Susan Beth Pfeffer's Blog, page 27

Tomorrow Is The Next Day Of The Rest Of My Life (Give Or Take)

When I failed to meet my deadline of a completed messy first draft of Hart by my birthday, I had to do some thinking.

I always meet deadlines. I have a dread of missing one, which is a direct result of having not liked school as a kid but feeling the need to graduate so I didn't dare let myself get an incomplete in anything. When I have a job to do, I get it done.

Only I didn't get the first draft done, and the reason was pretty obvious. I was writing and rewriting and rethinking and working out new plot twists and throwing out old ones and the material controlled me and not vice versa.

I don't mind being obsessed by a book when I'm working on it. I kind of like it. And I don't mind being obsessed by a book that I'm writing on spec. I had the best time imaginable writing Life As We Knew It, without any assurances that it would be published (and certainly no idea that it would meet with the success that it has).

But at some point yesterday, I decided I needed a break from the incomplete Hart. I need to decide if I've gone terribly wrong with the writing and plotting, or if the book is a stillborn, or if most of it is salvageable if I only think things through in my own good time.

It's not like there are any deadlines with Hart, or any obligation to get it written at all. Officially the only person I've told about it is my agent, who I haven't heard from since (that's not really true; I sent her the Valentine's Scooter picture and she emailed back to say it was cute, which it certainly was, and if you need proof, my agent doesn't even like cats). Anyway, no one in the publishing industry is telling me they want to see Hart once it's done, so any deadline pressure is self inflicted.

So instead of writing and rewriting, etc. I'm going to read
Death and the Virgin Queen by Chris Skidmore, and then I'm going to read American Idol The Untold Story by Richard Rushfield, which my cousin Ellen gave me for my birthday. I'm also going to go through boxes of newspaper clippings I found in the storage closet the day I pulled out the bag of old cat toys, which I have some regrets about pulling out, since Scooter played with his favorite on my bed this morning at 5 AM. I will also do my tax prep work to send to the office of Mr. Imagination. And instead of worrying about my mother, I'll try to do some constructive things for her.

And when and if Hart is ready for serious revision, I hope to be ready to do it!

Presence In The Present

Here's what I should be writing about.

I should be writing about Borders Bookstores filing for bankruptcy and how I'm relieved that the Borders near me doesn't seem to be on the list of 200 stores they're planning to close.

Or I should be writing about how it's mostly a moot point because thanks to people stealing books by way of the internet, writers can wave bye bye to earning money.

Or I should be writing about how I just signed up on Twitter (under the name of susanbpfeffer because for some reason why I tried to be susanbethpfeffer, it came out as susanbethpfeffe and I figured it was better to sacrifice beth than sacrifice the sacred name of pfeffer), but can't get the link to link properly which is why there's no link (not that what I tweeted was particularly interesting).

Or I should be writing about how I'm not going to get the first draft of Hart finished today because, among many other reasons, I discovered an important section I'd thought I'd written I hadn't, which is what happens when you write a book in bits and pieces and don't pay all that much attention to what you've actually gotten done. Other reasons include constantly changing motivation and events and lots of other stuff that should have been worked out before I began writing.

Instead, I'm going to write that tomorrow is my birthday and I bought myself a pot of tulips (which Scooter already knocked over) and a copy of Death and the Virgin Queen by Chris Skidmore. I'm not a big Queen Elizabeth The First fan, but this is one aspect of her reign that has always intrigued me, so it seemed like an ideal present to give myself.

Unbeknownst to him, Scooter celebrates his birthday on Feb. 17 also, and he treated himself to an early birthday present (no doubt his early birthday celebration was knocking over the pot of tulips). Yesterday, by happenstance (let's pause for a moment and admire a paragraph that has both unbeknownst and happenstance in it), I located a bag of old cat toys (most likely belonging to my late old cats, Alexander and Emily) in the outside storage closet and brought the bag in, intending to go through it for possible Scooter usage. Scooter saw no point in waiting, and went through the bag himself, picking and choosing amongst the many goodies. I came home from errand running to find quite a number of the old toys scattered around, and Scooter madly in love with one in particular.




Last year, when I had the best birthday ever, it snowed. Tomorrow, when I'll be celebrating a very low key birthday (lunch at Charlie Brown's with Marci and Carol and maybe Pam), the weather is supposed to be February lovely (temperature above 50). Maybe I'll spend my birthday trying to figure out the Twitter link, or writing some more in Hart.

Or maybe I'll just watch Scooter enjoy his presents!

Why I Write Prose Fiction

Today's the day to be Valentined
And read my books (if you're so inclined)

Not many poems have parentheses
It's still quite cold (try not to freeze!)




Happy Valentine's Day From Scooter And Me!

Why I Write Fiction

I found myself yesterday in a very good mood.

I'd been in a good mood the day before, but the day before I'd finally seen The King's Speech, a movie I'd really been looking forward to seeing and which I enjoyed every bit as much as I thought I would. In fact, I liked it so much that I didn't even mind having to do a mother job that turned out to be fruitless and probably will have to be done today as well. That's the sort of thing that can ruin a week for me nowadays.

But Tuesday, even though I'd run the fruitless errand the evening before and I didn't have a movie to go to and the weekly snowstorm was replaced by a sleet storm, which made it extremely treacherous to get to my car, which I did to run an errand at Macy's, which also proved to be fruitless, and then even though some gentleman decided to stroll across the road right in front of my car, forcing me to brake pretty abruptly, which caused the car behind me to rear end me, I still was in a very good mood. I can't say I liked the street crossing gentleman, but the young man who rear ended me was very nice, and once I had assured both him and me that neither my car nor I was damaged, I resumed my trip home, still humming "I just called to say I love you," which isn't even a song I like, but is kind of jolly. It got replaced by "Tzena Tzena" in my mind, which is extremely bouncy and not at all the sort of song one usually whistles after a great deal of fruitlessness and being rear ended.

I had no trouble determining why I was in a good mood, and that was because I'd figured something out in Hart. Hart, for those of you just tuning in, is the gothic romantic noir psychological thriller novel I'd been playing at writing for entirely too long now. Unlike every other book I've ever written, I started Hart in the middle, then muddled my way to the end, and only on Sunday did I begin the beginning. All the work I usually do before I write I'm doing as I write, and as a result, I'm constantly changing things, and getting rid of things I don't need, and occasionally getting rid of things it turns out I do need. In other words, I have no control over the material, and since I have no control over my life, as a general rule, I like having control over the material. It's kind of compensatory.

But what is fun about Hart, and it's fun about the whole writing process for me, is the solving of the puzzles. Smack on my way to The King's Speech, I solved what had been a significant problem for me, kind of a What Does Hart Know And When Does He Know It issue. Pieces fell into place. The whole of the book started to reveal itself. It began to make sense.

So I smiled when I ran my fruitless mother errand and I smiled when I ran my fruitless Macy's errand, and I smiled when I got rear ended (or at least I smiled at the very nice young man who rear ended me). I smiled and I hummed and I whistled.

The real proof of how much I'm enjoying writing this particular piece of puzzling fiction is I intended to write this blog entry yesterday, but instead went right to work on Hart.

And I'm still smiling!

The Hopes Of A Nation Rest On A Single Groundhog

Well, not an entire nation, since Hawaii probably doesn't care, and for all I know, Punxsutawney Phil is married.But everyone I know is going crazy waiting for this winter to end. It's the longest January on record, since it started right after Christmas, and seems to be going smack into February.

February has enough problems. It doesn't need to be annexed by greedy 31 day long January.

I like February, even if nobody else does (and it rarely wins popularity contests). It's a teeny tiny month, and fewer babies are born in it than any other month of the year (which makes sense because it has fewer days, but it also seems to have a fewer babies per day ratio as well), and, of course, my birthday falls just past the halfway mark. So I have something to look forward to until Feb. 17, and then after Feb. 17, I have spring to look forward to. I firmly believe spring starts on March 1, although it never seems to work out that way.

This year my goal for my birthday is to get the first draft of Hart finished. I'm really getting tired of outlining and reoutlining and rereoutlining it. Last night, I spent hours trying to shove the material into some kind of chronological order. For a book with minimal chances of publication, it's burning up a lot of energy (alas, not a lot of calories, which at least would justify the amount of time I'm spending on it).

I had thought I'd be doing a lot of writing on it this week, especially since I'm spending most of the week being snowed/sleeted in. But my mother managed a trifecta on Monday. Her hearing aid broke, she set fire to the microwave, and she fell. I don't know how long she'll be without her hearing aid, but Marci is going to bring her a used microwave tomorrow, and my mother wasn't hurt when she fell. So it could have been a lot worse, but it still took a great deal out of all of us. Which is my excuse for outlining rather than writing.

Oh well. I keep looking out the window trying to find some sunlight. At least there was none for good old Phil. That's one bright spot in this otherwise dreary week!

Hart To Hart

I keep writing and rewriting my gothic psychological romantic noir thriller novel Hart, and it has occurred to me that one reason why I'm writing it is to avoid all reality in my life.



Now you might legitimately wonder what reality I am choosing to avoid, given that I never leave my apartment because it's either snowed or is going to snow or is threatening to think about going to snow, and while I'm in my apartment, all I do is watch Australian Open tennis on TV (Rafa lost- now there's a tragic reality for me) and skating online (US Nationals last night, Europeans this morning). This is not what you call a low quality life, although I do have to say in defense of my January blues that Scooter has proven to be unusually sensitive to the lengthening of the days, and wakes me up each morning a minute earlier than the day before. By April, there'll probably be no point in going to sleep at all.



Because I've been writing Hart in sections, and thus having to rewrite it endlessly when I change the action in an earlier (or later) section, it's been hard to get a sense of what I've actually accomplished. So this morning, in between men's short programs, I did the third and I trust final chapter outline. It seems to have a lot of chapters, but that's because the chapters are very short. The little dashes indicate I haven't written that chapter (very few and mostly in the beginning). I don't seem to remember if I've written Chapter 7 (I definitely wrote Chapter 5 many times over). One chapter remains a question mark, and at the top right I put Glory Calls (?) because I have written a chapter where Glory calls, but it'll have to be rewritten in its entirety and I don't seem to know where it goes.



Hart is actually a lot of fun to write, which is a good thing since I have absolutely no idea if it will ever be published. I've given myself permission again to go bouncety bounce over the top, which I just love doing. And it's a book where things don't get explained right away, so I'm constantly shifting the revelations to try and improve their dramatic impact. Yesterday, for example, I put a big reveal in the dinner party scene, but this morning I thought I should move the reveal to the as yet unwritten announcement of dinner party scene.



I think some of these endless rewrites will come in handy when I actually put the first draft together and begin to polish it. My hope is some sections are close to where they need to be, just because I've rewritten them so often. You'd think by accident at least I'd have gotten some of the material right.



So here, using up two more sheets from the Speech Language Pathologist notepad, is the final chapter outline for Hart. Don't worry about being spoilered. Even I can't figure out what half my scribbles mean!

Despoiling De Spoiler

As you may recall, I was a tad annoyed that the Amazon product description for my upcoming novel Blood Wounds revealed a major part of the plot of my upcoming novel Blood Wounds. Not that I would have wanted it to reveal a major part of the plot of some other novel, mind you. I simply felt it told more than I wanted potential readers to know.

So I asked my editor to ask whoever needed to be asked to ask someone or something at Amazon (I have no idea if people or robots handle the Amazon busywork) to change the product description. And my editor asked whoever who asked someone or something and indeed, there's a brand new product description with the vital piece of plotting gone, gone forever (until you read Blood Wounds , which, of course, I hope you ultimately will):

Product Description

Willa is lucky. She has a happy family—Mom, Jack, her stepsisters Brooke and Alyssa, and Willa—all living together in peace and contentment. But a frantic phone call from her mother's best friend from her hometown of Pryor, Texas, shatters that calm and stability. Willa's birth father has murdered his second wife and two daughters and the police think he is on his way east to find Willa and her mother.

Questions abound as Willa realizes that her mother has held on to many secrets. As those secrets begin to spill out, Willa is compelled to seek the truth about the family she never knew existed. In dusty Pryor, away from the peaceful home life she'd always known, Willa begins to find her roots and question the meaning of blood ties. Only by looking at all of the pieces that make up her life can Willa discover her strength and independence—and realize what family ties really mean.

My mother always told me it never hurts to ask. In this case, not only was she right, but it didn't even hurt to be answered!

Cherry And Garcia Are Two Words Right There

In spite of an onslaught of bad weather (aka New York in January), things here have been pretty good. The Jets won. The Dead And The Gone was shortlisted for an award in Australia. I am still an Aquarius. And did I mention, the Jets won?

The New York Times had a very interesting article today about a dog named Chaser with a vocabulary of 1000 or so words. I was particularly intrigued since my own vocabulary is also 1000 or so words, with 12% being the names of ice cream flavors.

Naturally Scooter, as a cat, speaks flawless French, and he's been giving a great deal of thought to German, in preparation for the German publication of The Dead And The Gone.



It's a given that since Scooter is a cat, he'd be smarter than any old dog, but I figured I'd give him a little test to make sure our lingua francas (that's a new Baskin Robbins flavor) matched up.

So here are a few phrases I use regularly with him and his what he believes those phrases actually mean.

You are the cutest cat ever.

If George Clooney had four legs and a tail and whiskers, he still would come up short compared to you.

I love it when you purr.

I love it when you destroy my furniture.

Eww, you used your litter.

Ooh, you used your litter.

It hurts when you scratch me.

Pain and suffering are necessary adjuncts to spiritual growth.

Scooter, don't bite me!

Scooter, bite me!

I love you, Scooter!

Well, of course!

Facing Facebook

I'm on Facebook. A lot. And like so many other things in my life, it's not my fault.

Let me start by saying I don't really understand Facebook. I understand Twitter, even though I'm not on Twitter. Twitter makes a certain kind of sense to me. But Facebook seems a bizarre blending of a high school yearbook, Silly Putty and The Blob (the one with Steven McQueen in it). Now, I like my high school yearbook and I like Silly Putty (actually I love Silly Putty) and I like The Blob, but I've never sought out all three together. One at a time suffices.

If you scroll down the right side of my blog, really really scroll, you'll see that Harcourt set up Facebook pages for both me and Life As We Knew It. It was very nice of them and I'm quite appreciative. And if that was where my Facebook existence began and ended, I'd be more than happy. I'm always happy when people do things for me. In fact, if somebody brought me some Silly Putty, I'd be very happy indeed.

But on occasion, I do things for other people, and that's where this Facebook situation took a turn for the worse. I belong to a very nice very tiny very local good deeds organization, which was founded in the early 20th century and hasn't made much progress since then. So I offered to set up a Facebook page for them.

Well it turns out the only way you can find out anything about Facebook is to be registered with Facebook. Maybe I was already, since my name was, but I think (or at least I thought at the time) that I had to set up my own personal Facebook account, which means, like it or not, I had to set up my own personal Facebook page. So I did, for the sole purpose of being able to create a Facebook account for The Children's Enrichment Committee of Orange County New York. It's not the world's fanciest Facebook page, but I still maintain it's better than nothing.

When I set up my own Facebook account, I couldn't even do it under Susan Beth Pfeffer, since Susan Beth Pfeffer already had a Facebook page thanks to Harcourt. I went with Susan Pfeffer, and I don't know, maybe I told someone or maybe people figured it out on their own, or maybe people are trying to "friend" me over at the Harcourt page or maybe I was inheriting friends of other Susan Pfeffers.

All I know is every now and again I get an email telling me someone I don't know wants to be my friend. And when I go to the Susan Pfeffer page (which I never do) there are all kinds of comments and pictures, which I've had nothing to do with. They just show up.

My resistance to this could well be generational. The other day, while trying to figure out what possible benefit Facebook could offer me, I Facebooked in my high school graduating class, and found it has a page with a grand total of 4 members. This suggests to me that approximately 400 of my high school graduating class have no interest in being on Facebook and I don't blame them.

So here's the deal. You want to "friend" me, fine. Friend away. I promise I'll accept anyone who offers me Facebook friendship. It will be a totally one sided relationship, but from now on I'll press that "accept" button with only minimal hesitation.

And while you're busy on Facebook, I'll be playing with Silly Putty!

He Said. She Says. I Sneeze.

I have the sniffles. I am just sick enough that if I still went to school, my mother would keep me home. Instead, I'm keeping myself at home, although tomorrow I'd better be well enough to move myself out of the house, since the last I heard it was going to snow again on Wednesday.

I'm still doing rewrites on Hart, as opposed to doing actual writes, which might constitute work. People with sniffles don't have to work, because sneezing and blowing our noses is very energy consuming.

One day last week, pre-sniffles but possibly during the tiny snow storm we got, I invented a whole new medicine to be used exclusively by characters in Hart. Well, at the time, it was only going to be used by one character, my poor beleaguered heroine. I gave the medicine a name (this is the kind of stuff I love doing when I'm writing, working out names for completely made up medicines), and even gave it an additional side effect, although it's really more like two effects and no sides.

I know there are those of you here who are very sensitive to spoilers, which I think in this case is even sillier, since I'm talking about a book that has no beginning and no end, just a lot of middle I keep rewriting. It's not like the publishing industry is knocking on my door, begging to see what I've got.

But I love all of you, even those of you who are spoiler sensitive, so I'll only say about this medicine that it affects memory. But because my heroine takes it, and her memory is affected, I had to change the book from past tense to present.

At some point, early on, I had considered writing Hart in the present tense, which is a tense I rarely use. But since the book is first person, if my heroine can't remember certain things, she can't write about those things in a past tense voice. That's pure gothic romantic psychological thriller logic.

Now my favorite verb is "said." My characters go around saiding all the time. So I figured I'd take advantage of the cleverness of computers and tell my document to change all "said"s to "says," a true time saver.

It almost worked great. But it definitely had a negative impact on some of the dialogue:

"I love you," he says.

"I love you too," I says.

Sounds a little Ma and Pa Kettle.

So I still have to go around editing those says, but it's still something of a time saver.

Last night, in between sniffles and Philadelphia Eagles missed field goals, I changed the ending the book, to make better use of the medicine part of the plot, and also because I had a really good image that I wanted to exploit. Between sneezes and waking up at 3 AM, I worked out a new ending (so it's a good thing I never wrote the original one). My concern had been that the ending I had, while nice and dramatique, left my poor beleaguered heroine kind of passive, and even in a book as crazy as this one, I do believe main characters should act and not just be acted upon.

But at 3 AM, I figured out what she could do that would leave her in control of her own destiny. I love it. My book is no longer a gothic psychological romantic horror novel. It's a gothic psychological romantic horror noir novel.

Now if I could only stop sniffling long enough to actually write it!