Shiloh Questions from a 4th grade class

Comment:

I am a fourth grade ELA teacher in a small town in Ohio. All of our students in fourth grade just finished reading Shiloh. They loved your book and are begging to read the next books in the series. When we finished the novel, my students were shown your Shiloh blog and they have created a list of questions for you. We have selected the most commonly asked questions they would like to ask.
1. Are you going to write any more Shiloh books?
2. How is Clover doing?
3. How long did the editing process for Shiloh take? (We recently had an author visit our school and she told us 90% of her writing process is editing)
Thank you for writing such a wonderful book!

Phyllis replied:

I have written four books about Shiloh, and think I have now told the whole story.  Clover died in 2000 and was buried on the property of the people who adopted her in Shiloh, West Virginia.  I paid for a slab to go on her grave, engraved with her name.  We estimate that she was about eleven years old.  I believe she died of some kind of cancer, but she certainly had a good life once our friends took her in.  I wrote the first draft of “Shiloh” in six weeks, but am sure I put in about the same length of time on the revising and editing.  For me, the biggest part of the writing process is not the writing or the editing: it’s the thinking.  When I am working on a book, it seems as though it is on my mind constantly.  Everything I see reminds me of the story that is building in my head–what the characters are like, why they do what they do, where will they live? what kind of work does the dad do?  who are the friends?  But every writer is different.