Susan Pfeffer: Shade of the Moon

“She’s my friend,” Jon replied. “Nothing more. I tricked her into coming with me, and she tricked me into thinking she was Ruby.”

“Trickery and deceit,” Sarah said. “That’s quite a basis for friendship.”

Jon laughed. “I love you,” he said. “And I can’t believe you’re here. Could we put off fighting until tomorrow?”

Sarah’s kiss was all the answer he needed.

Nothing was going to come easy. Jon knew that. Nothing had for four years.

But the sun was visible behind the ash clouds, and with its light, Jon could see a future worth fighting for.

We’ll make it work, he told himself. Together, we can make it work.

• How would things have been different for Jon if Dad had survived the trip to Sexton?

• Would Jon have felt differently about the enclave rules if he hadn’t met Sarah?

• In each of the books with Mom featured, she finds a reason to throw a party. Why do you think socializing was so important to her, even in such dire situations?

• Jon and Miranda both carry a great deal of guilt over Julie’s death. Miranda talks only to Alex about it, while Jon has told no one. How would things have been different if Jon and Miranda had shared their particular truths immediately following Julie’s death?

• The “clavers,” people who live in the Sexton enclave, feel a strong sense of entitlement because the work they do is regarded as essential for human survival. On the other hand, Ruby says she was a “grub,” in effect a manual laborer, long before the cataclysmic events that led to the enclaves being established. Jon, as a “slip,” falls somewhere between the two. Do these sorts of class distinctions exist today, in the real world, in your world? Do you think it’s possible today for grubs to become clavers, or would they, at best, feel like slips?

Sometimes a writer sees a story as a whole, planning on taking a character from Point A to Point Z, in one volume, or two, or three or more.

Sometimes things just happen.

All four of my “moon” books just happened. It’s lucky for me that they did, but there’s no way I can claim I knew from the very first moment just how things would evolve.

That very first moment was a Saturday afternoon when I had nothing better to do than watch TV. I found an old sci-fi movie called Meteor, and I watched it all the way through, even though I’d seen it before and had a reasonably good idea who would live and who would die by movie’s end.

Eventually the movie did end, and I turned off the TV. That was when I had the idea that literally changed my life. I said to myself, “What would it be like to be a teenager living through a worldwide catastrophe?”

My mind began racing. By evening’s end I knew who the teenager was (a girl named Miranda, living in a small town in Pennsylvania with her mother, her big brother, Matt, and her little brother, Jonny) and what the catastrophe would be (knocking the moon closer to earth, thus strengthening its gravitational pull).

I spent three weeks doing the prewriting. Then I sat down at the computer and began what was the happiest writing experience of my life, creating the book that became Life As We Knew It.

I had decided that first evening that the book would be Miranda’s diary, since I wanted to get the readers as close to the action as possible. And writing a fictional character’s diary is a lot of fun. The story just spills out; it’s almost like taking dictation.

I worked all day long, stopping only when I became so tired I knew it would be a mistake to keep writing. Thanks to the prewriting, I knew where the story was going, but I hadn’t solved every single problem, so there was enough uncertainty that I could change things around and surprise myself on occasion.

It was more fun than work should ever be.

It was my job to write the book and my agent’s job to sell it. She found it a wonderful home with Harcourt (now Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). Kathy Dawson was the first of two excellent editors I’ve worked with there. She helped me tighten the book, and guided it through the publication process.

There was only one problem. I wanted to write a sequel. Even while I was writing Life As We Knew It, I wanted to know what happened next. But Kathy said Harcourt had no interest in a sequel.

There are moments in my life when I’m really smart, and this was one of them. Instead of taking no for an answer, I said, “How about if I write a book about the exact same situation only with a completely different set of characters?”

“Fine,” Kathy said. “Because that’s not a sequel.”

What I didn’t tell Kathy was my intention to write that second book and then a third one, where Miranda from Life As We Knew It would meet the characters from what became The Dead & The Gone . Because I knew someday the people at Harcourt would come to their senses and say, “Of course we want a sequel, only now we want one for both books.”

The Dead & The Gone was more challenging to write. Miranda isn’t exactly like me (for one thing she swims, a skill I’ve never quite developed), but Alex is nothing at all like me. I loved him and his sisters and his friends, and I loved ending the world all over again, but it wasn’t the joyous experience Life As We Knew It had been. On the other hand, I took more pride in it, because it was that much harder to write, so it all balanced out.

The Dead & The Gone was published and I began hectoring Kathy about writing a third book. Mostly she said no, but sometimes she said maybe. I wrote a third book on my own that had very little to do with the first two, but I realized before showing it to her that it was a mistake. So I kept asking and waiting, and eventually Kathy said yes, and we had a long phone conversation where we decided on a plot that had absolutely nothing to do with Miranda and Alex.

Only then she called me back and said, “What we really want is a sequel.”

So I finally got to introduce Alex to Miranda. I wrote This World We Live In, bringing together the characters from the first two books. It was back to Miranda’s diary, and I got the answers to some of the questions I’d been asked by readers. And when Kathy left Harcourt and I began working with Karen Grove, I found my book in the hands of another excellent editor.

I was a happy writer. I’d written a trilogy, a very high-class thing to do. Life was good.

But people kept writing to ask me if there was going to be a fourth book. And then I took my cat in for his annual checkup, and my vet asked if there was going to be a fourth book.

So I contacted Karen and said, “My vet wants to know if there’s going to be a fourth book. What should I tell him?”

And Karen said, “Do it.”

So I did. I wrote an entire fourth book and sent it off to Karen. She read it. Everyone at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt read it. And although they never actually said so, they hated it.

That should have stopped me. But I loved my characters and I loved the world I’d created and I wanted to make my vet happy. I tried again, and ended up writing the book you’re holding in some format or another at this very moment, The Shade of the Moon.

My vet has since retired, so he probably won’t be asking me if there’s going to be a fifth book. And since I’m writing this before The Shade of the Moon is published, I don’t know if anyone is going to ask me that. Frankly, I don’t even know what I’d want the answer to be, should I ever be asked.

But I do know that watching an old movie on a Saturday afternoon changed my life in a thousand different wonderful ways.