summerfallwinterspring at great length last night, and scurried over to Price Chopper this morning to buy the bleach.

At some point today, I'll venture onto the patio and bleach down Cujo. This will involve throwing out the bag of garbage that's currently in there, and I don't know who'll find that job more distasteful, me or the fruit flies. But it must be done, le fruit fly infested sigh.

Generally I feel about August as I used to feel about Sundays- I love not being in school but I hate the knowledge I'll be there in a day (or month). But since July ended on such a note of difficulty (actually more like a symphony of difficulty), I'm willing to embrace August with open arms and typing hands. And no matter what, I don't have to go to school in September. So three cheers for August.

Another nice thing about my new favorite month is it inches the publication date of Blood Wounds ever so much closer. Amazon noticed that also, and asked me to write a Dear Amazon Reader for their Blood Wounds page.

All right. I'm off to work myself into a pre-writing frenzy by playing Free Cell and eating lunch. Then back to The Shade Of The Moon I'll go.

Since the alternative is throwing out garbage and bleaching the trash can, my guess is I'll get a lot of writing done today!

I Fought The Fruit Flies (And The Fruit Flies Won)

2011-07-31T10:19:00.008-04:00

The gnats have been upgraded to fruit flies. I wish they were vegetable flies, since I eat a lot more fruit than vegetables.

My garbage can (recently renamed Cujo) remains in exile on my patio. My cutting board, aka Fruit Fly Riviera, is on the patio as well. My fruit is in the currently uninfested refrigerator.

I gave in to the dark side and bought insecticide, some organic stuff that guarantees if it poisons me to death, I'll die green. The best I can say for it (and this is no small thing) is that it's not a fruit fly aphrodisiac. Although I do worry about its logo: Be Fruit Fly And Multiply. But since I can't be trusted with anything that sprays, my kitchen walls are now permanently discolored.

I'm never getting my security deposit back so what do I care.

Scooter is out of sorts because I held off giving him his canned cat food yesterday. Today I fed him but he's still out of sorts because the fruit flies like canned cat food almost as much as he does.

My mother is sort of in sorts. She seems to be accepting the nursing home fairly well. Yesterday (and I was there to witness it), a physical therapist came in just as she was being served lunch, to tell her he'd be in after she'd eaten to take her to exercise. My mother informed him it wasn't good to exercise after eating. I gather she convinced him and she was spared the ordeal of getting up out of her chair and walking.

As you can tell from my complete (and unusual) inability to answer any of your comments, I remain frazzled and unproductive. In theory I'm going to start writing again today. I also have some fantasies of throwing out the garbage bag and giving Cujo a massive scrubbing. I think I'll try to smuggle my cutting board into the dishwasher. Maybe the fruit flies will follow it there and get scrubbed out of existence.

The best thing about this July is tomorrow it will be August!

My Mother Sums It All Up

2011-07-29T17:26:00.002-04:00

I got to the hospital just as my mother was being taken from her room to the nursing home. I hadn't realized it would happen quite as early as it did, and I'd spent a lot of time chatting with the gnats (who are still there and send their regards).

My mother was a bit peeved about the whole business, especially since I hadn't been there to explain what was going to happen. She looked at the men who were transporting her and said, "Well the first hundred years were nice!"

The Shade Of The Mother Trumps The Shade Of The Moon

2011-07-29T11:43:00.007-04:00

But before I get to that, does anyone know a system for ridding a kitchen of gnats?

I don't know for sure they're gnats- that's my generic term for little nuisancy insects that have a particular fondness for fruit salad. They've been hanging out in my garbage can, so I moved my garbage can to my patio this morning, hoping they'd take the hint, but now there are scores of them hovering around in my kitchen. I suppose I could spray them to death with insecticide, but I'm reluctant to do that.

Hold on. I'm going to try spraying them with white vinegar. Worse comes to worst, I can eat them in a salad...

Well, that's not going to make it to Helpful Hints From Heloise, but I have to admit it was the best time I've had in a while.

In my book Kid Power, Janie has to get rid of Japanese beetles (has their name been changed to something less nation specific?), so she tries a trick I learned in Women's Day or Family Circle- taking some canned fruit and putting it in a bowl and then putting the bowl in a bigger bowl of water. The idea is the beetles get drunk on the fruit and keel over into the water and drown.

I actually tried it once, several years after the book was published. Not a single beetle fell for the trick (I guess they'd read Kid Power), but a number of wasps did. I have a live and let live attitude towards wasps and hornets, so I felt kind of bad about that.

It's lunchtime too, but I don't feel like making anything with dozens of gnats looking over my shoulder. Le hungry sigh.

It's been a difficult week even without the gnat invasion. My mother and I spent five relatively pleasant hours in the emergency room Monday night, and she's been in the hospital ever since. She's getting released this afternoon and will go to the nursing home where she spent some time this past fall. She likes it there a lot, so that's a good thing. As best we can figure out, her blood pressure spiked which started the problems and then the hospital made her sicker (as is their wont).

My brother spent Wednesday in the hospital with her so I could get some work done, but I didn't. There were too many phone call interruptions. So I've left all your comments unanswered, although believe me, I read each and every one of them and appreciated each and every one of them.

I did figure out a slightly new direction for The Shade Of The Moon, but I got an email from Princess Summerfallwinterspring last night saying she wasn't feeling well. If she doesn't make a miraculous recovery, I won't be able to consult with her, and might actually have to plot the book on my own. Which doesn't seem fair, all things considered.

On two very different subjects (intended to distract you from my confession that I haven't been working), Scooter makes a special guest star appearance over here, and The New York Times has an interesting article about the effect of e-books on paperbacks.

I suppose I should see what the gnats and my mother are up to. Maybe one or the other will take over writing my book for me!

The Shade Of The Moon Is Right On Schedule

2011-07-25T10:33:00.003-04:00

I'm confident I'll meet the August 43rd deadline.

That's Aug. 43, 2011 for all you doubters out there.

There's been no end to the obstacles in my path. The Evil Murdoch Clan forced me to spend an entire day watching CNN International (Parliament committee meeting rooms remind me a lot of the local school board meeting rooms from the days when I used to watch local school board meetings on TV, albeit not on CNN International). My mother has entered the Misplacing Years, so I've had to make the occasional trip over to her apartment to locate her hearing aid and the suchlike. Even though my apartment has central air conditioning, I still had to take time off to ponder the sweltering heat outside. And I've had to nurse my modest one game winning streak on Free Cell solitaire.

Saturday evening, when I was pondering the inevitability of folding my laundry, I had one of those ZOWIE! realizations that force freelance children's book writers to rethink everything (or worse still, to fold their laundry). To use the term Shakespeare popularized in his memoirs (My Days And Nights With Queen Elizabeth The 1st, available only at Borders Bookstores), I've been plowing my way through this ding dong manuscript, occasionally leaving massive gaps when there's a scene to be written that might actually take energy and brain cells (both better spent on Free Cell Solitaire). There were (well, technically are, since I haven't written any of them yet) three of those scenes yet to be begun, except in my mind, where they're just about all written, and not for the first time I regret that no one's invented a way to get words directly from brain to book while skipping all the intermediary steps.

My ZOWIE! realization was that after those three big energy scenes are completed, there are no more big energy scenes left in the entire book as currently plotted, which means a handful of more discerning readers might find the final fifty or so pages a complete anti-climax.

Okay. More than a handful. More like everybody.

Now personally I have nothing against an anti-climax if I'm the one doing the writing, but I am sensitive to the wishes and needs of all humanity (except the Evil Murdoch Clan and maybe some members of a political party that shall remain nameless because the very thought of them gives me hives and I don't want them to have the satisfaction of seeing my skin all blotchy, although now that I think about it blotchy skin is probably an excellent reason not to get any work done), and all humanity writing reviews of my masterwork casually mentioning that the final fifty pages or so are completely, totally, and irrevocably anti-climactic might not be beneficial to my future royalty checks.

Fortunately for me, folding my laundry provided quite a wonderful distraction, and I didn't bother thinking about those final fifty pages for a happy day or so.

But last night I thought I really should solve this problem, because I only have so much laundry to do at any one time, and the Evil Murdoch Clan is laying low (and lying high). So I did what any sensible writer would do. I called in the reinforcements.

I happen to have a very close friend who I consult on occasion when a plot is giving me woe. Since I have enormous respect for her as a person, but not so much respect for her right to privacy, I'm going to call her by her actual name, Princess Summerfallwinterspring.

I called Princess Summerfallwinterspring and told her the basic idea of The Shade Of The Moon, leaving out only the witty repartee on Pages 12-13, so she'll have something to look forward to when she reads it. I explained the three big scenes and the ZOWIE! concerns. I told her of my inchoate whatevers (inchoate is such a fabulous word, but I have no idea how to use it in a sentence), and how I was willing (more than willing, maybe even salivating with willingness) to dump one of the three big scenes, in exchange for a super big scene at the very end of the book.

Princess Summerfallwinterspring (or Princess Summerfallwinter as she's known to her closest of closest friends) listened, pondered, and solved. She led me, kindly, patiently, and on her phone bill, to a final scene that has a lot of stuff happening in it, plus that emotional resonance I'm such a sucker for.

It's still not 100% formulated in my mind, but then again I probably won't write it until August 35th at the earliest.

And when I woke up this morning, I completely changed one of the remaining two big energy and brain cell draining scenes, so it's a good thing I never wrote a single word in either of them since I'd have to rewrite it anyway. I guess the Evil Murdoch Clan was good for something.

For those of you who are still interested in what I have to say (Hi Mom!), there's a new interview with me at The Gatekeepers Post, which is a very interesting place with or without interviews with me.

I'm off to play another round of Free Cell Solitaire, to see if I can keep my winning streak from falling into negative numbers. I promise to blog again before July 39th!

This Spoiler Solution Is Safe For Spoiler Avoiders To Read

2011-07-21T18:45:00.003-04:00

Not perhaps the slickest of blog entry titles, but I wanted everyone to know it's safe.

I wasn't sure how to put spoilers for The Shade Of The Moon where folks who wanted to read them could and folks who didn't wouldn't run into them.

And then I remembered, I had an entire blog for This World We Live In that I haven't used since This World We Live In got published. Blogspot with its infinite generosity didn't care what became of it.

So if you follow this link you'll find a blog entry with 5 (count 'em 5)plot-explaining spoilers (really mostly about who the characters are), plus an explanation of how and why I wrote Chapter 28 of The Shade Of The Moon plus Chapter 28 itself.

And if you don't follow the link, you can remain pure and unspoiled.

Comments can be left over there, and I will be reading them. But I don't see using that blog for anything more than this single entry. It's time consuming enough writing The Shade Of The Moon, not to mention getting Scooter to pose for all those lovely pictures.

For those of you who go over and read, I hope you like the direction The Shade Of The Moon is taking. For those of you who don't, it's a pleasure and a joy to have you here anyway!

All The News That's Fit To Paw

2011-07-20T16:47:00.006-04:00

I haven't gotten very much work done the past two days. Yesterday I watched Parliament hearings on the various Murdochs and their evil minions, and today, well I'm sure I have an equally good excuse why I didn't get much done today.

Meanwhile Scooter has taken to reading the New York Times. He thought this article was the cat's pajamas.

I'll be posting tomorrow with the brilliant spoiler solution. But now I must go back to not working!

Two Four Six Eight I Think I'll Hyperventilate

2011-07-18T14:29:00.004-04:00

I'm taking the day off from writing The Shade Of The Moon, which isn't the same as taking the day off from thinking about The Shade Of The Moon, which is what I really need.

I am definitely overinvolved. It's pretty much all I think about, and when I'm not writing it, I actually want to be writing it. Yesterday I wrote in the morning with every intention of taking the rest of the day off, and then in the evening I wrote a short transitional scene. After supper. When I had no business working.

The book is about 200 pages, the about being significant, because roughly 160 pages are the first 160 pages, and the other 40 pages are out of sequence waiting to be put in place (after some already decided upon revisions). I still don't know how long the book will end up being, but I'm determined to have the first draft completed by August 7, then take a week off, and then do the rewrites/revisions until they're finished (more than 10 minutes, probably fewer than 10 days).

One thing I realized yesterday was because I'm hyperinvolved and working like a maniac, I'm going to really crash when the book is finished and sent off. Not that there won't be other work to do on it, after my editor works her magic. But I'll still be leaving the world of post-moon society, and more to the point, I'll be leaving the world of writing 6 days a week and thinking 7 days a week, and obsessing 8 or 9 days a week (some weeks I take a day off).

I'd say I'll never ever agree to such a tight deadline again and/or never ever agree to spending an entire summer writing a book again, but after this one is done I am absolutely determined to be retired, and will never ever write another book again, so there's no reason to make such firm and decisive resolutions.

Write/Crash/Retire. Except for the Crash part, it sounds good to me.

Meanwhile, here's a lovely blog review of Blood Wounds.

Hmm... Blood Wounds comes out in September. Maybe it'll keep me from crashing!

ETA: I put in a quick three day poll on whether I should do a blog entry with some spoilers. Majority rules.

Pracuję, pracuję

2011-07-13T10:49:00.006-04:00

For those of you who don't speak Polish (moi aussi), that means I'm working; I'm working, at least according to Google Translations, which was very excited to see me put something other than German in their translation box.

My agent informed me on Monday that in addition to the wonderful good news of the starred Publishers Weekly review for Blood Wounds (always worth a link), we had sold the Polish publication rights for Life As We Knew It, The Dead And The Gone, and This World We Live In (aka, to me at least, the moon books).

This means the following countries either know now or will someday learn that Lisa is pregnant:

The US of A
The British Empire Past and Present
Denmark
Germany
France
Bulgaria
Somewhere in China
Brazil
Poland

All of them except Denmark bought the rights to all three books, which means I'll be getting 15 more of the moon books in their various languages over the years. I don't actually have room for 15 more books (not to mention Blood Wounds, which will most likely come out in paperback at some point, which'll mean 17 rather than 15), but as my mother is wont to say, this should be the worst problem I ever have.Of course my mother also says I should move into a bigger apartment so there'll be room for the Buxtehuder Bulle when I carry it back from Germany.

Speaking of Lisa being pregnant, I really have been working on The Shade Of The Moon, in which the result of Lisa's pregnancy is a fairly important character. In fact, today while exercycling to the 2002 US National Figure Skating Championships Without Sound (Evan Lysacek came in 12th but they didn't show him on TV), I figured out why Gabe is behaving the way he is. Okay, the real reason why is Because I Said So, but it helps if the motivation is a little clearer than that to the putative readers (or at least my editor). And poof! right in the middle of Matt Savoie's freeskate, I worked it out.

As it happens, because this is summertime when no rightminded freelance children's book writer should be working, I'm letting myself write The Shade in any old order I want. So the first 80 pages give or take are written, but yesterday I skipped way ahead to write a section I didn't even know was going to exist the day before yesterday, and today I'm going to keep going on that section, and then when I return to writing on Friday, return to page 81 give or take. I shudder to think how many pages there'll be between page 81 and the section I'm currently working on.

Speaking of shuddering, my mother who is getting wittier and meaner as she approaches her very own Big 100, said it was perfectly all right for me to be working all summer because my apartment is air conditioned.

She's right about that in English and 7 other languages!

Yippee! A Starred Publishers Weekly Review For Blood Wounds!

2011-07-09T08:08:00.006-04:00

This is the first review for Blood Wounds and it's a beauty.

Not to mention that shiny red thing on the top certainly looks like a star to me!

Here's the part my publisher will be delighted to quote (me too; I'll be quoting it for days to come):

This intense psychological drama, showing the brightest and darkest sides of humanity, offers remarkable acts of courage and disturbing images of domestic violence. Willa's frankly portrayed grief, confusion, and uncertainties will have a strong impact on readers.

I think I'll spend the rest of the day smiling!

Who Knew A Blimp Could Type

2011-07-08T15:32:00.006-04:00

I put a lot of effort in this blog and that includes the titles. I want you to know I considered Who Knew A Blimp Could Type? and Who Knew A Blimp Could Type! before settling on the unpunctuated version.

This blimp business is brought about because yesterday I went to get the mail and I saw the Goodyear Blimp flying overhead (as opposed to flying underfoot, but I have a true appreciation for descriptive cliches, because I don't like to write description, and a little help is always appreciated).

Since I am now getting the hang of Twitter, I tweeted about this, and by golly, this morning I found that the Goodyear Blimp itself had tweeted back an explanation (it was going home after a visit to ESPN, which is a couple of hours away as the crow flies).

Anyway, I was delighted that the Goodyear Blimp had bothered to tweet back, so I tweeted my thanks, and by golly the sweet blimp tweeted me right back.

I tell you, we got quite the thing going. And if I don't lose some weight, we could wear matching outfits when I go get my Buxtehuder Bullen Award.

In addition to my romance with the Goodyear Blimp, I also have a book going. I'm on page 60, which would be more impressive (to me at least) if it weren't for the fact I'd already written about 30 of those 60 pages. All of which, except for page 1, I've had to rewrite, so it's almost like writing them from scratch. Or so I tell myself. I have another 30 or so already written pages, waiting to be slotted into place, and then I have to do actual original writing, which may or may not go faster but the smart money is on or not.

When I'm not writing, I'm dealing with mother stuff (I don't suppose you know where she put her keys) or friend stuff or waiting for Derek Jeter to get his 3000th hit stuff (I feel ever more wistful that he didn't get it at the game Todd Strasser and I went to), and now, of course, blimp stuff. All of which use up a lot of energy, most likely better spent on page 61 and all the pages thereafter.

Or maybe I should just ask the blimp to write the book, after it finds my mother's keys!

ETA a couple of hours later: I forgot to tell you I changed Mom reading The Great Gatsby for the 20th time to Mom reading To Kill A Mockingbird for the 20th time. Thanks to all of you who made suggestions on what books Mom would insist on having to keep civilization alive!

You Read I'll Write (At Least That's The Plan)

2011-07-05T10:14:00.005-04:00

I'm back at work on The Shade Of The Moon. My brain is racing with ideas for new and revised material. My fingers, alas, aren't in nearly as much of a hurry. But I did get a fair amount done yesterday, and as long as I keep getting a fair amount done, I should finish the thing fair and square.

Meanwhile, although I've pretty much given up reading for the duration, I have a couple of things to recommend to you to read.

The first, and shorter by far, is an article in today's New York Times about families and all their new variants. I found this article particularly interesting because first of all, I'm a total sucker for families in any variety imaginable, and secondly because I have a friend of a friend whose family is constructed in one of the more contemporary fashions (not a variant covered in this article), and thirdly because a lot of what Blood Wounds is about is the way families exist and co-exist these days. Note what a strong and healthy ego I have, to link to Blood Wound's pushing into 2,000,000 number on Amazon. I'm simply telling myself the number will become more respectable (and less like my weight) closer to publication date.

Speaking of publication, the next link is going to take you to a whole other place, an ebook of an amazing book called ThThe Art Of The American Soldier. Because it is an actual book (unfortunately, in my opinion, available only online), it takes a while to download, but it's well worth the time and effort. Feel free to share the link with anyone you think would be interested. It's patriotism at its best.

I will now resume procrastination at its best. A game or two of Solitaire should get my fingers ready to write!

He Specializes In Character Development And Annuals

2011-07-02T12:51:00.021-04:00

I decided to get a brand new grip on The Shade Of The Moon by writing out its sequence of events on index cards.

Scooter gave the matter some thought.

But then he realized it was far too nice a day to be working.

Why, he pondered, would anyone choose to be indoors on such a lovely day?

No matter. There are impatiens plants to be tended to.

Happy Holiday Weekend everyone. I'll be the one sitting at the computer, turning index cards into fiction!

Die Welt Wil Wir Sie Kannten (aka Life As We Knew It) Wins The Buxtehuder Bullen Award!

2011-06-29T15:04:00.014-04:00

This is a great honor and I am so thrilled I can't even describe how thrilled I am. Here's some basic information about this wonderful award.

See that bull up above? That's the award winning statue, inspired by Ferdinand The Bull. My brother (who's been helping me through all this German information)says it weighs 12 and a half kilos, and my mother, who is thoroughly enjoying the entire process (she said, among many other things, "I had to wait 100 years for this," and is now demanding one half of all the congratulations) wants to know if I'll need a bigger apartment to hold it.

The awards ceremony is part of a 40th anniversary celebration of the award, and it's going to be sometime in early September. My mother's extremely big 100 is also in early September, but my mother has already told me if there's a conflict in dates, of course I should go to Buxtehude, but I should tell them that only an honor such as this one would make me miss my mother's birthday.

Of course, I'll have to say it in German, but I'll worry about that in September.

The Buxtehuder Bullen Award gets a lot of publicity in Germany, which my brother discovered through clever googling. The articles are pretty much the same, but they have different headings (I admit to a partiality to the ones with Susan Beth Pfeffer in the headline), but this one is currently my favorite because it shows both the jury that picked LAWKI and the pretty picture of the tree and oops me too that Marci took.

I admit I've been way too excited to get any work done, since finding out yesterday afternoon about the award (they called me all the way from Buxtehude, which is 30 kilometers from Hamburg).

The end of the world is simply going to have to wait. Winning the Buxtehuder Bullen Award takes precedence!

I Could Be Writing Or I Could Be Writing About Writing

2011-06-28T11:39:00.006-04:00

Writing about writing is less work. I'll go with that (at least until after lunch).

I'm not opposed to work. In fact I totally support it for other people (pretty much my same attitude about marriage). Actually, once I start working (on writing, cleaning closets, most anything), I kind of enjoy it. Or at least I don't loathe it. It's the starting that's the tough part. Especially before lunch, which I'll be preparing for myself in a mere 18 minutes (a wholesome and nutritious salad, thank you for asking).

I just created the following scale. On a scale of 1-10, with 1 not feeling like work at all and 10 involving the sacrifice of vast amounts of remaining brain cells, here's how the moon books stand:

Life As We Knew It: 1. Okay, maybe 2 because I did have to figure some stuff out.

The Dead And The Gone: 5, maybe 6. 5 and a halfish. I'd pretty much figured all the stuff out, but it did take some brain cells to make the chronology work. And I don't know Spanish. Okay, more in the 6-7 range.

This World We Live In: Definitely a 9. I'm the only person who gives myself credit for the amount of brain cells sacrificed for the sake of a novel. Working on the assumption that there would be some people who came to TW from d&g and some more from LAWKI, I had to keep various things in LAWKI/d&g unmentioned in TW in case any of those people then went back to read the unread book.

I feel so emphatic about all this, I think I'll bold the numbers. That'll show you. And having done so, I kind of like that "halfish" which looks like half fish if you don't know any better.

Ooh, what book have I left out? What Moon title remains unranked?

Yes, it's The Shade Of The Moon (which won't get italicized until it's finished). The Unnicknamed One is easily a 9.75. Not because it's that hard (it really isn't, and it's an awful lot of fun to play with), but because of that ridiculous September 1 deadline. I really really really want the submitted manuscript to be really really really acceptable, because there won't be very much time for substantial rewrites, and even though my editor/publisher has a basic idea (based on a 12 page outline, as well as the brilliant 2 sentence synopsis) of what the book is going to be about, that doesn't mean they're going to like the actual version unless the actual version is really really really good.

My guess is they want LAWKI 2, and that's not what they're going to get, so I'd better do a tiptop job with Shade 1 And Only, so they won't feel let down.

Stress and pressure. Or as I like to think of it, stressure. Although, actually I don't like to think of it at all.

My intent is to know the book so well before I write it that I won't get stuck anywhere in the middle/end, because it'll all be neatly ironed out before I get there. That's pretty much how I usually work anyway, but not with a ridiculous September 1 deadline.

For example, a couple of days ago I figured out what big big thing was going to provoke the big big change in the action. Fine. This is what I should be figuring out. Only that particular big big thing had consequences, or more to the point, presequences all its own that had to be dealt with. If I were going to write X, did that mean I had to change T and U, none of which I've written except in my mind where I happen to be very fond of them. How could I keep T and U so I can get to X (which now that I think of it, is more in the vicinity of V or W). And T and U only make sense if R and S do, and somewhere things have to be set in vicinity of E-H.

Writing's hard. And it's even harder to write about writing if you try to avoid spoilering.

But hey. Why complain when it's time to make lunch. After some nice healthy nutritious salad, I'm sure work will feel like 9.99 on the fun scale!

The Shade Of The Moon Game (Anyone Can Play)

2011-06-25T16:43:00.006-04:00

It occurred to me a couple of weeks ago that the heroine of The Shade Of The Moon (Mom's daughter Juliet) was an awfully fluent and talented writer, given that she'd hardly had any schooling at all.

I had two choices. I could either make her a near illiterate writer (which to me is similar to writing in dialect, and I hate reading dialect and therefore don't write it), or I could come up with an explanation of how Juliet got her literary skills.

I opted for Number 2, and wrote a nifty flashback scene (I'm trying very very very hard to limit flashback scenes, and I think this is the only one I've written and may well be the only one in the book once it's finished which it will be in time for its absurd September 1 deadline) to explain it.

It seems (cover your eyes ye spoiler hating readers) there was a library in the town where Juliet grew up and the library was closed and everyone in the town was allowed to keep one book. So Mom decided to get as many books as she could and connived accordingly and the family ended up with a fair sized number, which were then used to educate and enlighten Juliet and her half-niece Meggie.

We'll get back to this in a moment, but I want to interrupt myself to say I came up with a wonderful exchange of dialogue this morning (I think I was exercycling at the time).

Mom: I'm not afraid of dying.
Another character retorts: You want to live long enough to be able to say I told you so.

At first I had Alex saying that, and then I had Syl saying it, and then I had Miranda saying it. And the great thing is, Mom reacts completely differently based on who says it.

Also, to interrupt my interruption, I have the greatest end line for the book (which isn't going to get used, but I love it).

Mom (striking her forehead with the palm of her hand): What a fool I've been. The President was right all along!

Okay. Back to the library (I typed that as bake to the library; my typos are worth an entire blog all their own). It was up to me (on account of Juliet and Mom and all the others not really existing) to figure out what books Mom would decide should be taken to provide an educational base for Juliet and Meggie.

Here's what Juliet says:

We ended up with 31 books, a volume of all of Shakespeare’s plays, and a dictionary and a Columbia Viking 2 volume desk encyclopedia (I took one volume, Meggie took the other) and the complete works of Jane Austen, and The History Of World Art and Little Women and a World Almanac from the last year in the time before. 31 books. Only 1 made Mom cry. Miranda was supposed to take Alice In Wonderland, but instead she found a book Mom had written and took that instead.

The books were my school. I learned spelling and the meaning of words from the dictionary, and history and science from the encyclopedia and geography from the World Almanac. Shakespeare taught me about the beauty of language. Little Women taught me what families were supposed to be like. The History Of World Art gave me a way of escaping the dark ugly reality I lived in every day.

I told this to my friend Christy (aka St. Christy, since she listens to all my ramblings about The Shade Of The Moon), and she said she loved World Atlases. I'm not a big Atlas (just typed as Atlast- I told you my typos were fabulous) person, which is why I went with World Almanacs (I loved the Almanac as a kid, and it has maps). But her comment got me thinking (always a dangerous thing) and that's why I've invented the following game:

You have a library to choose from, and can take a half dozen or so books, in a desperate effort to educate the young and keep alive the memory of civilization. What books do you take?

Remember (as Mom and I did) that the longer the book, the better. That's why she took the complete plays of Shakespeare and novels of Jane Austen. Although I do have a scene later on where Mom is reading The Great Gatsby, which is nothing if not short.

Let me know what you choices are. If one pops up repeatedly, or if one strikes my fancy, and therefore Mom's, I'll put it in The Shade Of The Moon.

I should have enough time to do that before the absurd September 1 deadline!

Mickey Mantle Was A Natural Righty With A Plunger

2011-06-22T11:06:00.013-04:00

While it's true I'm spending every waking (and a few sleeping) hours obsessing over The Shade Of The Moon, other aspects of my life do slip in when I'm not looking.

For starters, Scooter is now eating the new shower curtain. This is my 3rd or 4th since he entered my life. He nibbles more towards the faucet side, but will chomp on the opposite end as well. I'm positive this is why my bathtub drain is so slow moving.

I had been particularly pleased with the current shower curtain. First off, it was so toxic I kept it opened on the patio for more than a week before its heinous new shower curtain smell wore off enough to hang it up. I was cautiously optimistic the scent would be bad enough to keep Scooter from devouring it. Well, that didn't work.

The other reason I was so happy is it's a shower curtain with a map of the world, and since the world has changed a great deal since my last map of the world shower curtain, I figured I'd finally learn where all those new countries I keep hearing about are actually located. I like educational shower curtains (although I saw one during sleepover weekend that was rules of grammar and I draw the line).

Alas, Scooter is now digesting his way from south of Tonga to the very border of New Zealand. Should this turn into a Twilight Zone episode, my apologies to everyone in Tonga and New Zealand. I really thought the toxins would keep you safe.

On a more (or less) literary note, I finally provoked my agent into letting me know what she thought of The Offering. No fool she, she had two other people in the office read it. They all basically said the same thing, some variant of Oh My Goodness! This, alas, is not the same as Oh You're Good! although I did try to convince myself they were practically identical in spirit.

They all suggested (and quite rightly) that my poor martyr of a heroine needs to suffer a tad less and that the romance needs to be stronger. They might have suggested other things I've forgotten about (like Put Down That Keyboard And Get An Honest Job), but I'm not going to think about it until after The Shade Of The Moon has made its merry way through the publishing process.

Oh, speaking of The Shade Of The Moon and my obsessing thereof, yesterday morning I came up with a whole new scene that I love (I love it so much I may even write part of it this afternoon, although I really should be assembling my new vacuum cleaner, since I plan on cleaning the apartment tomorrow morning). The great thing about this scene is it simplifies the motivation for something truly significant in the book. Before I thought of the new scene, this is how things went: A does something to B and because of C's response, A does something to D. That's a little clunky, so now it's B does something that provokes A to doing something to B and because of B's response, A does something to D. In other words, I leave C out of it, or I will when I get around to writing all that, which will be sometime in July.

Meantime, I'm back to being concerned about my lefthanded/righthandedness. I guess it was going to the Yankee game with Todd Strasser got me thinking about it again. I can never figure out if I'm a natural lefty or righty. This time I took a flat piece of plastic (the bag my new cable box came in), and grabbed the plunger that I always keep right by the bathtub because of Scooter's shower curtain issue, and set myself up. After multiple swings, I confirmed that at least with a plastic bag as home plate and a bathroom plunger as a bat, it's more natural for me to swing lefthanded than righthanded, although it's definitely more natural for me to throw a ball (not that I have one) or hold a pen (which I definitely do) righthanded. And no, I have no idea how that piece of personal insight will in any way improve the quality of my life.

Finally, on a more personal note, my brother found the most wonderful blog entry that mentions our father, and on Father's Day no less. It's about books that influence people's lives. I'm really thrilled my brother found it; it gives enormous pleasure to him, my mother, and me.

Alas, the only thing that gives Scooter pleasure these days is the chomping down of New Zealand!

Visual Evidence

2011-06-19T10:48:00.020-04:00

I've been having so much fun writing The Shade Of The Moon that I've been forgetting to do things, like proving to you that Todd Strasser and I really did go to the Yankee game, even though Derek Jeter was on the disabled list so we didn't get to see him get his 3000th hit.

Of course I'd brought my camera with me, so here's proof we were there. Although it's hard to tell us apart, because we both wore pink baseball caps, Todd is the good looking one.

Sadly, that is the best of the three pictures Todd took of me, but I do like its two dimensional cutout of an fat old flushed freelance children's book writer stationed at Yankee Stadium look. I like the illusion of being merely two dimensional (although I'm sure on occasion my writing's been described as one dimensional).

The game was great, by the way, and Todd and I stayed through all 12 innings and the ritual pie ceremony. And people in the row ahead of us were very impressed when I said the Yankees would sacrifice the runner to second and then have Rodriguez pinch hit, which was exactly what the Yankees did.

Joe Girardi had better watch out. This fat old flushed freelance children's book writer can manage ballgames just as well as he can.

One thing I can do that Joe Girardi may not be able to is end the world in not one, not two, not three, but four (count 'em four) books. How I love ending the world. I'm having a ridiculously good time writing The Shade Of The Moon. I've learned a little bit from the writing of The Offering. I'm writing the scenes that are most on my mind, but I'm indicating in the document where the other planned scenes will go. In fact today, I think I'm going to fill in the very big blank I have, which is a set of scenes where Jon comes to visit. He's all grown up now, and a very fine person.

When I did the various outlines for the book, I was worried that I didn't have enough beginning (I knew the plot would zip along once I got to the middle, and while the ending is a little underdeveloped, it's not for lack of possibilities). But the beginning is starting to look not unlike its creator, at least in the (ahem) plump department (not in the old and flushed and two dimensional, I hope). Fabulous scenes I never thought of have seized control (by the way, and totally off subject, if you ever need to know the exceptions to the I Before E rule, just remember this sentence: Neither the foreigner nor the weird financier can seize leisure at its height. I have no idea who figured that sentence out, but it's been a useful part of my life forever).

Now I know any number of you (at least one, maybe more) don't care for spoilers or those who spoil, but I love my first page so much I'm going to share it with you. Also it will prove there is a first page. Since I still haven't mastered scanning, I scanned it twice. Those who don't like spoilers might prefer the first version.

According to my clock (and why would it lie) it's time to make lunch. Oh well. The return of Jon will just have to wait a few minutes longer. But even with a Sept. 1 deadline, there should be time enough for the world to end at least once more!

It's Genuinely Semi-Official

2011-06-16T10:05:00.003-04:00

My editor and my agent and I exchanged emails over the past couple of days and I told my agent to accept the only slightly insulting offer that Houghton Mifflin Harcourt made for The Shade Of The Moon.

I figured I'd sacrificed so many brain cells to working out its plot and characters it would be a folly not to accept.

In a total fit of what the hey, I started writing yesterday. I know I must really be committed to the concept because I edited out about four pages I wrote and will edit out another four pages when I get back to it (the first four pages because they were about sex, which I have yet to figure out how to deal with in the book but realize I shouldn't deal with in the first ten pages, the second four pages because they were all explanatory of why things were the way they were, which fascinates me almost as much as sex, but unlike sex, drags the story down).

Also I got so involved in writing I didn't have supper until 8:30, which simply will not do. I've got to work out a schedule that allows me time to eat and breathe and talk to friends and family (talking to friends and family yesterday afternoon was why I didn't finish the four pages I will be dumping until 8:25).

If you can read between the lines (or under them or on top of them or on the lines right smack there) I have every intention of making the Sept. 1 (or as I think of it, the Sept. 6) deadline, so the book can be published in the Fall of 2012 (and let me tell you, if I make the deadline with the fabulous manuscript I intend it to be, and HMH dawdles so it doesn't get published until Spring 2013, the screeching and whining from these quarters will be heard on the moon).

Speaking of the moon, while I skipped the eclipse, I did gaze lovingly at the beautiful full orange moon in last night's evening sky. I love me some moon. In fact, I was thinking that if you can buy the naming rights for a star, you should be able to buy the naming rights for a moon (there are plenty of them out there; even poor sweet much maligned Pluto has a moon of its own). Somewhere there's an unnamed moon waiting for me to adopt it.

It's the least I can do, since the moon has been so incredibly generous to me!

Announcements And Assumptions

2011-06-12T15:05:00.023-04:00

I'll start with the announcements.

My car passed its annual inspection.

Granted it's only a year old, so the odds were in its favor, but one should never take anything for granted.

[I just got distracted by seeing a deer eating outside my window. It used to be deer were a lovely, unexpected sight, but now with so much Lyme disease going around, they're the enemy of the people.]

And when I got home, and needed some kind of overshirt (it was 98 degrees less than a week ago, and 68 degrees this week), I found one in my closet I have no memory of buying. Ordinarily this kind of discovery can cause great waves of guilt to roll over me, but the price tag said $14.98, and no doubt I bought it on sale for even less, so the guilt subsided and I put the shirt on.

Sadly, the shirt looks better on the table than it looks on me.

As far as professional announcements go, I have none. My editor sent me an email saying if I needed more time to write The Shade Of The Moon then of course I should take as much time as I need. And my agent emailed me to say she was doing what agents always do (she didn't word it that way of course), which was to ask for better terms (presumably more money, since that's what agents always ask for).

Ironically (ooh, two sentences starting with adverbs in a single blog entry), I spent several days last week whipping the material for Shade into shape, and was sufficiently satisfied with my work that I typed up a two page outline of all the scenes I wanted in the book.

And it's at a point now where the characters are talking to each other in my brain all the time (or at least all the time I'm not distracted by other things), and the step after that is usually writing at a frantic pace (if for no other reason than to get the characters to stop talking to each other in my brain). I even worked out a writing schedule that wouldn't (probably) kill me, and then I figured what with Labor Day being on Sept. 5 (aka my mother's 100th birthday) and my editor most likely not even thinking about reading the manuscript until Sept. 6, well, why not get it done in time for a Fall 2012 publication?

But since I haven't officially (or even unofficially) agreed to anything, there's nothing to announce.

Meanwhile on the assumptions front, my agent hasn't said anything more to me about The Offering, so I have a choice between two things to assume. Either she hasn't finished reading it or she's read it and doesn't like it and doesn't know how to tell me. I love that "doesn't like it" euphemism. What I mean is "hates it with every fiber of her being." I always assume that when I don't hear from someone past the point when I should have heard from them (that point usually being 7.3 minutes after I've sent them the manuscript). I picture the entire publishing industry whispering, "I really hate that manuscript by Susan Beth Pfeffer with every fiber of my being, but I don't know how to break it to her without destroying her frail delicate sensibilities. Oh, I know. I'll send a deer over and she can catch Lyme disease and that will distract her."

Meanwhile, Todd Strasser and I have tickets for the Thursday afternoon Rangers/Yankee game, previously known as Derek Jeter's Last Best Chance To Get His 3000th Hit At Yankee Stadium. Last year, Todd bought the tickets for the game we went to, so this year I did, and it was fun fantasizing about my investment increasing in value. But now that Jeter has an injury, the odds are Thursday's game will be just that, Thursday's game, and while Todd and I will have a great time (especially if the Yankees win), the likelihood of my selling our tickets for vast amounts of money so one of us could retire immediately and run off to Tahiti has diminished substantially.

Oh well. It's probably too warm to wear my new shirt in Tahiti!

501 Is A Good Number For An Announcement

2011-06-09T11:46:00.011-04:00

This is my 500th blog entry, which sounds like entirely too many, but over 4 years, that pretty much averages out to 2 a week, a socially acceptable number (or at least so I tell myself).

I had thought I'd hold off on Number 500 until I had an official announcement concerning The Shade Of The Moon, but I'm pretty much in control of when the official announcement will come, and I'm not quite ready to announce.

My publisher, the mostly lovable Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, made an offer for The Shade Of The Moon on Monday. It was, as offers go, only slightly insulting, which, my agent assures me, in this market is to be expected. So okay. I was only slightly insulted, and heaven knows, in my multi-decade career, I've been a lot more insulted on many more occasions.

The real problem (and it is a real problem) is that HMH, having taken over two months to read my two sentence synopsis (not even two sentences with big words, since I don't know any big words) thinks it would be best to publish The Shade Of The Moon in Fall 2012. And to do that, they'd need to have the manuscript in by September 1, 1011.

In other words (not the shrieking cursing kind of words, just the quietly sardonic kind), they take 2 months to read 2 sentences, and then expect me to write 300 pages (at more than 2 sentences per page) in less than 3 months.

A woman could shriek and curse. Both of which I did.

Here are the two problems with writing a 300 page book in less than 3 months. The first is I had other plans for this summer. I was going to read movie star and TV star memoirs (okay, I can probably do some of that, although I always read less when I'm writing). I was going to clear out the outside storage closet (forget that; I never do big jobs when I'm writing). I was going to wean myself off my beloved sleeping pills (totally forget that- writing gives me really serious insomnia). In other words, there goes my summer.

The other problem is that if I'm going to write a 300 page book (all right- maybe 270 pages) in such a short time, I have to know exactly what I'm going to write. It was a lot of fun doodling about with The Offering (which my agent hasn't finished reading, so don't ask where that fits into all this because neither of us know), but I wrote The Offering to distract myself from things I needed to be doing, and it didn't matter if I wrote page 116 thirty seven times (or page 37 one hundred and sixteen times- I've lost track). But with an actual already looming deadline, page 116 had better get written once, and then polished once or twice, and that's it.

Now I admit I've given The Shade Of The Moon a great deal of thought over the past couple of months (not enough thought though on what to nickname it- I guess Shade will do for the time being). I don't lack for material. Indeed, the problem is too much material, too many possible storylines, and way too much backstory. The book takes place 17 years after This World We Live In, and while I may be intrigued by every social and political development of those 17 years, that doesn't mean readers will be. Because they won't. I've learned that much over my multi-decade career.

So I have to clear out the backstory, but weave enough in so that what's going on makes sense. An incident that Juliet experiences at age 8 (to be arbitrary about it) becomes an incident Juliet witnesses at age 16.

I also have to figure out how much of the stuff I just love but doesn't really have anything to do with the book, I can use. My brain has come up with dozens of pages about Gordon Industries (one of the few businesses that has made big money off the end of civilization), but since Mom would never ever let Juliet work at Gordon Industries, what difference does it make?

And we won't even go into which important character is going to die 2/3 of the way through the book and how, because I simply don't know yet. Just that one will.

So all the material has to be absolutely clear in my mind before I agree to the slightly insulting offer. If I don't have absolute control of the plot and characters before I begin writing, then I'm not going to begin writing.

What I have been doing, to determine my control level, is writing out summaries of scenes I have in mind. I did a bunch yesterday and a few today, and intend to keep working on it, before I let my agent know whether the answer is going to be yes or no. I know some of you hate spoilers, but I figure if you go to the effort of reading any of these pages, then you deserve to be spoiled.

As it happens, Scooter loves spoilers. He takes after me that way.

So that's where things are or aren't. I'm going to do some more thinking work today and tomorrow if I need to and the weekend if I need even more time. I think I'll also start reading Sheldon Leonard's memoirs, since I may not have a chance to this summer.

When I'm ready, I'll tell my agent what I've decided. You and my publisher will find out from reading Blog Entry Number 501!

Hope Is A Thing Without Calories

2011-06-06T11:56:00.014-04:00

I just spent a wonderful, albeit fattening, weekend with three close friends, a mini-vacation in Amherst, MA. We stayed at the Black Walnut Inn (which was really nice and very comfortable and served delicious breakfasts), and we saw sights, the first, and best of which was Emily Dickinson's house (and her brother's conveniently located right next door house too). I have had some wonderful docents in my day (since I like going to historical houses, and that's where docents tend to be found), but the one we had was perhaps the best docent ever. He was articulate and knowledgeable and happy to answer questions and he even answered more of our questions in the gift shop (of course it could be he was dazzled by our charm and beauty, as we were with his).

For someone who wore white all the time and did a lot of baking, Emily Dickinson lived in a hotbed of sexual activity. Granted, it wasn't her hotbed, but it sure made learning about her a lot more interesting.

We also went to the Smith College horticultural gardens, where I practiced my flower photography skills.

I really like this picture I took of peonies, which has a real "A peony is a peony is a peony" quality to it.

The most expensive thing I bought was a pair of socks (the pair I had on kept slipping), but we did some window shopping, although when it came to ice cream and candy we smashed the metaphorical window and actually shopped.

It was great to spend time with friends and get away from home and reality for a couple of days, even though it meant I couldn't see Rafael Nadal and his rippling muscles win the French Open. And Scooter has been even more of a lunatic than usual since I got back. And the scale broke when I stood on it this morning.

I noticed when I logged on to Blogspot that this is the 499th entry I've written on this blog. I think I'll wait for something to announce for #500. My agent is reading The Offering and my publisher has been reminded a few times that they really should make up their mind about The Shade Of The Moon, and you never know what might happen that's worthy of a blog entry.

So in the meantime, thank you again for answering my birth order poll and for all your comments about birth orders, and for committing to memory all previous 499 blog entries, starting, of course, with the first!

The Things One Thinks About at 4:35 AM

2011-06-01T08:00:00.003-04:00

Are, it turns out, the things one thought about at bedtime five hours earlier. In my case last night, I was thinking about birth orders.

There's very little I really believe in, but I am a near fanatic on the subject of birth orders. Personally, I am a youngest (of two), and that wouldn't mean all that much to me except that out of about a dozen or so close friends, ten are first borns or onlies. A handful have asterisks, older or younger half siblings that might have affected family dynamics in ways I'm not privy too.

But I figured a while ago that it couldn't be coincidence so many first borns and onlies liked me, or that I selected them as friends at many different points in my life.

I respected birth order in the moon books. Miranda in Life As We Knew It and Alex in The Dead And The Gone are both middle children. I very much wanted Miranda to have a big brother she could turn to (as I turn to my big brother), and I favored the idea that she wasn't the youngest (although as the only girl, she had a different relationship than she would have as the middle child in a family of three boys). For Alex, it was really important that he wasn't the oldest. He found himself thrust into the position of being the one responsible for his two younger sisters, when that had never been his place in the family (which was to be the best and brightest, the one his mother pinned all her ambitions on).

Somewhere around 4:47 AM, I decided it would be interesting to find out from all of you what your birth order is. Polls are so cheerfully anonymous, and I don't expect to find any trends whatsoever, but I'm curious anyway. If you have any birth order comments you want to make, please do. But with or without comments, I'd love it if you place your birth order in the poll, so I can see if I'm hanging out with oldests and onlies here as well as in "real life!"

Pick A Number (Almost) Any Number

2011-05-30T13:21:00.021-04:00

Every time I sign in to Blogspot to write an entry, it informs me of how many people follow this blog. Follow, by the way, seems like a very weird word to me, but it's the one that gets used here and at Twitter.

Anyway, I've been noticing for a few entries, that this blog has 100 followers, and I've been meaning to thank all 100 of you for showing up, or at least being told when there's a new entry, which I assume is the benefit, such as it is, of following. My Twitter account has 116 followers, and I have minimal idea why, since I still haven't mastered the fine art of Twitter.

So there are 2 numbers right there- 100 and 116, both subject to change.

1 is always a good number. In this case it's for 1 new interview with me, this time on JMCooper's blog.

I also meant to announce when Life As We Knew It got its 200th review on Amazon, but that came and went as well. I think it's at 204, and since I don't read them, I can delude myself into believing all 204 are raves (although some are most likely raving; LAWKI inspires that kind of response as well).

And speaking of numbers, yesterday I finally analyzed my royalty statement (as opposed to depositing the check which I did instantly), and after adding up the numbers and doing some division based on something I was told by one of the Houghton Mifflin Harcourt people, I can announce that approximately 1/4 of the sales of all three moon books were made by Barnes & Noble. So grateful authorly smooches to them.

Another number in my life these days is 8. That's the number of versions of The Dead And The Gone (do you notice I'm capitalizing that these days? It's because I realized that HMH put This World We Live In in small letters without asking me, so capitalizing D&G is my new form of rebellion)I now have, since I was sent the German audiobook version (aka the German audiobook version of Die Verlorenen Von New York).

And here's Scooter chewing things over:

Here's a series of numbers for you: 4, 2(1.5), 4.5, 8. The 4 represents the 4 fan letters HMH forwarded to me that arrived on Saturday. Two of the letters had been sent me mid-April (a month and a half ago). One letter was from February, four and a half months ago, and one was from October, eight months ago. I answered all four letters yesterday evening and made a point of mailing my responses this morning, but this particular quirk of HMH drives me crazy. How much effort can it take to forward a letter? Kids write them, for goodness sakes, and who wants to disappoint a kid? If there are any teachers out there, please understand that publishing houses can be absolutely awful in forwarding letters (or at least HMH can be; I don't remember things being quite so bad at other publishing houses), and consider letting your students email formal letters to me instead. When I'm on top of things (which I grant you, I haven't been lately), I answer emails within a day or two, but at worst they get answered within a week. None of this 4-8 months business.

One final number, 5. That represents 5 AM, my new wake up and think about The Shade Of The Moon time. I can't even blame Scooter, who isn't waking me up. Nor can I blame HMH, which certainly has offered me no assurance that I should be thinking about it, rather than sleeping until a far more decent hour. It's all my imagination's fault, and my imagination and I would both appreciate getting definitive word from my editor, so I'll know whether it's useful for me to be using my brain or whether I should simply turn over and sleep the happy sleep of the semi-retired.

Otherwise, instead of being semi-retired, I'll just be semi-tired. Not knowing is clearly doing a number on me!

And When, You Wonder, Will We Hear About The Shade Of The Moon?

2011-05-26T15:39:00.011-04:00

If I had to guess, we'll hear whether Houghton Mifflin Harcourt wants The Shade Of The Moon (aka the fourth moon book) before I finish exercycling to Season 1 of The Facts Of Life.

I did make it through another two episodes yesterday morning (Mrs. Garrett's first and I guess only husband shows up and teaches all the girls poker, and Tootie finds out all the girls' IQs and much soul searching ensues) and they remain dreadful. Which begs the question why I'm watching Season 1. Well, I'd thought it'd be kind of interesting, since I only started watching in Season 2, which I hope will live up to my memories of same. Today I exercycled to an Edward G. Robinson movie that TCM showed last night, definitely an improvement.

Meanwhile, back to my publisher, who, as a general rule, I'm very pleased with. But I don't think it should take five weeks to decide Yes or No to a two sentence synopsis. At this point, they should know me, they should know my books, they should be able to figure out without too much trouble whether a fourth moon book will make them money (in which case Yes makes sense) or won't make them money (in which case No makes sense).

Having not heard anything by the end of last week, my agent was told the earliest we'd hear would be the end of this week. Technically speaking, that's tomorrow, but tomorrow, for those of you keeping score at home, is Friday of Memorial Day Weekend, which means in the publishing industry that the end of the week is today, only there's no way I'm going to hear anything today because the publishing industry thinks the end of the week is Friday at 11:59 PM. Or Saturday at 11:59 PM, or three weeks from Saturday at 11:59 PM, or possibly a year or two from now, give or take, but in the PM.

Or when I finish Season 1 of The Facts Of Life.

I figured out this morning that assuming HMH decides Yes, and I decide Yes, and I write The Shade Of The Moon and they publish The Shade Of The Moon, then The Shade Of The Moon will come out when (are you ready for this) I'm 65 years old. Gack, gack, and double gack. 65 is really old, although I do socialize with people who are that age or older, and my mother is 99, so in comparison 65 is as young as the girls on The Facts Of Life Season 1.

By the way, I love Charlotte Rae, but I think Mrs. Garrett wore a wig.

Where was I? Oh yeah, 65 years old, and if I get any kind of advance (and if HMH doesn't offer me any kind of advance, then my Yes will become my No so fast it'll make your head spin), then even if the advance earns out from the sale of the hardcovers (true for Life As We Knew It, The Dead And The Gone, and This World We Live In), I won't see any royalties until I'm 67 years old, otherwise known as The Golden Age Of Getting Social Security.

You know, it's possible most writers don't blog about money and when they'll earn it and The Facts Of Life Season 1. One or the other, but probably not both. Other writers have standards, silly them.

As you can probably tell, I didn't sleep too well last night, and once again it was The Shade Of The Moon that woke me up and kept me up. Not stress about whether and when I'll hear from HMH (which irritates me, but isn't particularly stressing me out). Just working on the plot. Working out a nifty little section involving body parts. The kind of thing that when I start thinking about it at 4 AM, the next thing I know it's 7 AM, and I'm starting the day out tired and cranky.

Oh well. Whether I hear from my agent or not, and whether she hears from HMH or not, it's going to be a lovely Memorial Day Weekend. Saturday I'm going to New Paltz Crafts Fair, and Sunday, just maybe, I'll start clearing out my outside storage closet, which has been on my to do list since last summer, when I guess I didn't done it.

Hey, with a style like that, maybe I can understand why HMH is delaying making a decision!

Sick (And Tired) Day...Okay, Just Tired Day

2011-05-23T10:52:00.013-04:00

This morning when I exercycled, I was too exhausted to watch an episode from Season 1 of The Facts Of Life DVD. Actually, it takes a lot of energy to watch episodes from Season 1 (at least based on the two episodes I've seen) because it's pretty dreadful and thus seriously energy draining. It'll pick up once Season 2 begins, but right now I don't have the mental fortitude to think that far ahead.

So instead of plowing my way through the DVD, I channel flipped, ending up, as I always do, on Lifetime Movies. And who should I see there but Tori Spelling. It took me a few moments to confirm the movie was Mother, May I Sleep With Danger, the made for TV movie with the all time best title ever of all time, in no small part because of the perfection of its iambicdom.

I'd tell you how it turned out, but I flipped over to CNN at 9:00, so I'll never know.

Naturally I was curious about why I was too exhausted for The Facts Of Life Season 1, so I looked at my calendar and my date book to see what I'd been up to.

It started, as all high stress periods do, with taking Scooter to the vet. Then I took me to Connecticut, upstate New York and Tennessee for school visits, to Rockland County (one county down from me) for 3 libraries in an afternoon, 1 quick local library visit, and Arizona for a school visit. I moved my mother into enriched housing and moved her out of enriched housing. I finished writing and rewriting The Offering and sent it to my agent. I determined that my publisher was interested in a synopsis for The Shade Of The Moon, wrote a 12 page one and sent that off, then at their request wrote a 2 sentence version of same and sent that off. I devoted extraordinary amounts of brain cells, at the cost of many normal nights' sleep, to working out a plot for The Shade Of The Moon. And this weekend, I had houseguests (but no world ending rapture, alas).

Want to know how I've gotten through all this? Candy and cookies. Lots of candy and cookies. Maybe some cake I no longer remember, but definitely supplemental ice cream.

Since I've yet to hear from my agent about The Offering or my editor about The Shade Of The Moon, and I've run out of candy, cookies, cake and ice cream, I intend to take to bed. I'm not even going to ask my mother permission to sleep, with or without danger. I'm just gonna.

Who knows. Maybe after a day of doing absolutely nothing, I'll have the strength tomorrow to exercycle my way through an episode or two of The Facts Of Life!

ETA: I may be doing nothing today but my beloved Google Alerts is keeping busy sending me this fabulous examiner.com link.

It's A Date

2011-05-18T18:05:00.004-04:00

April 50th came early this year. My royalty check arrived in today's mail, and it was actually quite a bit larger than I'd anticipated.

My bad mood of last night evaporated pretty quickly, even before the check arrived. I haven't had the TV on today, so I don't know if I still have the hi def stations, but with the way it's raining, most likely all the east coast baseball games will get rained out anyway (and the Yankees won last night, so all is forgiven).

In between the showers and storms, I bought impatiens plants and got them planted, some in the little tiny patch of land to the side of my front door, the rest in the patio window boxes. Neither spot gets much sunlight, so impatiens work best there (so do coleus plants, but for some reason they're not as easy to find as they used to be).

Morgaine, in a comment to last night's grumpfest, points out that today is May 18, and that's the day the meteor hits the moon in Life As We Knew It and The Dead And The Gone. You'd think I'd know that, and thoroughly enjoy getting my royalty check on that very date, but I thought I killed off all humanity on May 20, aka April 50th.

Apparently it's a moot point, and I'm not going to be around much longer to enjoy the money anyway. I just read an article saying the world's coming to an end on Saturday. Of course with interest rates what they are these days, it doesn't really matter if I deposit the check or merely cash it and hide the money under my mattress (it's probably safer under the mattress; I have one of those really big heavy mattresses), but I would like to have the sensation of money in the bank (or under the mattress) for more than three days.

Conversely, if the world is coming to an end, it'd be nice if it came to an end on May 18, because then people would be very impressed with my psychic powers and I could maybe get a TV series out of it (or at least an appearance on Jerry Springer). And since I'm scheduled to move my mother back to her apartment tomorrow, if the world comes to an end tonight (it being 6:17 PM Eastern Time as I type), I wouldn't have to pack and unpack all those books all over again.

I have two chocolate chip cookies in the freezer. What with the world coming to an end any minute now, I might as well eat them. After all, the dead don't diet (now there's a name for a noir).

If it turns out the world isn't coming to an end sometime between today and May 21, I'll see you all on May 22 (give or take). By which time the cookies will long be gone and there'll only be three (I think) days before we'll know who won American Idol.

With that to look forward to, I hope the world lasts just a little bit longer!

Spoiled? I'm Not Spoiled. I Simply Want Everything Exactly As I Want It Right Away!

2011-05-17T17:43:00.012-04:00

Some days are easier than others. My guess is you know that from personal experience.

April 50th has not yet arrived, and what is an even more ominous sign (or lack thereof), I exchanged emails with my agent this morning, and she didn't mention how my royalty check was on its merry way. Usually when I email her and there's a check on its way, she informs me as a distraction (a technique I know well with Scooter, who can sometimes be convinced not to bite me if I toss one of his toys a safe distance from my ankle). I think however, if I read between the lines correctly, she has noticed I sent her The Offering. I wouldn't want to swear to it though.

It is a sad commentary on my everyday life that I'm not even all that upset about the slow motion of my career. Underlying everything is my concern about my mother and her move back to her apartment. It's scheduled for Thursday, and my guess is I'll feel better once it's done, but it's still worrysome. If my brother and I hadn't felt she needed more help, we never would have arranged for the enriched housing room.

Hmm... Either spellcheck isn't working, or it really is spelt "worrysome." I thought it was worrisome.

Google says it's worrisome. I am not surprised.

Back to complaining (and not even complaining about spellcheck not working). Yesterday morning my smoke detector started chirping. Marci and I had lunch today with my mother, and it turns out Marci can do a fabulous imitation of a chirping smoke detector. For those of you who've never heard one (or heard Marci's imitation), it's like a castrati bird on steroids.

Double hmm. After four years of high school Latin, I have my doubts that castrati is a singular. Castratus? Castratum? Or is the word Italian, which I don't know one bit of. Triple hmm.

Anyway, I couldn't get the smoke detector to stop its high pitched song of love, so after several hours (some of which, I grant you, I wasn't home for), I disembowled it. This is trickier than it might seem because my apartment has very high ceilings and I'm not getting any taller. Eventually I pulled two out of three smoke detectors off the ceiling, and yet it still kept chirping. Finally I hid them in my outside storage closet, but this morning when I pulled them out so they could be fixed and put back in place (the advantage of apartment living), one of them continued to chirp. It was very Twilight Zone.

My friend Pat, who heard the chirping even though she lives 3000 miles away (the telephone is really an astonishing invention) suggested attacking the smoke detectors with a broom handle (her system). Frankly, if I'd had a baseball bat handy, that's what I would have used. Instead I used my big ladder and my bare hands and the outside storage closet.

I came back from lunch to find the smoke detectors in place and fabulously silent, only to have aspects of my cable stop working. I lost MLB Extra Innings (which couldn't happen at a worse time, since baseball is a huge stress reducer for me, not to mention that this is not the best moment for a New York Yankees fan to be watching New York Yankees games) and a variety (like almost all of them) of the high def stations I get on my fancy high def TV.

Yes, I still get a whole lot of TV stations. And if the Mets don't get rained out, I can watch the Mets and the MLB Network is showing the Phillies/Cards game, which is what I'd be watching anyway, although it's way prettier in high def. I know all that.

The cable repairperson will come Friday between 11-2. And I'm supposed to be grateful I don't have to wait until next week.

Then there's the weather. Have I mentioned the weather? The endless endless endless dreary rainy days? The only nice weather the northeast has had was when I was in Arizona (where the weather was lovely, but I was mostly in an airplane flying there and back). I read the 10 day weather forecast which said it's going to rain until Sunday when suddenly it's going to be sunny and 85 degrees for the next week, which means we're skipping spring altogether and going from March to July. Which, now that I think about it, may well mean April 50th will never arrive.

Now here's the thing (see, wait long enough, and the thing eventually arrives). I wrote Life As We Knew It.* I gleefully deprived my characters of food, water, heat, sunlight, clean air, televison, the internet, friends, family, safety, electricity, transportation, and probably lots of other stuff. I killed off entire countries (I still feel a little guilty about that). Throw in the characters from The Dead And The Gone* and This World We Live In*, and we're talking about a lot of pain and suffering and loss and pretty much everything except locusts and the death of the firstborns.

I remind myself of my characters' suffering whenever lunch is a little late or I can't get my baseball games or it drizzles outside, and you know what? I don't care. I still feel sorry for myself.

Then again, none of my characters ever had to put up with a chirping smoke detector, so what do they know of true suffering!

*Apparently not only is spellcheck dead, but I'm no longer allowed to italicize.

ETA to announce italics have returned, my cable has miraculously healed itself, MLB Extra Innings is back, and all the games are rained out, except, of course, for the Yankees.

I am going to eat supper and ponder all this irony until April 50th rolls around.

ETA Number Deux: It's castrato (and it is Italian).

The Bolivian Hat Has Spoken

2011-05-16T08:00:00.003-04:00

First thing on a Monday morning at that.

I've pulled the four names out and sent the appropriate emails. So if you haven't gotten one, it means, alas, the Bolivian hat has failed you (it probably failed a Bolivian or two in its day).

I'll try to convince my publisher to send me more ARCs, and if I succeed, all your names will return to the hat for another drawing.

In any case, thank you for expressing your interest in Blood Wounds. Let's hope it meets with people's approval!

He's Cain And I'm Able (I Hope)

2011-05-15T11:49:00.012-04:00

I am currently reading a biography of James M. Cain by Roy Hoopes. I'm on page 102 and it's going to be another 10 years and who knows how many pages before he writes anything I've heard of, but so far it's an easy read and I'm enjoying it.

Meanwhile, when I'm not reading about James M. Cain, I'm bouncing around between reality and whatever the alternative to reality might be. My current reality is that after a week in enriched housing, my mother declared she wanted to move back to her apartment. I can't say as I blame her, but I'm not really looking forward to packing that bookcase of my father's books, my brother's books, and my books all over again.

It's a good thing I didn't give her one of the ARCs of Blood Wounds, since that would be one more thing to pack (and just a reminder- the Bolivian Hat Blood Wounds drawing remains open through Sunday night if you haven't yet emailed me for a shot at it).

I still haven't heard a thing from my publisher about whether they're going to want a fourth book, or from my agent about The Offering. I didn't expect to hear from either one on a weekend (I'm egotistically obsessive, but not that egotistically obsessive, believe it or not), but it still would be nice to have heard something. Of course I haven't gotten my royalty check either, but April 50th is right around the corner, so I expect that to show up within a week, give or take (and I would prefer to take).

Not hearing from my publisher about a fourth book hasn't stopped me from plotting like crazy, although a couple of days ago, I did tell myself to stop until I had definite word. That resolution lasted about three minutes, because the truth of the matter is I love plotting The Shade Of The Moon, and given that the alternative usage of brain cells is thinking about my mother back in her apartment, it's off to the moon I go.

Last night, right before falling asleep, I came up with an new plot story for Meggie, Miranda's daughter by Richard (I feel like I know Richard pretty well, although you've never met him). I liked the idea so much that it cost me a quarter of a sleeping pill at 4 AM to keep me from developing it still further then and there. Instead I held off until Scooter woke me at 7:00, and I kept at it, exercycling to The Golf Channel without any sound, so I could think some more.

Someplace between last night and a bogey, I thought about The Shade Of The Moon in a kind of Gone With The Wind sort of way (not that I ever read Gone With The Wind, although I did see the movie and the classic Carol Burnett takeoff). You know, big and sweeping, but mostly big. Then I said, well maybe if I'm planning on a GWTW big sweeping kind of novel, it shouldn't be first person.

This was actually quite an interesting possibility to me, since I've been having trouble picturing Juliet (Mom's daughter with Charlie) sitting down and writing all the stuff I have going on. In particular there was one scene in my mind where tons of interesting things happen but she wouldn't have the chance to put anything on paper for a couple of days, and when she did, it would be 30-40 pages, which handwritten is a lot of paper and a lot of work. Third person would solve all that.

So then I thought about the problem I always have with third person which is what do you call the parents. In this case, there's only one parent, Mom, so I said to myself (while some golf balls ended up in water, where I don't suppose they were meant to go), I could just call her Mom and the heck with it.

But then I thought, well what if I kill off Mom, and then I wouldn't have to worry about it. And I pondered just what Mom's been doing in The Shade Of The Moon as it is currently constituted, and mostly Mom exists so all the other characters can say, "Don't tell Mom." I did come up with possibly the best line of dialogue I ever won't get to write, which is Miranda, after saying "Don't tell Mom," to Juliet for the zillionth time, declaring, "That should be on my tombstone: Here Lies Miranda Evans. Don't Tell Mom." It's that play on words of "lies" that I find particularly delectable.

But other than being constantly deluded, Mom didn't seem to be doing all that much, so this morning as I ran errands, I held Mom's memorial service. If I do it (and there are so many "if"s in that "if"- like if I kill off Mom, and if my publisher even wants me to write the book), I'd start the book with the memorial service, maybe not even from Juliet's point of view, but more like a prologue. I once read a book about soap operas, and the author pointed out that one of the ways soaps use weddings is to get all the characters with all their storylines under the same roof at the same time. Mom's memorial service could function that way as well (although, sadly, neither Matt nor Jon would be there).

So that's where things are right now. Apparently, not satisfied with killing off all humanity for a fourth time, I'm intent on killing of a character I absolutely love, and a mother at that.

Hmmm. I'd better warn my mother to keep away from me while I'm repacking her bookcase. I think death by deluging books could merit double indemnity!

Blood Wounds ARCs

2011-05-13T12:54:00.007-04:00

As best I can tell, the blog entry I wrote yesterday offering all of you a chance to get one of four advanced reading copies of my new novel Blood Wounds has completely disappeared.

Given the quality of my life right now, this disappearing act fits totally in place. It's definitely Let's Make Life More Difficult For Susan time.

Anyway, if you didn't read yesterday's entry (or admire the extremely cute Scooter picture that went along with it), the gist was I've been sent 4 ARCs of Blood Wounds to share with my blog readers, and if you want a chance at one of them, email me using the address in the upper right corner with the phrase ARC or Blood Wounds or Bolivian Hat or anything else you might think of, between now and Sunday night, and on Monday morning I'll put all the emails of everyone who has asked in my Bolivian hat and pull out four and email those people to ask for their names and addresses and then I'll send them an ARC. Also it doesn't matter where you live, this chance is open to all of you.

My apologies to any of you who read yesterday's entry and can't figure out why I'm telling you stuff you already know.

Now if the world will just apologize to me, everything will be right where it should be!

ETA: The blog entry may have vanished, but your emails haven't. So if you've already emailed me for a chance at an ARC, don't worry. The emails are waiting for me at AOL, right where you sent them.

Double ETA: Yesterday's post has miraculously reappeared, although the comments (which are always the best part) are still missing.

But now you have many Scooter picture options, which is probably good for something in this world!

Four ARCs, Four Days, One Hat and One Cat

2011-05-12T11:03:00.000-04:00

I came home last night from doing a school visit in Arizona (where everyone was extremely nice and the landscape looked like New York after an exceptionally dry summer only with mountains instead of hills) to find a package with five Advance Reading Copies of Blood Wounds waiting for me.

Actually, Marci, who came to visit Scooter and bring me lilacs, found the package and brought it in. But I opened it.

So here's the deal. I'm keeping one ARC for myself but I'm not giving one to my mother, because now that I've packed and unpacked all my father's books and my brother's books and my books, I'm not that eager to give her anything more than is absolutely necessary. And Blood Wounds isn't dedicated to anyone I actually know, so the four remaining copies are meant for people who read my blog.

My guess is more than four people read my blog, and four doesn't seem like a lot of copies to me either. I'll do some begging and pleading and maybe my publisher will find a few more copies for me to send out, but in the meantime four is what it is.

So here's how it works (on the assumption more than four of you will want one). Email me using the email address up top and say you want to be in the drawing for an ARC. It'd be super great if you head the email with something like ARC or Blood Wounds or Bolivian Hat, but I'll open all the emails anyway and figure it out.

Then I'll put your email address in the Bolivian Hat (removed from its spot on the bathroom wall just for this occasion) and pull out four addresses. I'll send an email to each of the four pulloutees (there's a word Blog Spot ain't gonna like). So if you don't hear from me, it means your name wasn't pulled out.

Because there are only four copies, I'm going to give this only four days, and will pull out the names Monday morning (this being Thursday morning). This drawing is open to anyone on this planet, so if you don't live in the USA, feel free to email me for the drawing anyway. I'll pay the postage wherever you might live.

But since there are only four copies, I'm going to ask the following of you:

Don't tell anyone else about the drawing. Let's keep this one to readers of my blog (all probably more than four of you).

If there's a chance you could get an ARC at ALA or the suchlike, then please don't email me, because four is such a tiny number (bigger only than one, two, or three). I'm quite confident my publisher will have ARCs for distribution at the major conferences because it says so on the back of the ARC and why would they lie?

If what you like about my books is the sci fic/post apocalyptic aspect, and you really aren't interested in realistic YA fiction, then don't email me. My feelings won't be hurt. If you love me but not the subject matter, then you can always wait until the book is published in September and take it out of the library.

Here's the official publisher's description so you can decide your interest level for yourself:

Blood can both wound and heal . . .

Willa is lucky: She has a loving blended family that gets along. Not all families are so fortunate. But when a bloody crime takes place hundreds of miles away, it has an explosive effect on Willa’s peaceful life. The estranged father she hardly remembers has murdered his new wife and children, and is headed east toward Willa and her mother. Under police protection, Willa discovers that her mother has harbored secrets that are threatening to boil over. Has everything Willa believed about herself been a lie? But as Willa sets out to untangle the mysteries of her past, she also keeps her own secret—one that has the potential to tear apart all she holds dear.

To sum it up: If you're interested in a chance at an ARC of Blood Wounds, email me by Sunday night to say so and on Monday morning, I'll draw four email addresses out of the Bolivian Hat and email each of the four to get names and addresses to mail the ARC out to.

You get the ARC. I keep the hat and the cat!

A Super Early Announcement Of Something I'm Super Pleased About

2011-05-09T10:45:00.004-04:00

A few months back I was invited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling to submit an original short story for an upcoming anthology of YA dystopian fiction, to be called After and to be published by Hyperion.

I am pleased to be able to officially announce that my story, "Reunion" will be included in the anthology along with original stories by (among others):

Genevieve Valentine
Cecil Castellucci
Carol Emshwiller
Katherine Langrish
Richard Bowes
Matthew Kressel
Beth Revis
N. K. Jemisin
Carrie Ryan
Steven Gould
Caitlín R. Kiernan
Susan Beth Pfeffer

I will tell you more (like publication date) when I learn more. I can tell you that the above list is not all inclusive.

And it certainly reveals no spoilers to say when I started thinking of the idea for "Reunion" I imagined a happy friendly heartwarming story and I ended up instead with an unusually dark (even by my unusually dark standards) kind of nasty story instead.

Well, you all know me well enough not to be surprised by that!

Lots Of Things Happening (But All With My Mother)

2011-05-08T16:14:00.012-04:00

When last I left you, I was waiting for an ARC (or ideally ARCs) of Blood Wounds from my publisher, word from my editor about whether they were interested in a fourth moon book, and acknowledgement from my agent that I'd sent her my manuscript The Offering.

Oddly enough, I haven't received or heard a thing since. Well, I got my phone bill and my car insurance bill, but neither came from my publisher, my editor, or my agent.

I certainly had other things to keep me busy though. My incredibly cute 99 year old mother is trying life at the enriched housing section of her retirement complex. For the past fifteen or so years she's had an apartment there, but my brother and our friend Marci and I all think she needs more services than she's getting. So I've spent much of the past week packing her things and buying her what she'll need and moving her into the enriched housing (which is one floor down from where she'd been living). If my mother likes it, she'll stay. If not, she'll move back to her apartment.

All moves are difficult, although this one had the great advantage of help from the maintenance staff, who did all the heavy lifting (and hung the pictures). But I had decided my mother should have familiar things with her whether she stayed or not, and that meant packing and unpacking the bookcase, which holds my father's books, my brother's books, my books, and any books my mother might feel like reading someday.

My father wrote fewer books than me, but his (and my brother's) weigh more than mine. So do the large print books, which are really heavy.

Still, having lifted and packed and lifted and unpacked, I have to give very serious consideration to the possibility I've written way too many books.

I wonder if my publisher and my editor and my agent think the same thing!

Wait Till The Sun Shines Susan

2011-05-04T13:57:00.008-04:00

See how happy I look? The picture was taken at the Nyack Library, where I saw the only known advanced reading copy in captivity of Blood Wounds. My own ARC (or ARCs as the case may be)is but one of several things I'm currently waiting for. But since I am an extremely impatient person, it's the thing I'm currently waiting for whose lack thereof irritates me the most.

Not that the lack thereof of the other things I'm waiting for won't irritate me soon enough, and probably even worse.

Let's see. First off, I'm waiting for the sun to shine. This has been the worst spring ever and since it follows one of the worst winters ever, it's especially annoying. Three solid months of January followed by three solid (or really liquid, the way it keeps raining)months of March. I am not, by the way, the only person who's noticed this, but if everyone else wants to complain, let them complain on their own blogs (ooh, I love it when I'm whiny).

Then there's my royalty check. Now my royalty check will come, and since I have a very approximate idea how much it'll be, it's more amusing that irritating that it hasn't come yet. Amusing because my publisher, who generally speaking is wonderful, seems to think the month of April lasts 45 days, which at this point I wouldn't mind, since 45 days of April would be an improvement over 90 days of March. Anyway, the check will arrive circa May 20, since that's the circa it's arrived on the past couple of years. Just think of it as April 50th.

Another thing I'm waiting for from my publisher is a decision about The Shade Of The Moon. You wouldn't think it'd take them too long to read a two sentence synopsis, but I did cram a lot of words into those two sentences, and maybe they had to look some of them up in the dictionary. Oh well. That decision involves the spending of money on the publisher's part, and that always slows things down (which is why they think April has 45 days).

Lastly, and this one is going to take forever, I'm waiting to hear what my agent has to say about The Offering. I gave it a final polish yesterday and emailed it to her. But given that the two previous times I mentioned The Offering to my agent, she never responded (not even with a "You're crazy," or "Well, that's gonna be a stinker"), I can't even fantasize (and I'm naturally gifted at fantasizing) that she's going to drop everything to read it. Or drop anything. Or read it before the sun shines, assuming the sun ever shines again, which it won't so she won't.

I tell you, if there was a Nobel Prize for crankiness, I'd be a multiple winner!

Foreign Relations

2011-05-01T11:17:00.027-04:00

This time of year, writers don't stay home much. We're invited to schools and libraries, where we get to meet really nice people who actually encourage us to talk about ourselves.

So far, I've been to Connecticut and upstate New York and Tennessee and downstate New York. I still have a local library to visit and a school to go to in Arizona. Scooter, by the way, has not liked any of this, and really gave me a talking to when I got home yesterday evening.

While I certainly listened to his complaints (I didn't have much of a choice in the matter), I was also occupied with opening a box that had come from my agent's office. In it, I found four copies of Die Verlorenen Von New York, aka the Carlsen (German) version of The Dead And The Gone.

It's a very striking cover, and a lovely addition to the non-USA versions of the three moon books.

At one of the libraries I visited yesterday, I saw an advanced reading copy of Blood Wounds. It truly was advanced, since I have yet to see one. I assume at some point my publisher will send me one or more copies, but apparently I have to request them, which I'll do tomorrow. If they send me enough that I can spread them around here, I certainly will. My publisher has been very generous in the past, so I can only hope.

Another thing I can hope for is that the Susan Beth Pfeffer Every Book I Ever Wrote And Then Some Bookcase will miraculously expand. It's going to have to, since I already know of fifteen more books and audiobooks that will arrive at some point in this decade.

As my mother always says, this should be the worst problem I ever have!

Fanfic, Your Fic, And Me

2011-04-26T18:55:00.006-04:00

I get emails on a fairly regular basis from people asking if I will read their books or stories, and Anonymous Santa Fe brought up the same question in a comment on my last blog entry.

It gives me great pleasure to know my books have inspired other people. I even, with a minimal amount of googling, found a Last Survivors fanfic page. Given that I came up with the idea for Life As We Knew It from watching the movie Meteor on TV one afternoon, I can hardly complain if my work gets someone else plotting away. And it's fun to think of my characters having lives I'm unaware of, sort of like hearing you're in a friend's dream.

But I haven't read any of the fanfic stories, and I always say no when asked to read anything. It's pretty much a hard and fast rule in my life. I figured out a while back that it's easier to say no to everybody than to say yes to some and no to others and have to figure out why I'm saying yes or no.

I don't even read my friends' books for the most part. As a courtesy, I don't give them my books to read either.That kills me sometimes, because I'm the bestest writer ever and their lives would be roughly 1,000,000,000% better if they read my most recent masterpiece. Then again, they probably know the same about their most recent masterpieces and me.

Feel free to take my characters or my plotlines and have fun. Don't tell me what your ideas are though, because I don't want to accidentally "steal" them (I got an email the other day from someone with what was basically a great idea, and I'm relieved that it would never work in The Shade Of The Moon as I'm currently planning it).

So thank you for asking, but the answer will always be no. Of course, if the question is, "Would you like a chocolate chip cookie?" you'll get a whole different response!

Think Of It As Gone With Cousine Mildred

2011-04-25T18:51:00.009-04:00

The past few mornings I've woken up at 5 AM, which I can't even blame on Scooter, who doesn't start playing Purr On The Neck until 6. Maybe because I know in an hour I'm going to aggressively adored, I haven't been able to fall back asleep. Instead I play with ideas for The Shade Of The Moon.

Now I've been devoting a lot of brain cells to a book that I've yet to be told my publisher wants. I did that recently (as recently as Saturday) with The Offering, but the difference is if one publisher should happen to reject The Offering, then there are dozens of others to turn to. The Shade Of The Moon is more of a one publisher deal, so I should preserve my brain cells until I'm informed that they were overwhelmed by the two sentence version and want to give me lots of money.

Then again, I wrote 12 pages when all they wanted was 2 sentences, so this is obviously a book I enjoy thinking about.

This morning, as I awaited Scooter and played with ideas, I had a vision of The Shade as a Balzacian novel. Not that I've ever read anything by Balzac, but I did see a Masterpiece Theater of one of his novels. I had actually just created a character that I thought of as a combination of Rhett Butler and Belle Watling (not that I ever read Gone With The Wind but I did see the movie), so I don't know why I thought about Balzac, who, to be perfectly honest, I get mixed up with Emile Zola, who I never read anything by either (but I saw the movie about him). Before breakfast, I googled Balzacian, which turns out not to be a word, and then I googled Zolaesque, which also turns out not to be a word (and then I ate breakfast).

Dickens and Byron get words. I don't see why Balzac and Zola don't. Well, maybe they do in France.

I'm at the stage where I'm creating scenes and developing characters, which is my favorite stage of writing. I do have to be careful though. I heard Lisa (who is turning into a considerably more important character than you might have thought) say that Miranda's daughter Meggie was spoiled, and the next thing I knew, Meggie had morphed into Veda Pierce (and yes, I saw Mildred Pierce and I read the book). That seemed a tad on the overkill side, so I pulled away from Meggie and started thinking about other characters instead.

The trickiest character, by far, is Miranda. The younger generation can be whoever I want them to be. Mom is definitely who she is, and Lisa is someone who the readers of Life As We Knew It and This World We Live In don't know that well. Alex is a little difficult, because I have such a strong sense of who he has become and it's not necessarily what the readers might think, but I figure as long as I understand his motivations and portray him sympathetically, it's okay.

But Miranda is someone the readers know very well, or knew very well, when she was 16/17 years old. Seventeen years have passed, which means half her life (how's that for a weird concept), and she's grown and changed during that time. She's made decisions and compromises that the readers won't have witnessed. I was a very different person at 34 than I was at 17, and I didn't have nearly as much end of the world life experience as she has. In addition, Miranda is going to be seen through the 16 year old eyes of Juliet, and 16 year olds see family members differently than other people do. I have to keep that inner core of Mirandahood in Miranda, all grown up, but to be honest, I don't know yet how to do that.

Ooh, spellcheck is going to have a lot of words it doesn't approve of.

Anyway, the current 5 AM vision for The Shade is that it be bigger (and possibly longer) than LAWKI. Juliet is part of a community that's vital and lively and noisy, and she participates and witnesses and shares what she knows with the readers. I want the book to be read by people who are interested in what happens next to Miranda and Alex and the gang, and by people who've never read any of the first three books. I want it to be part of a quartet, and yet a book that can stand alone.

But mostly I want my publisher to tell me if I should keep waking up at 5 AM to work on it!

You Give Them An Encyclopedia, They Ask For A Tweet

2011-04-20T16:29:00.009-04:00

My poor beleaguered editor emerged from hiding to say that while she thought it was extraordinary of me to write a twelve page synopsis, full of the most intricate detailing (I could be paraphrasing here), for The Shade Of The Moon, what she really wanted was just a sentence or two. How, she asked, did I describe the book to my friends?

Well, the truth of the matter is, I haven't described it to my friends (present company excepted). Yesterday, it's true, I did talk to a friend, but I described The Offering instead, at twelve page length, full of intricate detailing. And when I've described it to you (present company included), I've described it as Peyton Place The Next Generation, which isn't exactly how I'd like to present The Shade Of The Moon to people who're going to decide if they want to publish it or not.

Not that Peyton Place The Next Generation wasn't fabulous. It was. I can still quote dialogue from it.

"Oh, Betty."

A classic.

Actually, speaking of dialogue, what I immediately thought of when my editor requested twelve pages be boiled down to two sentences was the beginning scene in Sullivan's Travels, which is probably the best beginning scene in the history of everything.

Sullivan: I want this picture to be a document. I want to hold a mirror up to life. I want this to be a picture of dignity - a true canvas of the suffering of humanity.
Lebrand: But with a little sex.
Sullivan: With a little sex in it.

So here is the two sentence version of The Shade Of The Moon. Feel free to put a little sex in it!

Seventeen years after the end of This World We Live In, teenagers related by love and by blood to the families in Life As We Knew It and The Dead And The Gone struggle to find their place in a society that is welcoming to some and forbidding to others.

Sixteen year old Juliet reveals in her diary her feelings of love, jealousy, and yearning, until a shattering truth changes her destiny and that of everyone she loves.

"We Shall Live On And See"

2011-04-19T10:08:00.011-04:00

Isn't that poetic? My mother said it to me, and since I've been looking for a title for this blog entry, I decided to go with that.

When my mother got her teeth cleaned a couple of weeks ago, I scheduled her next appointment for October, and realized by then she'll be 100 years old. With no cavities, I hope.

Those nice people at UPS delivered the Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Fall 2011 catalog (the one for books that come out after my mother turns 100)with its impressive page for Blood Wounds.

I really like the "Blood can both wound and heal..." heading, since it's genuinely reflective of the themes of the book. And I always like seeing the Marketing plan, especially, as in this case, where there is one.

By now I should have finished the revisions of The Offering, but I still have about 40 pages to go. I'll do them today if I can resist the siren call of a three hour nap. What's kept me from The Offering (other than good old fashioned laziness, the appeal of which should never be underestimated), is The Shade Of The Moon and the plotting thereof. It's been entirely too much fun coming up with plot and characters. So much too much fun that I wrote a 12 page synopsis which I sent to my editor yesterday. I think she found it a bit overwhelming. In fact, if I read between the lines correctly, she has entered the Editor Protection Program and will remain in hiding until convinced I truly am retired.

Relax.I'm not going to ram the 12 pages of plotting brilliance into this blog post. I will tell you that as of this moment (and keep in mind my publisher has not said they want any kind of fourth moon book) all the characters who set off at the end of This World We Live In are featured in The Shade Of The Moon, except for Dad, who I fairly arbitrarily decided has died. But the focus of The Shade is on four teenagers (close your eyes if you don't want to know): Gabe (aka Gabriel, originally thought of as Baby Rachel, son of Dad and Lisa), Connor, Gabe's best friend, Juliet, daughter of Mom and the late lamented Charlie (I bet you didn't see that one coming) and Meggie, daughter of Miranda and Richard (you didn't think Miranda's been celibate all these years, did you?). Meggie's full name is Megan Rebecca, for Miranda's friends Megan and Becky, but Beggan didn't work as a nickname. Gabe and Connor are 17, Juliet is 16 and Meggie is 13. So Matt, Miranda and Jon are Juliet's half-siblings on Mom's side, Gabe is her half-brother on Dad's side, and Meggie is her half-niece if such a term exists.

Hmm... Just writing all that down makes me drowsy. Maybe I should take my three hour nap before tackling those final 40 pages.

Wake me up if the world comes to an end!

All Work And No Redecorating Makes Sue A Very Cranky Freelance Childen's Book Writer

2011-04-16T20:15:00.005-04:00

So instead of doing rewriting/polishing of The Offering, I redesigned the blog (although I did keep the interesting stuff on the right side, where it's been for a while).

I'll work on The Offering tomorrow (along with a half dozen other jobs I keep not quite getting around to).

And while I'm thinking of it, for all who celebrate Passover, Happy Passover! And for those who don't, just pass over this whole paragraph (a little bit of traditional Passover humor).

Going Forth On A Fourth

2011-04-13T22:55:00.002-04:00

Like any sensible freelance children's book writer with a cat, I emailed my editor and told her my vet wanted to know if there was going to be a fourth moon book.

My editor emailed back say say she intended to discuss that very possibility with the appropriate person to discuss those kinds of things at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

The next day, my editor emailed me to say she had indeed discussed the possibility with the appropriate person and she and the appropriate person were interested in the idea. They particularly liked the concept of setting it a number of years later, so any babies or potential babies from This World We Live In would be teenagers. She suggested as an alternative possibility setting it 3 or 4 years after This World,perhaps focusing on Jon, but I don't like that concept as much.

So nothing is definite, but the next step is mine to take, which is to come up with something resembling a plot. I intend to finish polishing The Offering (previously known as Hart) first, and that's going to take a few more days. Then I'll let my brain focus on possible storylines for The Shade Of The Moon, and when I'm satisfied with what I come up with, I'll write it down, email it out, and see what happens.

No matter what, I'll be sure to tell you and my vet!

If He'd Voted, It Would Have Been 240-13

2011-04-11T16:43:00.008-04:00

I took Scooter to the vet this morning. It took 25 minutes to get him into his carrier, and then he yowled the entire trip there. He also yowled the entire trip back, with considerably less justification.

While I was waiting to take Scooter in, the receptionist asked what in addition to his shots and general checkup did I want for Scooter. The exact quote was, "Sue, aside from his shots..." which I heard as a suggestion ("I'll take nooses for 800, Alex").

No sooner do I get Scooter into the examining room then my vet walks in and asks if there's going to be a continuation. It takes me a moment to realize he means is there going to be a fourth book. When Life As We Knew It came out, I thought it would be my last book ever, so I gave copies of it to everybody I know, including my vet, who loved it so much he bought copies of it to give as Christmas presents. Hardcovers at that.

Scooter, by the way, weighs 14 pounds. And my vet claims that when Scooter puts his paw on top of me, it's not to say he loves me, but to let me know he outranks me, which is very silly because every cat knows that and every cat knows every person knows that, so there's no point telling us.

My vet also says the official term for one girl cow getting cozy with another girl cow is nymphomania. I no longer remember how that came up in the conversation, but I'll remember it forever, along with a license plate number that I decided to memorize on the drive home to sharpen my memory skills. Years from now that license plate number will show up in my brain and I'll have no idea what it is and it will haunt me forever like stray song lyrics.

I continue to work on polishing up Hart. Not today, since I'm still recovering from those 25 minutes of Scooter chasing, but yesterday and I hope tomorrow and certainly Wednesday if the weather is bad. I've gotten deep enough into the polishing process that there is now an official Chapter Seven and an equally official Chapter Ten. I decided that there was need for a brand new Chapter Nine, so I wrote that yesterday, thus making the previously official Chapter Ten the equally official Chapter Eleven. The other change I made was the title. It is no longer Hart; it is The Offering. I think The Offering is a lot sexier, and it doesn't seem to be a particularly overused title, so I'm grabbing it.

Oh well. I could try to do some rewrite/polishing now, or I could put the den back in order after 14 pounds of chaos, or I could check out some neighborhood nymphomaniac cows.

It's always good to have choices!

When The Shade Of The Moon Meets The Sleep Of The Pill

2011-04-07T10:04:00.003-04:00

As you may know, inspired by your poll votes and comments, I've been playing with an idea for a fourth moon book. Playing with is clearly not the same as working on, since I refuse to commit to work until I find out if Houghton Mifflin Harcourt wants a fourth moon book. They have standards too, you know.

But I do love playing with ideas, and mostly I've been thinking in terms of setting The Shade Of The Moon 15-18 years later (or as I fondly think of it, Peyton Place The Next Generation). This would allow me to catch up with all the characters while seeing what the world looks like and having teens as my focal point.

But I noticed the character that was intriguing me the most was Alex. I kept picturing him as angry, angry at Miranda, once he finds out the truth, angry at God, angry at the government, angry even at Julie, but most of all angry at himself. Anger like that might not last 18 years, but it would affect who he becomes. I had a glorious moment or two of picturing Alex as a terrorist, but I also thought of him as a community organizer, and also a successful politician.

Last night I bumped into one of those can't fall asleep nights (blame it on the excitement of American Idol's Top 9- Paul's dazzling teeth alone could cost one an hour's sleep), and I got to thinking about Alex again, and what becomes of him smack after This World We Live In. Once Miranda tells him the truth, he'd break away (he has the least at stake in remaining with the Evans family unit), to go off and be angry. Well, angry young men are at a premium in the post LAWKI world, so I imagined him doing all kinds of highly dangerous work, and because he doesn't care if he lives or dies, becoming almost legendary in the jobs he accomplishes.

Then I thought of my dream matchup, Miranda from Life As We Knew It and Chris Flynn from The Dead And The Gone, and I came up with a way they might meet. Then I started thinking about how people would be writing letters all the time, which is just as much fun as writing diary entries, maybe even more fun, because Miranda could write a letter and so could Jon and so could Alex and anyone else I wanted to write letters for and The Shade Of The Moon would be a collection of their letters.

The next thing I knew I was popping sleeping pills in a struggle to fall asleep (which is after all what sleeping pills are for), but my mind was still racing. Things get a little hazy at this point, but it would seem I got up and typed some notes, just in case I wouldn't remember what I'd come up with between 1/2 and 1 full pill.

Now I know there are those of you who hate spoilers, but I don't see any of this as spoilers given that I don't even know if HMH will ever want a fourth moon book, not to mention that the brief description I gave of one in an email was more Peyton Place the Next Generation than Miranda/Alex and Co. one year later. But if you don't want to read the following notes, feel free not to. And if you do read them and still don't understand, well, that's what sleeping pills do to the creative, restless, bad typing mind!

Miranda is pregnant and tells Alex the truth about Julie’s death. Alex is enraged and cannot delal with Miranda, He goes away to dangerous locations, and is in a statet of ratge, whih he works through by taking on the most dangerous tassks- suicidal explosoions of ovoklandodo a dbd wirb in highly nuclear reastor plants, Each job he gets there is an assumpton he will be survive, but a t he does, his lesson and fame inceases.

Jon goes ijto the safe town but find its veryundomfortabke, and seazies a chance at an aeducation as a physicial sassistant, sartting at atge 16, He leadsv gthe safe town to to go the school, and there meets Dris fliyynm who believes in talking about th past, and rereverals hi connection to Ales, and wishes to get back tin trouhc with hin, Chris suggested using Miranda as a go belieteween.

Nirada neantime hs gotten a gjobm maybe thgrough Haon’s health teachting skating and skwining t the kids in the safe tiow, Sje lives outside of town with mom and dad abut has a card that allows her access to the safe townm as slong ashs she leaves each night. A family that has lot chuildene is informed of her daugther Juliet and suggests they be abkkiwed ti aditot her, Nurabda ciykd serve as west nurse and hen babby nurse for Julies first two years or so, until they could get a proper nanny for her, They would help set Miranda up with a husband so she coulc sart a a family of her ow,=, and if she were abke ti concentric herself sge cikd ve k=limited contact with Juliet, who of course would not be known she wss her nother. Then Lisa dies ian a pandemic, one whih traps Miranda in the twon and Juliet outside with Mom. /the family agreeds to adopte gabe as well, assuring Miranda and dad that the children would e brought up to understand the are kid, Miranda cold stay with the children unil they are 4, at want hoint, she would leave the familu. Dad supports this idea as being best for the children; Mom is opposed. Oppossiley Mom dies in the thir pandemic.

At somoe point Chris comes to the ssafe town and meets Mirnada. Tney;ve already exchanged letters, bt they find hey ae very tttrachd t each oher, When Alex find s out this provokes a severe reaction in him since he was aways comeptietornve with Chris in hisgh scool and now he’s losing ht o erh again.

No wond on Matt abd Syll how left right away so hey wouldn;’tbe stuck with Mom all the time, Maybe Momn founds ou what’s hppening with her dna work, helping bringing families together buy tryacking their names and dna, as different arts of the countri are made livaeabe again

Vyt bbiijss end, maybe Miranda is raising Juliet and Gabe with Chris, or maube possibly Alex.Mom mau be died in he third pandemic. Conditions are slowly getting more stablelsnf Dvooyrt yhinkd zi h

ETA(and an oh dear ETA it's about to be). I should have spell checked before putting the notes in. Poor blogspot is gonna have a nervous breakdown!

Chapter Ten Was Particularly Good

2011-04-06T15:37:00.019-04:00

Monday I took my mother to the doctor (her blood pressure is lower than mine) and Tuesday I took my mother to the dentist (no cavities). Then today I got a reminder from the vet that Scooter is due his annual checkup. It is considerably easier to get my mother into the car than it is to get Scooter into his cat carrier, so I'm none too pleased about this particular obligation.

Scooter won't be either.

I am pleased however to announce that I have finally figured out what Scooter thinks I am. In his eyes, I am a Mouse With Benefits.

Speaking of benefits, I have certainly benefited from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt's support of the moon books (am I slick or what). Look at this goHastings.com promotion of Teen Dystopian novels (well, don't look at all of it, just the bottom).

You looked at all of it, didn't you. I'm crossing you off the dedication list.

Meanwhile, now that the paperback of This World We Live In is sort of officially published, I've been obsessively following its Amazon rankings. It's the first of my books to have an extended period of availability as an ebook before coming out in paperback, and I'm very curious as to how that will affect its sales. Ebook sales are flourishing, but children/YA paperbacks seem to be suffering:

In the Children’s/Young Adult category, Hardcover sales were $31.2 million in January 2011 vs $31.8 million in January 2010 (-1.9%) while Paperbacks were $25.4 million , down 17.7% from $30.9 million in January 2010.

Today was the first chance I had to read Hart in all its gothic/romance/thriller/horror/noir/fairytale glory. Of course I loved it, but I have no taste whatsoever when it comes to my own writing. Still, I plan to polish it and offer it to my agent to see what she thinks.

Assuming I survive getting Scooter into his carrier. Think of me as a mouse with high blood pressure!

Oddly Enough, There's Still No Chapter Seven

2011-04-04T15:49:00.004-04:00

About a month ago, I posted what was then the most up to date outline of Hart, the gothic/ronance/thriller/horror/noir/fairytale book I was writing. All the potential chapters were neatly numbered, but Mr. Cavin commented that there was no Chapter Seven. Apparently in a few previous outlines, there weren't any Chapter Sevens either.

The reason there was no Chapter Seven was because Hart, unlike every other book I ever wrote, got written piecemeal. I'd write a chapter, then completely change my mind and either rewrite it or dump it or place it in a different section of the book. Since I wrote Hart essentially for my own entertainment (the two times I've mentioned it to my agent, she has chosen not to respond), I didn't really care how I wrote it.

But now the first draft is finished, and probably on Wednesday I'll read the whole thing and start thinking about rewrites and polishing. I never wrote another outline, but out of curiosity just now I wrote down the chapter numbers and their order. So without giving away any part of the plot but all of the disorganization, here's the listing of chapters exactly as they now stand:

Prelude
One
Two
Three
Chapter Three
Four
Five
Five
Chapter Five
Chapter Eight
Twelve
Chapter Nine
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Eleven
Fourteen
Thirteen
Sixteen
Thirteen
Fifteen
Thirteen
Seventeen
Fourteen
Twenty One
Twenty Two
Chapter Twenty Three
Twenty Four
Twenty Five
Twenty Three
Twenty Four
Twenty Four
Twenty Seven
Chapter Thirty
Thirty One
Unnumbered

I'm still torn between putting a number on Unnumbered or making it an Afterward, to balance the Prelude.

Or maybe I'll just name it Chapter Seven. Every book should have one!

The Day I Understand This World

2011-04-01T15:35:00.017-04:00

Will probably be the day I destroy it all over again.

I was just about to write an entry about how my new printer hates me and vice versa (okay, not an entire entry, but the entry into an entry so to speak), but as I got ready to sign in and start whining, I looked over at the poll votes, and the total had gone up. Lookit->

I thanked all of you yesterday and said there were 217 votes, and now there are 252 votes. The thing is yesterday morning when I checked, I saw some of the previous night's votes had vanished,lowering the total to 217, but I decided to be all good and mature about it (although I did mourn the lost votes at lunch with my friend Hilarie), but it really made me sad. Of course that was before I broke my new printer and sad turned into irritated and grouchy. Only who can be irritated and grouchy when they get those 35 votes back, even if one of them is No. Well, I can, but I'm naturally gifted.

Still,I love having 252 votes on the poll. Although with my luck, it'll be back to 217 by the time I finishing posting this post. Le pessimistic sigh.

Anyway, it's a very good thing that my printer didn't break until today, because yesterday after I got home from lunch, I found an email from darling Google, leading me to this review of Life As We Knew It on the Woman's Day magazine website, and I was so excited, I printed a copy. Which I could, because my new printer was working yesterday, as opposed to today.

Darling Google wasn't through with me (unlike my new printer and vice versa), and today it sent me a link to this list from YALSA, declaring This World We Live In is an Amazing Audio. Which it is, thanks 90% to Emily Bauer who did the reading, and 10% to me who did the writing and the printing on a printer that didn't hate me and vice versa.

Meanwhile, for those who are still reading and wondering, I completed the first draft of Hart last weekend, but I decided it needs a new Chapter 2, which most likely I would have written this afternoon, except for a run-in with a certain printer that shall remain nameless (and rightly so, because who the heck names their printers?).

And speaking of names, if (Blogspot doesn't let me underline, so bolding will have to do) I write Book 4 (only time and my publisher will tell), the working title will be The Shade Of The Moon. It has 5 single syllable words, just like Life As We Knew It, The Dead And The Gone, and This World We Live In, and since the trilogy never got an official trilogy kind of name, I call them the Moon books, so one of them should have Moon in its title even if then becomes a quartet, so it would thus lack a quartet kind of name. I know the UK and Amazon think of the three books as The Last Survivors, and a fine thing it is, but I still think of them as the Moon books (or sometimes the moon books).

Oh dear. Wouldn't it be awful if the 252 vote total is a nasty Blogspot April Fool's joke, and tomorrow I check and it's back to 217. Le triple pessimistic positively mournful irritated and grouchy sigh (and vice versa)!

Thank You

2011-03-31T10:41:00.002-04:00

I just want to thank the 217 people who voted in the poll (far more than I ever thought would) and the 60 or so people who were kind enough to leave comments. If I'm ever feeling blue about my life or my career, I'll reread those comments and cheer myself right up.

I emailed my editor a couple of mornings ago to let her know about the poll, and she responded very quickly to say how impressed she was at the number of people who had voted and who had left comments.

An idea for a possible fourth book has been floating around in my mind. If Houghton Mifflin Harcourt indicates they're interested, and if the idea stops floating long enough for me to work it through, I'll certainly let you know.

Thank you again. I know how fortunate I am to have you interested in my books, and I am very very grateful.

Should There Be A Fourth Moon Book?

2011-03-24T10:18:00.002-04:00

Personally, I have no idea.

So I've set up a poll to learn what you think. It's pretty simple- you either vote Yes or No.

Then again, if not many people vote, that's kind of a No in and of itself.

Either way, I'll let my editor know how the vote goes. And thank you for your thoughts and opinions.

The Paperback Of This World We Live In Has Arrived!

2011-03-23T12:36:00.029-04:00

In my apartment, at least. Ten copies last night by way of UPS.

Like all proud (yet humble) authors, I immediately pulled out my contract to see what my royalty rate is. I get (or will get is a tad more accurate) 7% on the list price of $8.99 (writers are among the very few people in this world who actually like inflation). Out of deference to my limited mathematical skills, I round $8.99 to $9 and times it by .07, and the next thing I know, I anticipate getting at least 63 cents in royalties (I mean someone is going to buy a copy someday somehow probably).

63 cents will buy a can of cat food for Scooter with a couple of cents to spare. That's all he cares about.

Anyway, I love how the book looks, and I especially love the front cover which includes my ever favorite designation: The New York Times Best-Selling Author. And I super especially love the quote: "The Ultimate Dystopian. A Very Exciting Read!" credited (quite properly) to Good Morning America.

No new arrival is complete without a family get-together, so here they are, the hardcovers and paperbacks of the Houghton Mifflin Harcourt editions of Life As We Knew It, The Dead And The Gone and This World We Live In.

May they all earn me at least 63 cents. Scooter has a very big appetite!