Please welcome Sci-fi author, Margaret Fieland. Margaret, do you recall how your interest in writing originated?
Unlike many authors, I did NOT always know I wanted to be a writer. On the other hand, I always told myself stories, and I was a huge reader, especially of sci fi and fantasy – I picked the then fairly new Farmer in the Sky by Robert A. Heinlein for my tenth birthday.
As a writer, poetry was and is my first love. I started writing it in High School and continued on, mostly storing it in notebooks which I piled in the attic. At some point, I started writing more, and eventually wrote a poem I wanted to keep, started wandering around online, and things snowballed from there.
Q: What books have most influenced your life most?
I’d have to say Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, which I re-read every exam time in college. In order to help myself concentrate on studying, I would make an act with myself not to go to the library. Then I’d start suffering from Book Deprivation and re-read my copy of The Annotated Alice.
Q: Why did you decide to write Sci-fi.?
As I said, I’m a huge sci fi fan, but up until 2010 I hadn’t written any at all. That September, I decided to devote NaNo (National Novel Writing Month, which takes place every November) to a sci fi novel. In spite of my friends’ advice to plan out the book in as much detail as possible, I wrote about a page of plot notes and then devoted the rest of time to world building.
The resultant novel (which I completed, along with 30 poems by a poet I created in the universe of the novel) was pretty much of a mess, but I found out about an intense editing workshop that
was starting in January and signed up for that. I think the whole workshop took six or eight weeks, but I continued to work on the novel through the spring and finally ended up submitting it for publication. It became Relocated, the first in the Novels of Aleyne series.
Oh, yeah, and I never intended to write a series. I fell into that, too.
Q: What is your process for writing a book? For example, are you a plotter or a pantzer? Do you start at page 1 and write your book sequentially or do you skip around? Do you start with your characters or the plot?
First of all, I’m by nature very sequential, to the point that when we still went to video stores for movies, I’d never get to watch the movies at end of the alphabet because I always started looking at the A’s, that is, until I noticed I’d missed one of the Star Trek movies and started alternating looking backwards from the Z’s; then I only missed the M’s and N’s {grin}. Left to my own devices, I start writing from the beginning, write the first draft straight through to the end, then stop. This is not entirely true of some bits of some of the later Aleyne novels, where I ended up writing some of the scenes as homework for online classes.
Anyway, I usually start with the characters and the initial situation. I plan the beginning, the end, and the major plot points. Sometimes I sketch out the first quarter or third of the novel’s plot in more detail, but in general, I’m planning in more detail a couple of scenes in front of where I’m writing. I generally have a good idea of what will happen (or what I want to happen) but not how. For example, in Rob’s Rebellion, the latest Aleyne novel, I knew how I wanted the conflict between the Federation and the Aleyni to be resolved, but I had no idea how I would pull it off until I was writing the end of the novel.
Q: Would you tell us your story of getting “the call?”
The first novel I wrote (it was long ago accepted by a small print house, but has yet to appear) I wrote in response to the death of a friend’s wife and children in a tragic fire. Long after the event, it still haunted me, and I ended up writing a story about a little boy who loses his mother in a fire. I wrote the first draft in a weekend, but at that point I didn’t know much about how to structure and write fiction, and I spent the next year and a half learning. Among other things, I complete the Institute of Children’s Literature course. At that point, I started revising it, and eventually had it accepted for publication.
Q: What was the most exciting thing that happened to you after you signed your contract – besides receiving your first check as a published author?
Realizing that other people actually wanted to read what I wrote.
Q: If you weren’t writing, what would you be doing?
Spending more time playing music. I play the flute and the piccolo, but I don’t have much time to spare for it now.
Q: What is on tap for the rest of 2016?
I’m working on another Aleyne novel, a prequel to the series this time. Some friends and I are hoping to put together another poetry collection, and I have a fantasy novel I want to get back to. And I’m hoping that my chapter book will finally be published.
Q: Where can readers find you on the World Wide Web?
My Website:
http://www.margaretfieland.com/
Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/MargaretFielandAuthor/
Pinterest:
https://www.pinterest.com/margaretfieland/
Join me tomorrow when we preview the trailer for Rob’s Rebellion.
~Tina
The Clog Blog 