A Quick Request For The Dead And The Gone ARCS

I'm hoping to do a blog entry about the Possible Third Book, but I haven't heard back from my poor beleaguered editor yet, after I e-mailed her the answers to her not unreasonable questions of What Is This Book About? and Why Would Any Sane Person Want To Read It?

I have, however, received a request for an ARC of the dead and the gone, and I know of at least one other person who would like to read it (for purely professional reasons).

Does anyone have a copy they have no sentimental attachment to (i.e. would be willing if not flat out eager to dump?).

If you do, could you use the cute little e-mail link to the left to let me know? I am actually down to one and only copy myself, and oddly enough, I don't intend to part with it (stop hissing).

Okay. I'm off to do my recycling and have lunch with my mother and get our hairs cut, so if I get the okay on P3B, I'll be ready. Should my poor beleaguered editor e-mail me with the go ahead, I'll blog about what I intend to do with the story.

If not, at least I'll have gotten a good haircut.

I'm So FAME-ous!

As mornings go, I'd have to say this has been one of the top five of my life (don't ask me what the other four were, since I have no idea; I just don't want this one morning to get too swelled a head).

To start with, I received an e-mail from Florida, asking if I could attend their FAME conference this September. That's The Florida Association for Media in Education (but you all knew that).

I took my time before responding, since my happy dance lasted at least five minutes (and no doubt disturbed my downstairs neighbors, who may not be regarding this as one of their top five mornings ever). But then I e-mailed back my acceptance with so much grace and dignity, none of you would have recognized me.

Meanwhile, my dear friends at Google sent me an e-mail, just because they'd noticed Life As We Knew It had been mentioned somewhere in this darling universe of ours. I followed their link, and discovered that LAWKI has been nominated for a young readers award in Sheffield, England. The same country as Coventry, only this award doesn't seem to involve tomato splatting, thank goodness.

All right. I'm off to e-mail my poor beleaguered editor. I sent her an e-mail last night with a one paragraph summary of Possible Third Book, and she e-mailed back just now asking a few basic questions (What is this book about? Why would anyone in their right minds want to read it?).

I know the answer to her first question. The second one is a little tougher. But if I can do the happy dance while avoiding being splatted by tomatoes, I can think of something!

Caroline Made Me Do It

I think I now have a blog at MySpace. I think my name is Susan Beth but maybe it's susanbethpfeffer.

I have a new friend. His name is Tom. He is considerably younger than I am.

Beyond that, I have no idea what I'm doing there. I can't even figure out how to list my interests and all that stuff.

Not that I'm hinting or anything, but HELP!

ETA: I figured out how to do some of the listing stuff, and have informed the world that the person I'd like to meet is Jean Renoir. He seemed like a very nice guy and I thought it would add a touch of much needed class.

Tom remains my only friend there. This is after several hours. On JacketFlap I got two friends right away, and one of them is even willing to sell me office supplies.

If that isn't a definition of true friendship, I don't know what is.

May I Be Struck Dead By A Tomato If I'm Bragging

Now that I think about it, I killed off a lot of characters in a lot of different ways in Life As We Knew It and the dead and the gone, but not one of them died from a vicious tomato attack. Let alone a kindly tomato attack.

Both Anonymous Glen and I have noticed a sudden dearth of comments for my most recent post. My theory is you've all tired of my endless discussion about the Possible Third Book. I can hear murmurings of, "Shut up and write," wafting in the distance.

And to think I was going to tell you that there's a chance that Will will neither be hung nor sent to the coal mines. But I guess no one cares (sorry, Will).

My life is very strange these days, or at least my time sense is. LAWKI seems like something in the long distance past, yet there's always news about it. d&g hasn't even been published yet, but I feel like it's been around for ages. My mind is completely focused on P3B (okay, yesterday, it was focused on my friend Geri's surprise birthday party, and the Super Bowl, and watching the European Figure Skating Championships because I was too nervous to watch the Super Bowl. Oh and politics. My mind's been focused on politics too. And maybe a few other things, now that I think about it, like cookies. My mind is always focused on cookies).

I do have some LAWKI announcements to make. For those of you who don't obsessively count the number of states that LAWKI is nominated for young readers awards in (and to the best of my knowledge, no one obsessively counts that), the list to the left is up to 12. I snuck Illinois in one day last week (or maybe the week before; even I don't obsessively count), and last night I added California. I'm particularly pleased about CA, not merely because it's big and glamorous, but because it limits its nominations to three per category. This gives LAWKI a mere 2 in 3 chance of losing, as opposed to Illinois, where it has a 19 in 20 chance.

Speaking of awards LAWKI has not yet lost, thanks to the ceaseless efforts of the Knife Club, LAWKI is one of the last two books unsplatted by tomatoes over in Coventry. I'm delighted and surprised it's made it that far, and I'll be stunned if it makes it any further- it's up against an extremely popular book. My thanks to everybody around the world who voted to save LAWKI from tomatodom.

As a result of my not quite obsessive googling, I found out today that the audiobook of LAWKI, read by the incredibly talented Emily Bauer, was named to the YALSA 2008 Selected Audiobooks for Young Adults List. 21 audiobooks are so listed from a two year period.

And I really am going to ALA. I got a confirmation e-mail today from Harcourt. They've already arranged my accomodations, two nights at the Bed Bug Motor Inn.

I'm itching to get there!

And Hast Thou Slain The Bleakity Bleak?

I'm in an frabjous mood.

About an hour ago, I was in anything but, since I had a plot problem with Possible Third Book that I was finding very aggravating. It was the direct result of how I've been working this book out, figuring out a bit of the story here and a bit there. I'm pretty sure that's how I worked out Life As We Knew It and the dead and the gone, since all three books are similar in structure (big set pieces surrounded by little incidents).

The problem today was this morning I aligned a number of the set pieces so they made structural sense. Only once I got everything neatly in place, I realized the set up I needed for the very big set piece of Will gets taken to town and maybe even hung was totally shot.

I whined. I pouted. I answered e-mails. I started and stopped a blog entry. I complained to total strangers. I ate lunch and then whined and pouted some more.


And then, of course, I solved the problem. Which is why my mood is so frab.


The challenge with P3B, as I have said ad nauseum, is keeping the bleakity bleak to a socially acceptable level. What I may have only hinted at to you, oh beloved slowly gained readership who's been helping me a lot with your comments, is what Caitlin's position is as understudy in the troupe. I've been keeping it to myself because I've had to figure out how much bleakity bleak I could put in and how much was excessive even by my standards.

It's like this, or at least I think it's like this. In LAWKI and d&g, the main characters suffer like crazy. Hunger, disease, loss of loved ones, cold, misery, and general bad times. But the stuff they go through is pretty much the stuff everyone is going through. d&g is more class conscious than LAWKI, but no one has it easy.


In P3B, my set up has always been that Caitlin comes from a privileged family. whether her father's been a dentist or a doctor (he's back to dentist), or whether she's had a stepmother or not (currently not). I've expended a vast amount of energy (not calories, alas, but energy nonetheless) on how to show just how privileged Caitlin is in this three years after LAWKI ends world. But the more I showed it, the more bleakity bleak things got, and while I was clearly having a great time showing the suffering of 95% of humanity so we could see how lucky Caitlin was to be in the other 5%, it really wasn't furthering the story along, and it was certainly making things seem less realistic than LAWKI and d&g.


So I cleared much of that bleakity bleak out, simplifying the set up, and making things more family oriented. Caitlin still joins the troupe to avoid marrying a man so dreadful that his working name is Mr. Hinkler, but it's more a teenage act of rebellion against her father than a reasoned approach to her situation. And the suffering masses hardly figure at all in it.


But what happens next is Caitlin discovers (as do the readers) that being the understudy essentially puts her in the same league as those suffering masses. In some ways, she's an understudy as we would know the role- she learns the lines and the songs and has to be prepared to go on stage with very little notice. But as the understudy, she's also expected to do the grunt work ( like washing everyone's clothes, a job she never had to do before). In addition, this group of six teenagers is a clique that she will never be able to be part of. Partly this is because these kids have been on the road together for several months before Caitlin arrives. But mostly it's because she's the fourth or fifth (I haven't decided yet) understudy. In a world where 95% of humanity is starving and cold, it's not that hard to find teenage girls who are willing to carry a tune and a bucket of water in exchange for food.


This is why Caitlin is sent into the woods, with or without a knife, in spite of the fact the woods are dangerous. No one really cares if she's going to come back alive. If she does, fine. If she doesn't, they'll simply get a new understudy the same way they got her. It's like she's a private and everyone else is a colonel or a general. They're all in the same army together, but the private gets the KP.


Getting the balance so that Caitlin is both part of the group yet outside it has been very tricky. I didn't want the book to be Caitlin The Suffering Understudy Slave (if you want a quick laugh, read that in a Daffy Duck voice). But it was essential to the story that I want to tell for Caitlin to discover she' s expendable, exactly the same as all those suffering masses she never gave a moment's thought to. The fear she feels has to be different from that of Miranda and Alex. They're loved and Caitlin isn't.


I think I have it in place now. I've been writing notes on the computer (similar to the notes for d&g I have that link for), and I believe I'm ready to do the equivilent of my chapter outline, using pen and paper to write down each big event in chronological order. The characters are finally falling in place (although I do have to say Tyler has no redeeming social value at this point, and I'd better give him some or else there are going to be a lot of angry readers that he survives and Will gets carted off to the coal mines). There's still room to maneuver and places for me to surprise myself, but I can see starting to write P3B as soon as ten days from now.


And that's pretty darn callooh callay.

World's Shortest And Quickest Blog Entry

I'm going to ALA!

I'm Lobbying Hard For The Knife Club Vote

When I was a kid, I was a member of two very exclusive clubs, the Explorers Club and the Knife Club. Both clubs were created by my brother Alan, and both had more than two members, but not much more.

My favorite of the two was the Knife Club, because of the knife. It was made out of plywood, and I have no idea how we came to own it. Possibly my brother made it. I don't remember there being more than one knife in the Knife Club, or what exactly we did in the Knife Club (we explored in the Explorers Club) with that knife, but I really liked that knife. I still have a great fondness for plywood.

I've been hard at work on the Possible Third Book. On Sunday I wrote preliminary notes for it, and have continued to do so over the past couple of days. When I wrote Life As We Knew It, I referred to several parts of it as set pieces (crazy shopping day, Miranda goes skating). There are similar set pieces in the dead and the gone. It's those set pieces that I've been working on for P3B. One example would be the hanging/nonhanging scene, which I've been working on in this blog.

With all the set pieces I've been creating, there's been a struggle between reason and bleakity bleak. LAWKI and d&g certainly have their moments of unpleasantness, but because both books were set in the immediate aftermath of the world's biggest catastrophe, they're about a downward spiral. P3B takes place two or three (more likely three) years after the end of those two books and nothing good has happened during the interim. It's important for me to establish just how bad things are right away, but if I do establish just how bad things are, we're knee deep in the bleakity bleak, which may be off putting to any normal healthy human being (which at least a handful of my readers might be).

In my notes on Sunday, I wrote a brief synopsis of a scene where Caitlin, the heroine understudy of P3B, goes into the woods to gather kindling (I love that kindling) for the campfire. While she's in the woods, a guy lunges at her. She is able to escape, goes back to the camp very upset and scared. She's comforted by Will (he who will end up not being hung), but is told she has to go back into the woods to get the kindling.

This morning I woke up at 4:30 and pushed the scene further. What if Caitlin sees the guy in the woods before he sees her? What if she has a hunting knife on her and plunges it into the guy, then runs back to the camp, gets comforted by Will, and is told she has to go back into the woods to get both the kindling and the knife.

Obviously this is a much more frightening and powerful scene. But it's also very heavy in the bleakity bleak. And this evening, while I was exercycling (my second favorite place to work), I asked myself if Harcourt would really like my heroine to kill someone, even if it was self defense. Then I asked myself if I would really like my heroine to kill someone, nifty and dramatic though it would be. In seventy five books, I've never had one of my heroes or heroines ever actually kill somebody (although a few have bored the readers to death). Given that I'm committed to a fair amount of bleakity bleak anyway, is it really necessary to have Caitlin plunge the knife (nifty and dramatic though it would be).

I'm like the little Dutch boy with his finger in the dike, holding back wave after wave of the bleakity bleak.

Meanwhile, on the left side of the blog, you may have noticed that LAWKI has not yet been splatted by a tomato in the Coventry Book Award competition. Frankly, I'm quite startled and delighted about this. I do have to confess that one young cynic on that site expressed shock that LAWKI had not yet been voted off and placed full responsibility for this injustice on power voting from my fan club.

I'm very excited to learn I have a fan club. When did this happen and why wasn't I invited to join? Trust me, I am my biggest fan. I'd be a charter member, especially if that allows me to learn the secret handshake. My favorite clubs always have secret handshakes.

Secret handshakes and plywood knives that is.