Susan Beth Pfeffer's Blog, page 12

Just In Case You Ever Wondered What I Do While I'm Waiting To Hear From My Editor

I dawdle!

I play tons of FreeCell. My winning streak is now 1261, thanks, as always, to cheating.

I go over to Amazon and Barnes & Noble to see what my Life As We Knew It paperback rankings are. Currently, they're 1093 and 426, but a few minutes ago, B&N LAWKI was 373, which I prefer.

I dust bookcases. Not books, which is too much work, but bookcases. I dusted every shelf in the den. See how they shine.

I also rearrange the books on the shelves that hold my books, so there'll be room for the 16 copies of my books I know will be coming over the next few years. That's 1 paperback of Blood Wounds, 1 German hardcover and 1 German paperback, 2 Polish, 2 Chinese, 3 Brazilian, 3 Lithuanian, and 3 Bulgarian versions of the moon books.

I have lunch with Marci at Charlotte's Tea Room. I should have gotten the asparagus quiche (Marci let me have a bite of hers and it was delicious).

I imprison Scooter.

I'd better go and clean my coat closet right away, before I discover my Amazon ranking has gone up.

Have an excellent, stress free weekend!

The Shade Of The Moon Number Three Is Now In The Hands Of Editor Number One

Actually, it's not in anybody's hands, since thanks to the miracles of modern technology, I simply zapped it across the airwaves into the editor's computer. For that matter, she's not Editor One, since I had a different editor for Life As We Knew It and The Dead And The Gone. So the entire title is a lie, or at least a prevarication (which, I think, means lie, but with multiple syllables).

I just checked over at dictionary.com and yes, it's a fancy way of saying lying. I thought it was very funny that when I checked, it offered me, in one of its many ads, a free Christian dating service. I don't even date expensive Christians.

Back to literature, or what passes for it in my computer. Well, literature with complaining. I love the word processing gizmos, but they have their limitations. Remember
But then that nasty little Mistake! Mistake! button started going crazy, so I looked to see what the problem was. Well, the problem was when people had names, they now had nHughes, and when they played games, they played gHughes.

Then there was the minor character Brian. He was definitely not a Brian, so I went back to my beloved
Sadly though, that meant that Alex' sister Briana, mentioned once in the book, became Virgila. The Mistake!Mistake! button went crazy over that as well.

I thought the manuscript was perfect when I zipped it off, but in my search for a celebratory 2 pages to scan over here, I found that Jon took a book of Plato out of the library, but ended up reading Aristotle instead. Oh well. If manuscripts were perfect, editors would get very bored.

What we all should remember, as we think about the editor, is there's no contract for The Shade Of The Moon Attempt Number Tres. So the editor might not get bored, thanks to my catchy mistakes, but might not like the book either and turn it down, and all you'll ever get to read of it is the four pages I put on my blog earlier and the two I'm about to put on.

It's very tricky, by the way, getting two pages that don't give away too much of the plot. It's a book with a lot of plot, and every time I looked for two pages to put here, there was always too much information to reveal so casually.

The two pages I finally chose are about Miranda and Alex. So if you don't want to know what's happening with them, don't read the pages. Consider yourself warned.

Oh, I know what I'll do. I have an excellent picture of Scooter I've been looking for an excuse to plop here. If you want to stay completely unspoiled about Alex and Miranda, then admire the picture of Scooter and move on.

I'll say goodbye here just in case. Now that I no longer have the manuscript to write or rewrite, the focus of my life is on naps!

Meet The Newest Members Of The Life As We Knew It Family

Our number has increased by two.

Yesterday, my mail carrier was kind enough to bring me CHRONIQUES DE lA FIN DU MONDE Les Survivants. Or as we in the United States think of it- the French version Of This World We Live In.

First I reunited it with its French relatives.

Then I introduced it to its American and British cousins.

Today 殞月之城  arrived.  That's the Chinese version of Life As We Knew It. Here's some badly translated by Google information about it (along with a nice picture of the cover).*

Since I just happened to have my camera out, I brought in all of 殞月之城 's first cousins, so they could get acquainted.

As we all well know, Scooter can't resist a party.

In case you were wondering, 殞月之城 is all in Chinese. But there are five footnotes for terms its readers might not be familiar with: West Nile, Ina Bauer, The Sound Of Music, Wishbone, and Date. To prove my incredible creativity in English, here's a sentence using all five:

After we broke the wishbone on our dinner date, Ina Bauer and I went to the West Nile Theater and saw The Sound Of Music.

Okay. I'll stick to photography and Scooter wrangling!

*If you press the third button on the top, it takes you to their The Dead And The Gone page.

I Know I Should Be Working On My Rewrites

But they just announced that the 2014 US National Figure Skating Championships will be held in Boston!

In honor of the announcement, I tried very hard to get Scooter to pose with the figure skating bunny rabbits, but as you can see, he wasn't interested. Actually, he was kind of annoyed because I closed the closet door, which he was considerably more interested in than triple lutzes and the suchlike.

Spellcheck, by the way, doesn't approve of lutzes or toeloops, or axels. Guess what. It doesn't like salchows either.

Flip, flip, flip. Finally, a jump it accepts without question.

The last US Nationals held in Boston was the best Nationals of all, ever, without question (okay, you can question) because the skaters and coaches and us folk rode on the same buses together, and to make sure the skaters and coaches got to competitions on time, we had actual police escorts. I know this won't happen again, because they no longer allow the fans to ride on the competitors' buses, but it's one of those memories you cherish forever. As opposed to the memory of rewrites, which I will never ever cherish ever.

When I finished work on Sunday, I used my handy dandy calculator to determine that I was 44% finished. Sadly, I am still 44% finished, or maybe even less, because I decided I needed to add another tiny scene, which somehow I didn't get around to writing yesterday or today.

I didn't write yesterday, because I spoke to the librarians of Orange, Ulster and Sullivan counties, and had a fine time doing so. Remember how I was going to make them work on a new book idea I came up with last week? Well, I didn't, not out of the goodness of my heart, but because I worked the whole thing out myself. It cost me a night's sleep, but I did it. I actually think I'll write the book later this summer (assuming I ever get  56% more rewrites done). It should be short and I know the beginning and the ending and a sufficient amount of the middle. Basically, it's 3 novellas that take place on the same day, which will be a great relief after all these moon books that take place over months and months and I have to remember the dates and add endless tiny scenes in between the dates I've already written scenes on.

Tomorrow is the 19th anniversary of my father's death (Spellcheck doesn't like 19th either, which is really kind of ridiculous). My brother is coming up, and we're taking our mother to the cemetery and then out to lunch. So I don't see that as a big work day, or even a little work day.

I guess I'll get back to serious work on Thursday and plow my way through until the middle of next week, when I'd better have all 100% done. Of course, there's the French Open to watch. I do want to root Rafael Nadal onto victory. Spellcheck doesn't like Nadal either. Hmm. How will it feel about Federer? Okay, I'll try Murray. Murray it likes, but I'm rooting for Rafa (it hates Rafa) anyway.

You should see this thing. It's red line after red line.

All right. I'm going to celebrate some more, and then come up with another excuse not to work. I'll let you know when the rewrites are finished and I've mastered that quad loop triple loop combination!

First Names Last Times

I did a fair amount of rewriting yesterday, enough so I'm not in a 2 hour/2 page panic mode anymore. I zipped through about 30 pages, polishing each one until it sparkled.

Naturally, in celebration, I won't work today. Instead I'll do that shopping and movie thing I keep talking about. Today is a spectacularly gorgeous day, so it makes sense to spend it inside a mall.

One thing that had to get changed yesterday was a minor character's name. Jon has four friends he eats lunch with every day- Luke, Tyler, Ryan and Sean. On a scale of 1-10, with Jon being a 10 as most important character, Luke is a 6 and Tyler a 5 1/2 and Ryan a 4 and Sean a 2.

But the real concern was Jon, Luke, Tyler, Ryan and Sean basically all have the same name. No more than 5 letters, no more than 2 syllables, nothing distinctive or unusual about them.

I knew the character whose name I would dump would be Sean. In fact, his name was so nondescript, I had trouble remembering what it was.

So I zipped over to my favorite place in Internetland,
Monday, I'm giving a talk to The Children's Librarians of Orange, Ulster and Sullivan Counties. I live in Orange County and I used to have a summer home in Sullivan County and I have been known to drop in on Ulster County, so this is very much a local event for me.

But what it also is is my last scheduled speaking engagement. I'm not saying there won't be more (I'm always open to invitations to Hawaii and Paris), but if there aren't, this is it.

It occurred to me, while exercycling this morning, that I should figure out what to talk about when I give my talk. My mind has been pretty much focused on The Shade Of The Moon and where the heck is my German royalty check, but I owed it to myself and the librarians to have something coherent to say.

So I came up with an idea for a new book, complete with title (never before used, at least as best I can tell from Amazon). The level of lunacy involved in writing a new book,when I feel like all I've been doing is writing and complaining and fantasizing about retirement is, on a scale of 1-10, with 1 being sane and 10 being what the heck am I thinking about, a 12, maybe higher.

But it's such a nifty idea. And it would be short and relatively easy to write. And I can make the librarians help me with the plot.

I love making other people work. Of course I'm not that crazy about working myself, but I'll deal with that when the time comes.

And now the time has come for me to zip over to the mall and shop for something to wear on Monday!

There's A Lot To Be Learned From Scooter

He knows what to do on a day off.

I, on the other hand, didn't go to the movies like I planned. Instead, inspired by  a brand new interview I gave, I began the polishing part of the rewrites of The Shade Of The Moon Third And Definitely Last Effort.

I spent two hours (the length of the movie I didn't see) on the first two pages. You may recall, if you committed my March 29, 2012 entry to memory, that things were kind of clunky on pages 1 and 2. I had to introduce the readers to Jon and his entire family, while covering everything that had happened in Life As We Knew It, The Dead And The Gone, and This World We Live In. That's 900 pages of pain and suffering summed up in a couple of paragraphs.

Here's the part I particularly didn't like:

            Dad died the same as so many others had died, of exhaustion and hunger and vulnerability to disease. Jon had travelled from Pennsylvania to Tennessee with him, with his whole family. They’d journeyed together, Dad, Lisa and Gabe, Mom, Jon’s brother Matt and his wife Syl, and Miranda, Jon’s sister. Alex, Julie’s brother, came with them. They rode bikes, walked, even drove whenever they could. It was a journey of a thousand miles, and it took months, months of cold and fear and hunger. Months of seeing bodies strewn on the highways. Months where the boy Jon had been grew into the man he now was. 

I admit I liked the bodies strewn on the highways, partly because I do love my dead bodies, but mostly because "strewn" is such a high class word. But all those names clomped together in a single paragraph...Even I, who thinks every word I write is a masterpiece, knew that stank.

So I rewrote those two pages. It is a bit of a concern that each page took an hour to revise. Assuming I work seven days a week, at two hours a day, it'll take me five months to finish the rewrites. And I'm not going to work seven days a week. I'm not even going to work on Friday (I'm going to the movies instead).

But in the meantime, here's the newly revised first two pages. Let's hope the other 298 don't take quite so long!  

Does Saturday, Sunday, Tuesday Constitute A Long Weekend?

I'm going to work on Monday.

I'll be writing two short scenes (Jon plays with Gabe; Jon goes to the library), which are intended to show what a nice guy Jon actually is. I haven't figured out where to plop them, but that's a Monday job also.

But I won't work on Saturday or Sunday or Tuesday for that matter. Tuesday morning I'm going to buy $45.00  worth of groceries, because I have a coupon that will give me $3 off if I do. And then Tuesday afternoon I'm going to see The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, because on Tuesdays, the movie ticket only costs $6.00 if you're old enough (and I am and then some).

So just by not working, I'll be saving $5.00. Pretty darn impressive.

On Wednesday, all short scenes having been written, I'll start the actual rewriting. Of which there is a great amount to do. I've read the manuscript twice now, and neither time did any descriptive writing show up. Believe me, I looked. There might have been an adverb or two (I seem to recall someone smiling ruefully), but not an adjective to be seen.

Personally, I like nouns and verbs, with the occasional adverb for seasoning, but editors seem to favor  adjectives. And when one is writing a book without a contract (my decision, I grant you, but nonetheless), it pays to please the editor.

So, for all of you having a more traditional three day weekend, have a splendid, lazy, sunny, pleasurable, safe, meaningful, enjoyable, relaxing time. And for those of you who don't get Monday off, please send me some adjectives. As you can see, I could use some help!

My Agent Says Just Because My Publishing House Has Gone Into Chapter 11, That's No Reason Why I Shouldn't Be Rewriting Chapter 11

I'd promise you this blog entry would be shorter than its heading, except the more I write here, the less time I'll have for working on The Shade Of The Moon Version The Third Draft The First.

What is it about rewrites that inspires such high level procrastinating? I know I won't mind doing them once I actually get started. It's the getting started that's the tricky part.

There are two new scenes to be written, and two to be rewritten from scratch, and then, of course, the entire manuscript has to be gone through and, le sigh, improved. After which I send it off to my editor, who could hate it and reject it, even if the publishing house doesn't go out of business, which my agent assures me they won't.

Or I could play FreeCell. My winning streak has now reached 1,100 games, thanks to the miracle of modern cheating.

Oh good. The clothes dryer just beeped. It's time to fold my mother's laundry. If I do it super perfectly, that could take anywhere from 1 to 978 minutes. At which point, it will definitely be time to expand that winning streak to 1101!

We Welcome A New Member To The LAWKI Family

The Polish version of Life As We Knew It has arrived.

I know absolutely no Polish, but on the back jacket it says it's a "trylogii z pogranicza science-fiction i dystopii," the only part of which Spellcheck doesn't loathe is "science-fiction."

"i" means "and" which we learned when I brought Marci and Carol (the book's dedicatees) their copies and Carol asked why her name now starts with "i."

Spellcheck doesn't like "dedicatees" either.

But what I like a lot is the book jacket. You'll see, in a moment, that my copy has this cool wraparound that says: GONE Dla Fanow Serii. Google Translations says Dla Fanow means For Fans, but it refuses to acknowledge that GONE is a Polish word, so I'm assuming GONE means Gone and that's the Polish name for the trylogii (just like the UK trilogy is called The Last Survivors).

Naturally, I introduced zycie, ktore znalismy to its relatives. Notice how I cleverly placed the German version close by so you could admire its Buxtehude Bulle sticker.

Scooter can never resist a photo op.

He has a particular fondness for the American paperback version, since that's the one that pays for most of his cat food.

But he's as happy as I am to get to know zycie, ktore znalismy!

You'd Think By Now I'd Know Not Working Is More Fun Than Working

This was going to be my first weekend off in approximately forever, and I'm going to be working this coming weekend, so I was really looking forward to two solid non-working sorts of weekend days.

That glorious non-working thing lasted through Saturday. Then Sunday, I read The Shade Of The Moon Version The Third.

I was scheduled to read the manuscript (is it still a manuscript if you can only read it on a computer screen?) on Thursday, since Friday I'm driving to Rochester for the 7th Annual Greater Rochester Teen Book Festival. and a long drive is a great time to think about what needs to be written.

But I got impatient and devoted a shocking number of hours to reading TSOTMVTT instead.

Thank goodness I liked it. A lot actually. Of course, since I don't like reading description, it didn't bother me one whit that there wasn't any in the entire 291 pages. No, I think there's a little bit on page 2, but that's just to fool people into thinking it's a high class descriptiony kind of masterpiece.

As they say in Gay Paree, le ha!

(Spellcheck is in process of having un pettite nervous breakdown, as is its wont around here).

Sadly though, I did discover that there's one section of the book that needs revision. I have a perfectly fabulous essentially flashback scene, where Jon thinks about what he did that makes him have those haunting dreams about Julie. Then entirely too much later in the book, he talks to his girlfriend Sarah about it (scroll right down for two pages which mention Sarah; I'm too lazy to bother getting the link).

Well, that's just not going to work. I need to turn that fabulous flashback into a new scene when he tells all to Sarah, and I have to find a reason for him to tell her and a place for all that brand new and recycled old stuff to fit in.

In other words, work. Le double triple extremely French sigh.

Oh well. At least I'll have something to think about on that long drive to Rochester!