He's Cain And I'm Able (I Hope)

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

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

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

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)

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

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

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!