Monday, August 9, 2010

Guest Author Series - Welcome Peggy Fieland


I'd like to welcome fellow 4RV Author, Peggy Fieland to the blog today. Peggy's book, "The Angry Little Boy," will be published in early 2012 with 4RV. Peggy's here to tell us a little about it today.

PEGGY: My book, “The Angry Little Boy,” is a chapter book that will be published by 4RV Publishing, LLC, in early 2012. It's about a little boy who loses his mother in a fire.

I started writing this book a couple of years ago and wrote the first draft, about 5000 words, in a weekend. I spent the next year or two learning enough about writing fiction to rewrite it and make it the book it was supposed to be. It ended up being about 11, 000 words and the plot was quite different than the original. For one thing, I ended up discarding the original first two chapters and starting with the third. The first two chapters were backstory – and I ended up realizing this when I signed up for a class on revising and editing and decided that the third chapter would make for a much more interesting one to work with.

The genesis of the story is a tragic fire that took the lives of the wife and all four of the children of an acquaintance, now many years ago. The whole thing haunted me for years, and I wrote the story in part as an attempt to deal with it. I couldn't handle writing about dead children, so in my story my main character is an only child.

I'm currently working on a middle grade novel about a girl who wants to go to music camp and whose parents are divorcing. I wrote the first draft in about three weeks – and about halfway through, I realized that I needed to write in the first person rather than the third, so I chucked what I had and started over. I consider this version (about 15,000 words) more in the way of an outline than an actual revision, but however you count it, I'm just a couple of chapters from the end of this next draft. It's currently 32,600 words. Yikes! I have a writing partner with whom I'm exchanging chapters of our work on a weekly basis, and he's been incredibly helpful in giving me pointers and also in generally encouraging me to keep going.

I also write a lot of poetry – in fact, poetry is my first love – and a group of six of us have put together an anthology of our work that we're just about ready to submit for publication. We met in a workshop of the Muse Online Writers Conference a couple of years ago and ended up working together on our poetry writing.

You can find Peggy on the Internet at: http://www.margaretfieland.com/

11 comments:

  1. Hello Peggy, nice to learn a little bit about your upcoming book with 4RV. You're fortunate to have Ginger as your illustrator - she's wonderful!

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  2. Steph, thanks for hosting me today.

    Peggy

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  3. Great post, Peggy. It's good for you that you're willing to revise your story so many times. It shows your commitment to become a great writer.

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  4. Hey, Peggy,

    Nice to read more about you and your work. I think it's interesting the way most of us get ideas for stories from things that happen in real life. But it may take us a while to figure out what to do with them.

    Congratulations on your upcoming book!

    Suzanne Lieurance
    The Working Writer's Coach
    http://www.workingwriterscoach.com

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  5. Peggy,
    I'm so happy for you. I remember seeing your story when you first subbed it on Musekids. I'm glad you changed the story. Did toucher any of our suggestions?

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  6. I took lots of your suggestions .. you guys were a tremendous help in making Grandma and Dad have believable reactions ..

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  7. Peggy,it's always great learning more about you. And, I agree with Suzanne, it's so interesting how and where writers get inspiration for their stories.

    Congratulations on your book!! I'm with 4RV also, but not sure when my book will be out.

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  8. Peggy thank you so much for visiting Romance Under the Moonlight today. It was nice to have you! I'm looking forward to your 4RV Book!

    Smiles
    Steph

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  9. Congratulations on your forthcoming book, Peggy. The story sounds so interesting. Best of luck to you.

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  10. Peggy, I can't write about children being hurt, either. Your book sounds fascinating and I wish you much success!

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  11. Peggy, wishing you all the best with your book!
    Hope we hear something soon about our poetry collection.

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