Susan Beth Pfeffer's Blog, page 10

While We Wait To Hear From My Editor About What The Shade Of The Moon Will Be Called

Which could take a while, so here's a distraction.

While culling magazines the other day (it's been on my to do list for a while now), I located my previously missing but I wasn't really worried about it because I knew it was around here somewhere junior high school yearbook.

I'd wanted to find it because I've been thinking a lot about my 9th grade English teacher, Mrs. Smitten, who I liked so much I considered naming my kitten Mrs. Smitten if my kitten was a girl kitten (I also considered naming the kitten Mrs. Minster, for my 3rd grade teacher, but as we all well know, I adopted a little boy kitten and named him Scooter).




 I didn't know what Mrs. Smitten's first name was, and let me tell you, you google "Mrs. Smitten" you're not going to find out. But my guess was her first name would show up in the yearbook, which was why I wanted to locate it, and by golly it did. Now I have to decide if it's good manners to write her a letter to say what fond memories I have of her. My guess is she has no memories, fond or otherwise, of me.

The yearbook's kind of on the scrawny side (something, sadly, that will never be said of me), but it did include a Last Will And Testament. I don't think it has all the kids in the 9th grade class, but it certainly has a lot of them.*




To keep you occupied while we await word about Who Knows What The Title Will Be, I offer you the challenge of finding:

The sportswriter and TV personality who was surprisingly friendly at our last reunion.

The Academy Award winning documentary filmmaker who seems to think Jeffrey MacDonald is innocent.

The songwriter who's written hit songs for Meat Loaf, Celine Dion, Bonnie Tyler and Air Supply among many others.

The science fiction writer/editor who I had a crush on from 9th-12th grades.

The New York Times Best Selling Author Who Didn't Name Her Cat Mrs. Smitten


Since I know all the answers, I'll go check my emails, and see if the fourth moon book has a title!

*There's actually one more page, with 5 names on it, but I left it out to make things easier for you.

And The Name Of The Fourth Moon Book Is...

TBD.

Well, it would be tbd if it were in the middle of a sentence and not the very beginning of this entry.

Thank you one and all for voting on the poll and for your comments as well. You gave me a great deal to think about, and I gave my editor the same, by reporting the results.

In the early middle of last night, after making my traditional early middle of the night trek to the bathroom, I stumbled my way to the kitchen where I scribbled a couple of sentences to add to the end of the book. Then this morning, while exercycling to Harry O Episode 3 Of The First Season DVD I thought about those scribbled lines and how if I added a little of this and a little of that, there might be a completely different title possibility.

I emailed my editor about that possibility, but haven't heard back.

So to emphasize the importance of this all, I emailed her the entire revised manuscript. Yes, the rewrites are complete. I finished them Thursday with the assistance of a box of donuts, and then I finished them again Friday morning, and then I finished them for the third (and I hope final) time a half hour ago, after which I sent them off to my editor, along with a friendly reminder that the title is an open question.

I'll celebrate the completion of the rewrites by going to the movies tomorrow to see The Master . Then on Wednesday I'll atone for those donuts.

When I learn what The Shade Of The Moon's tbd title is, I'll let you know!

Not All Polls Are About Politics

Some are important!

I just got an email from my editor asking what I thought about changing the title of the fourth moon book to The Shadow Of The Moon.

Well, I don't know. My life consists of rewrites and avoiding rewrites. Who has time to think about titles?

I'm hoping you do. So I've put a 5 day poll over on the beloved right side of the blog. Gave it prime real estate too. I threw Shadow Of The Moon into the conversation because polls are free and why not.

So let me know what you favor. I'll pretend I didn't get the email from my editor until Monday. In the meantime, I'll see if there's a strong consensus amongst you for one title or the other or the other.

Thanks in advance!

Before I Jump Back Into An Ocean Of Rewrites

I want to wish each and everyone of you a happy and healthy new year.

Oddly enough, I wish the same for myself, but I'm throwing into the wish mix a completed set of rewrites.

I've made it to page 95, and I think I only have one more scene I have to rewrite pretty much in its entirety (which reminds me- I have a small change to make in an already rewritten scene). The remaining 200 or so pages (gack!) should mostly be following my editor's suggestions for small changes and making sure all the new stuff I've written pages 1-95 isn't contradicted by anything in pages 96-295. Or something like that.

Oh well. Work and many more games of FreeCell await.

May the year 5773 be full of peace, prosperity, and election results that won't render me suicidal!

The World Would Be So Much Better If September Had 35 Days

I mean, what's the hurry to get to October?

I ask this perfectly sensible question because I seem to have a September 30 deadline for completing the rewrites of The Shade Of The Moon.

Oh heck. I do have a September 30 deadline, and unlike practically everything else in my life, this one is all my fault.

First of all, one should never write a book in the springtime because then the publishing house has to read it in the summer, and nothing happens in the publishing industry in the summer. To be honest about it, very little happens in the publishing industry in any of the other seasons, but it's even worse in the summertime.

Back in the days when editors had to read actual manuscripts, I heard about one author whose manuscript got left on a beach by her editor (this did not happen to me, but it still puts chills down my spine, which is kind of handy on a hot summer's day).

The next foolish thing I did was insist on a Fall 2013 publication date for The Shade Of The Moon. I am a very impatient person, and in this particular case, I'm super duper impatient to be actually retired. I figured if the book was published in the Fall of 2013 (aka a year from now) then a year and a day from now I could be actually retired. But if I said, No let's wait, no hurry, Spring 2014 will be just fine, then I wouldn't be actually retired until Spring 2014, which is a good six months after Fall 2013, regardless of how many days there are in September.

My editor, with a smile on her face and malice in her heart*, said, Yes, that's fine, let's do it, and here is my long well thought out list of every single thing you have to change in the manuscript, the big things, the little things, oh why not change everything while you're at it. No hurry. October 1 will be just fine.

Naturally I agreed, since I was under the impression September had at least 33 days, or maybe as many as 37, given how early Columbus Day weekend is this year. That left me tons of time to watch every tennis match at the US Open and  go to New Paltz Crafts Fair and read Meat Loaf's memoirs and vacuum and have house guests and celebrate my mother's 101st birthday and mourn over the demise of my beloved New York Yankees (stop snickering, Red Sox** fans).

Well, the tons of time is now over, as is nearly half of September. To make things just a tad worse, I'm going away on a fabulous 2 day vacation (please don't tell the burglars). I'm going to see a Phillies game (I should be pretty easy to spot, since I'll be wearing a red shirt) and then stay at a nice hotel and then the following morning go to the Barnes Collection, which I've always wanted to see. I should be pretty easy to spot there as well, since I'll be wearing a black shirt.

But sadly, during this itsy bitsy vacation, I won't be working on rewrites.

As of the moment, I have done 29 pages, which is approximately 10%. This would panic me no end, except that I figure if I do 10% a day, I should be able to finish and still take Yom Kippur off for fasting and atoning and the suchlike. Doing rewrites is a form of atoning, but fasting makes work a little harder.

And the first 29 pages were the hardest, since my editor's suggestions (she found all the weak spots in the manuscript, and a few that I don't even think of as weak) mostly focus on the beginning of the book, making  that the spot that takes the most time to correct. And I've worked out just about all the changes in my mind, so it's more a question of getting them into the manuscript than anything else. I even wrote them down on paper, so I won't forget what I'm supposed to do.

Don't worry about spoilers, since my handwriting is impossible to read and I changed a few things anyway.

So that's what I'm up to, or almost up to, or hoping to be up to by the end of September.

I guess all I have to remember is every day of rewrites brings me one day closer to retirement!



*Total non sequitur (which Blogspot refuses to acknowledge is an actual word, forcing me to check the spelling 3 times on Google), but they found
**Ha! Blogspot doesn't believe Sox is a word either!

One Year Ago Today...

My mother turned 100 years old.

So today she turned 101.

When I visited her yesterday, she said she never intended to live so long. I told her I doubted anyone did, but I was certainly glad for every day that she's in my life.

I visited her again today (she lives 15 minutes away, so it's not that hard) and then I had lunch with a friend. When I came home, I found a note saying a florist had tried to deliver flowers. I called the florist and told him to deliver the flowers to my mother directly. Then I asked who had sent the flowers.

The florist checked. They were sent by the president of a organization where my mother gets a pension. I said, Wow.

I called my brother and told him the story. He said Wow. Then I pointed out he'll be getting a pension from the same organization, so they'll send him flowers when he turns 101. He said that gave him reason to live.

Since you probably want to see the difference between 100 and 101, here's a picture I took yesterday. For some reason, she didn't feel like getting out of bed.
When I got there today, she was in exercise class, She also had a haircut yesterday afternoon, but she had an emergency shampoo this morning.


Oh yeah. I have rewrites to do on The Shade Of The Moon, but they can wait. Today is for celebrating my mother's long and wonderful life!

See You In September

Unless something really extraordinary happens between now and then.

I'm about to have an onslaught of (beloved) house guests. The next couple of weeks are going to be (by my standards at least) quite the social whirl.

Sadly, when I'm not whirling with my friends, I'll be cleaning the apartment in preparation. Which is what I must do now.

Have an excellent rest of August. For those of you (like me) who enjoy Labor Day Weekend, enjoy Labor Day Weekend.

So don't think of this as a dust off, but I'm off to dust!

Another Way To Read My Books In Europe

Over a year ago, I got an email from a woman who lived in an Eastern European country. She had seen a recommendation of Life As We Knew It and was interested in reading it. But living where she was, it would have cost a lot of money to have a copy shipped to her. And the book wasn't available for her Kindle, at least not in English.

At that point, I didn't know a lot about Amazon/Kindle, so I contacted my agent to ask why that was. It seems that when we sold the UK rights to the moon books, we hadn't included the ebook rights in the contracts.

We asked the UK publisher if they would like the ebook rights, and they hemmed and hawed and ultimately decided they didn't. Don't ask me why not, because it doesn't make a lot of sense to me, but a no is a no.

So my agent contacted Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and asked them if they would like the ebook English language rights, and they said sure, why not. So we signed contracts. They didn't have to pay me a penny more, but I get a nice royalty rate, which works fine for me.

Now if you're in a country which has Amazon/Kindle available, you can now buy a number of my books in English (the German versions have been available on Kindle from the beginning). All three moon books are  there, as well as my older titles that I put up as ebooks (see the right side of the blog for information about them). In addition, Blood Wounds can be bought on Kindle outside of the United States and Canada. Since Blood Wounds hasn't been published outside of the United States/Canada, this is pretty much the only way of reading it without having to pay for shipping.

Here's the Amazon/Kindle listing from Amazon UK.com and Amazon Germany. com  and Amazon France. com (notice that the French versions of my books aren't available on Kindle, for reasons I don't understand). Those are the only countries I have listings for. Amazon isn't available every country, and when you google in something like Amazon Brazil, you get a lot of listings for some river or another.

But if you're in a country where you can use a Kindle, and you're interested in reading one or more of my books, you now can, thanks in part to a woman in an Eastern European country who took the time to email me to ask why she couldn't!

I'll Write A Sensible Informative Post Next Week I Promise

I actually have two in mind.

But this week has been crazy, partly because of the Olympics, which I love on TV and online (do you know, well of course you don't but you will momentarily, that I even watched the Men's Triple Jump online  because the competitor from Haiti is actually from about 20 miles from here).

And if the Olympics weren't enough, my carpet got stretched yesterday (no doubt in training for the Triple Carpet Jump event). I'd been told it would get stretched Wednesday, so I moved all the books and CDs and    DVDs and pictures out of the living room Tuesday night, only it didn't get stretched until Thursday, so I spent last night and this morning moving all the books and CDs and DVDs and pictures back into the living room. The carpet definitely looks better, although it remains old and ratty (the disadvantage of renting).

But in the midst of all this chaos, I made a magnificent change to the right side of the blog. See? I added a slideshow of Scooter at his most intellectual. It took me a long long time to figure out how to do it, and I'll never do it again, since I have no idea how I actually got it up there. But it was definitely my accomplishment of the week, and it merited a line in my Friday gratitude diary.

All right. I still have dozens of plastic bags to put away and my mother's laundry (done yesterday) to take out of the drier, before watching track and field online.

Next week had better be calmer!

A Quick (By My Standards At Least) Announcement Before I Start Watching Trampoline

My absolute favorite Olympic sport, and why there's no cable network devoted exclusively to it, I'll never understand.

But onto the announcement. My editor emailed me yesterday to ask if I wanted The Shade Of The Moon to come out in Fall 2013 or Spring 2014. Fall would require me to finish the rewrites by October, and Spring would give me until January to do same.

I emailed back to say the people who read my blog (i.e. you) are eager to read The Shade Of The Moon and would prefer the Fall date. My editor understood why that was so important to me, and agreed to get to work almost instantly, since I can't do the rewrites until she writes her notes suggesting what needs improvement.

What I didn't tell her was the only chance I have to test my No Complaining Resolution was if I had to do the rewrites almost immediately, since by December, I will undoubtedly have slipped into my whining ways, because I won't have had anything much to complain about between now and then to put my No Complaining Resolution to the test.

Yes, people who read my blog (i.e. you). I used you (i.e. you).

Hmm. This is now an announcement and a confession. Two for the price of zero (thank you, Blogspot*, for this gift of free space).

So The Shade Of The Moon will be published a little over a year from now. Let's see how much complaining I don't do between now and then!

*Blogspot's very own spellcheck doesn't think Blogspot is a word. It offered me as an alternative "Bloodsport." I'll let you come up with the jokes about that while I watch trampoline.