Susan Beth Pfeffer's Blog, page 13

The First Draft Of The Third Attempt At A Fourth Moon Book Is Now Finished!

It would have been finished a lot sooner if I hadn't added another 60 or so pages. On the other hand, those 60 or so pages got the page count to 295 and made the book a whole lot better. At least, I think so.

This version of The Shade Of The Moon has (among other things) riots and arson and killings and kidnappings and romance. What it doesn't have is enough description, because I hate writing description, but I know I need to put some in, so I will. I promise. I'll use as an incentive getting the book to 300 pages (such a respectable number), although there's at least one scene that I know needs a good deal of trimming, and I'm not sure I have more than 5 pages of description in me (frankly, I'm not sure I have 1 page of description in me, but I suppose I gotta).

In celebration of the completion of the first draft, leaving me time to have more lunches with more friends, and go clothes shopping, and see a movie, and plant my impatiens for the deer to eat, I've selected almost at random 2 pages to print and scan and show you.

I hope you like them. I also hope you don't mind the complete lack of description!

I See Poland. I See France.

I see Scooter
In his underpants.

Well, I would if he wore any. Trust me, I see all of him dressed or undressed constantly.

But that has nothing to do with my career. Let alone the international part of my career, which is what I'm writing about. Poetry is extra.

Oh, speaking of poetry, Scooter wrote a poem. He was clearly inspired by the character Ruby in The Shade Of The Moon Number 3.

Rubies are red
Emeralds are green
If I don't get fed
I'll eat your spleen.

Back to my career. We'll start with France because I found out, via my obsessive following of Amazon, that Chroniques De La Fin Du Monde, Tome 3: Les Survivants came out on Thursday.

I know this for a fact because I got an email from someone in France who bought a copy Thursday. I have to take her word for what it looks like because my publisher hasn't yet sent me a copy.

If you squint very hard, you'll see that at one glorious point its Amazon ranking was 459. Trust me, it's nowhere near that right now, so it's a good thing I printed it when I could.


Moving over to Poland, Google News was kind enough today to send me a link to a Polish review of the Polish version of Life As We Knew It. At lest I think it's a review. This is what Google Translations claims it says, and it sounds kind of reviewish to me.

Within a few moments to the world sixteen Miranda of Pennsylvania turned upside down. She led a quiet, ordinary life, along with his two brothers - older than the younger Matt and Jonny - and mother. But everything changed when the asteroid hit the moon. Since then, Earth's climate and geosphere go crazy. There was the era  of powerful earthquakes, giant tsunamis and volcanic eruptions, which led to very serious climate change. Miranda and her family need each day to fight for survival, despite the constant hunger and lack of prospects for improvement.

The life that we knew the first part of the three-volume series of Survivors by Susan Beth Pfeffer. The book was on  the seventh in a list of YALSA's Teens' Top Ten, reached the finals Andre Norton Award, Hal Clement Award and the Quill Awards. The novel takes the form of a log: Miranda shows in him his life before and after the disaster, the entries are short and full of simple, youth language, so the book reads quickly and is easy to read. In addition, this form gives the author the possibility of acquiring the presentation of the heroine's feelings - her hope for survival and a better future, anxiety about loved ones, the pain felt by the death or departure of many famous people, and fear caused by the subsequent massive cataclysms.anyone knows what role the moon, it is not difficult to predict the consequences of altering its position in relation to our planet, and thus - another disaster. However, for readers not fully known is the fate of the characters and the answers to key questions. Can they survive? Do you receive assistance? What is the fate of Miranda's family living in an area where more than others? Are people able to control the raging climate? Growing problems, but still smoldering glimmer of hope makes the novel draws to the end.

Among the best know as Miranda and her family. Official accurately represents the appearance of the characters, their feelings, passions, and family relationships. The book shows how the man changed the face of great tragedy, as he can devote himself to save the beloved people. Miranda and Jonny before the disaster were just ordinary children, but unfortunately they are forced to make many sacrifices, and to make responsible decisions. Everybody's daily struggle with his weaknesses and wszechpanującym hunger. Above all, strive to maintain friendly relations with loved ones and avoid pointless arguments. Family members are characterized by very thoughtful behavior, so they are prepared for problems before they manage to appear. Other characters are shown only briefly.

Watching exciting, dramatic struggle heroes from various problems, we get to the end of life, we knew, skonsturowanej so that arouses an immediate desire to reach for the next part of the cycle. The struggle with the elements has not been completed, and the fate of Miranda and her family will weigh more in the next two novels.

Apparently, the book came out on Feb. 28, but the publisher hasn't yet sent me a copy. Thanks to the review, I know what the book jacket looks like, and I love it. I think it is  bardzo bardzo cool (actually bardzo, which Google Translations assures me means "very" is bardzo bardzo cool on its own).











So that's it for reporting on my international career, except to say that my national and international publishers don't seem to have gotten around to sending me my royalty checks, which I think is bardzo bardzo bardzo uncool!

The Mythbusters Were Nice Enough Not To Comment On My Bra Strap

And I'm sure you'll be equally polite.

Here I am on the Titanic:


I discover its fate.

I took this picture of flowers while I was waiting for my worldly and sophisticated friend Renee to find a place for me to get ice cream.

Princess Summerfallwinterspring says it's fashionable to show a bra strap. And she's tres more fashion conscious than I am (obviously).
Isn't this picture weird? Mayim Bialik looks like half the girls I went to high school with. And I look like an overweight cutout.

But I do look good with astronauts.

In case you were wondering if I actually met the Mythbusters* or Mayim Bialik, the answer is no. Just had my picture taken with them. But the astronaut and I had a nice conversation.

I think I've offered sufficient proof that I actually was in Washington DC. Where else could one find such a dazzling combination of myth and disaster!

*(Spellcheck hates Mythbusters. It offered as an option Methodists.)

To Be Continued (Hopefully With Paragraphs)

I thought I had ended The Shade Of The Moon last Tuesday (or was it Wednesday- I don't remember, but it was one of those days that started with last), and then I was going to Washington DC (I did, and I have the pictures to prove it), and then I was going to spring clean my apartment.

Instead, I spent much of yesterday sleeping.

Then at 3:49 AM, my smoke detector started beeping, which forced me to bring my ladder in from the outside storage closet. At which point, it stopped beeping. Since I'm still alive, I have a feeling it was a problem with the detector, not any smoke.

It took me an hour or so to fall back asleep, and I'm not sure when I had this thought- either then, or when I woke up, but I think it was then because I'm pretty sure when I woke up I had to recreate it.

What it is is a huge plot twist and approximately another 80 pages, starting, with just the removal of a sentence or two, at the exact moment where I thought the book ended.

So here's my plan. I'm going to visit my mother, and buy groceries, and at least do a little bit of Clean Out The Closet. Then I'm going to call Princess Summerfallwinterspring and test the idea out on her. If she likes it, and almost more to the point, if she can figure out how to resolve the brand new situation I created thanks to the smoke detector, I'll go back to writing, something I swore I would never do again.

I promise to keep you posted and show you the photographs. Ideally with paragraphs!

I Am Woman. Hear Me Talk (And Talk And Talk)

There's a great new website called Scripts & Scribes.com (admit it, you love it already), and for reasons best known to them, they decided to interview me. They offered me the option of doing the interview on Skype, but the problem with doing an interview on Skype is your house has to be clean, and as you know I'm a tad behind on the housecleaning business. So I said I'd rather do it on the phone, and that is why the podcast lacks a view of my frantically trying to dust and vacuum while chatting merrily about my career. So if you're interested in hearing me chat merrily about my career, scurry over to the Susan Beth Pfeffer page and listen away! PS (and on a different subject) Blogspot has decided it hates Internet Explorer and will only let me post on Google Chrome. For some reason, Google Chrome doesn't seem to understand paragraphing, or editing, or any other other things I was accustomed to on Blogspot. This does not make me a happy person.

Coming in February 2013, The Taschenbuch of Die Welt Wie Wir Sie Kannten!

I was killing time waiting for The Voice to go on, so I went over to Amazon to see how my titles were doing.

Imagine my surprise when I saw that Die Welt Etc. (aka Life As We Knew It, which I find considerably easier to type) is scheduled to be a Taschenbuch this February.

Not knowing what a Taschenbuch was, I made my merry way over to Google Translates Everything For You Just Because We Love You, and typed in Taschenbuch. Imagine my surprise when I found out a Taschenbuch is a klasika!

It turns out I'd left the translate to to Lithuanian.

No fool I, I changed the translate to to English (my kind of language) and discovered that a Taschenbuch is a paperback (I keep typing Taschenbuch as Taschenbuck, obviously reflecting my hope the paperback will bring me a few bucks). My guess is a klasika is a paperback in Lithuanian, but The Voice is about go to start, so I'll look into that possibility some other time.

Meanwhile, I have a whole new reason to look forward to February. Happy Taschebuch Day everyone (and a Merry Klasika too)!

Just A Quick Note To Say There Won't Be A Cholera Epidemic

And will all those anonymous characters who were going to die in a particularly unpleasant way thank me? I think not.

I was set to write the big cholera epidemic scene today, having done just enough research that I could fake it. But I woke up this morning at 6:30* and I thought about the cholera epidemic and how complicated it was going to be, not so much because of all the dead bodies (I'm used to those) but because of how the disease might spread into places I didn't want it spread into, so I decided against it.**

Scooter didn't even wake me up. I did it all on my own, sad to say.

Instead of the cholera epidemic, I killed off a main character (just like I promised) in an unusually (even by my standards) grisly and unpleasant way. All of which I thought of at 6:30, give or take.

I have things I have to do tomorrow, but absolutely nothing planned for Tuesday and Wednesday, so I'm hoping to finish the first draft before I go to Washington DC on Friday (please don't break into my apartment while I'm gone, and if you do, please don't take Scooter, not that he'd let you, and I have to take him to the vet for his annual checkup and I can't tell you how little I'm looking forward to that). Then I'm going to spring clean my apartment, which trust me it needs, and then do the rewrites, which trust me, it needs. With or without a cholera epidemic!



*Actually not 6:30, even though that's what the clock said. I have one of those atomic perfect time clocks, except this one runs slow. It was probably 6:38, and I suppose I could have said "around 6:30" but I didn't think of it in time, and besides having one of those atomic perfect time clocks that doesn't keep anything close to perfect time is something to complain about. And if you didn't want to hear me complain, you didn't have to read this footnote.

**It doesn't count as a spoiler when you say something isn't going to happen. So don't even think about complaining. I do all the complaining around here, thank you very much.

The View From Page 140

I got back to work yesterday, and will get back to work today after I play a few more hands of FreeCell.

Better that than go through a few more boxes of tissues.

I'm pleased to say that on Page 140 (practically Page 141, since most of Page 140 is written) the only dead characters are unnamed extras. My guess is that by Page 150, quite a number of those unnamed characters will never have a chance to be named. I'm sure if they existed their families would know who they were. Unless I killed off their families as well.

Once I start killing off unnamed characters, it's hard for me to stop.

One of the bi-products of lying in bed and sneezing is that I have time to think about the as yet unwritten pages and what might happen in them. For the most part I know what's coming (and who's going), but that doesn't prevent my brain from thinking things out even more. The other morning I woke up at 5 AM with a scene on my mind, and although I'm sure I fell back asleep, all I seem to have dreamed was that scene, so maybe I didn't fall back asleep at all.


During an in bed sneezing stretch, I was thinking about who was going to live and who was going to die, and suddenly I considered the possibility of killing off one of the named characters on the list to the right. Someone who I'd never considered killing off. Someone people might actually be upset about if I killed off that someone.

The super great advantage of killing off that character is it would allow me to write a scene where things got explained with even a touch of resolution. Well, emotional resolution. I'm not great at story resolution, because if I were, I wouldn't be trying for the umpteenth time to write a fourth moon book just to answer all those unresolved questions from the first three.

But a little emotional resolution would be nice. Even if people got upset. I mean, for all I know, people are going to get upset over all those lovely unnamed corpses I have littering Pages 138-40 and beyond.

My plan is to work work work, and then work some more, and try to get the first draft finished before I go to Washington D.C. next weekend. Since I know just about everything that's going to happen, finishing should be doable. And then I'll know who lives and who dies and what their names are and I won't have to think about it anymore.

Of course the alternative is to play some more FreeCell. Thanks to the wonders of cheating, my winning streak is pushing 900.

Hmm... Do I aim for 1000 or do I kill off some more characters? What a jolly dilemma to have!

On Page 133, The Only One Close To Death Is The Author

i.e. Me.

Or I.E. me.

Take your pick.

Usually when I write about something looking sweet and innocent, but actually cruel and vicious, I'm referring to Scooter.

But not this time.

No, it's spring, the most glorious season of the year, that has done me in.

Thanks to my hearty peasant blood, I never suffer from allergies. But this season, after an incredibly mild winter followed by an incredibly hot spring, my aristocratic sensitive blood has taken over.

When I'm not sneezing, I'm blowing my nose. When I'm not blowing my nose, my eyes are weeping. Actually my eyes are simultaneously extremely wet and painfully dry. Even indoors, sunlight hurts.

I really would be working on The Shade Of The Moon Take Three, but it's hard to type when you're wearing a sleep mask. And blowing your nose. And sneezing.

I do intend to get back to writing. As soon as this
starts looking like this, I'll return to the manuscript, and find out who lives and who dies.

I hope I'll be in the who lives category!

I'm On Page 103 (I Checked) And Not A Single Character Is Dead Yet

But who knows what'll happen on Page 104.

My thanks to all of you who participated in the Who's Gonna Be Dead Meat poll on the right. Poor Mom seems most likely to be a goner (sadly, in my mind as well).

I put in the "new character" option almost as an afterthought, and until Scooter woke me up this morning, I hadn't really considered knocking off any of the new ones. Scooter's been doing a very good job waking me up the past few mornings. He's been holding off until about 6:45, and then he gets into full snuggle mode. For the week or so before this, he's been waking me up while in full attack mode, and I can't concentrate on anything if I'm throwing him off the bed, in a desperate effort to keep from being viciously mauled.

What can I tell you? He thinks it's fun.

But when Scooter snuggles, and it's too late for me to fall back asleep, I can get a lot of work done. The other day I came up with a semi-brand new ending (basically the already planned action, but an entirely different response to it), and sort of worked out a particular plot problem (I'm still pondering that one).

And this morning, as I thought about a very big scene in the fairly near future, things got worse and worse (you know how much I love worse and worse) and two new characters ended up dead.

It makes sense. Why should new characters get a bye just because they're new?

I'd like to say I've found a great writing pattern, but I haven't. Now that I think about it, I only worked this week on Wednesday. I had thought I would on Thursday, but I discovered I had a dentist appointment at 1:00. Just a cleaning, so I planned on returning to work with sparkling teeth for most of the afternoon.

Only my dentist decided to go mining for decay, and I'm still recovering from the drilling. I couldn't do anything after I got home except quiver and gobble aspirins.

Today I've recovered (although a couple of aspirins isn't a bad idea), but it's the Yankee home opener, and I don't want to miss a single moment of the opening ceremonies. I think I'll watch those and maybe an inning or two, and then try to get back to work. I'm not going to be working on Monday (I'm having lunch with a friend) and Tuesday morning is devoted to mother stuff, and it's getting to the point where the only time I'm writing is on weekends, and I'm really deeply opposed to writing on weekends.

My current estimated time of completion is after the 2nd USA Science And Engineering Festival and before the 7th Annual Greater Rochester Teen Book Festival.

Assuming Scooter lets me sleep and I don't get any more teeth drilled!