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/