Author: Peg Kehret

Many years ago I was a struggling writer, selling a few magazine articles and short stories, and writing plays. I decided I wanted to write a novel, and I had what I thought was a good idea for a mystery. A young woman, a college student, is hired to baby-sit for a wealthy family, and while she is there the baby gets kidnapped. The plot consisted of the woman’s efforts to track down the kidnappers, and the danger that she got into as a result.

It took me nearly a year to write the book. I sent it to an agent, who agreed to try to sell if for me – but she was not able to do that. Eventually she returned the manuscript, with a long list of all the publishers who had turned it down. I wept as I read that list. The agent also sent a letter in which she said, “Your protagonist seems awfully young. Have you thought of writing for children?”

I had not. I tried to rework the novel and make it into a YA but it was not a successful effort, mainly because I didn’t know a thing about children’s literature. I finally put the book aside, and went on to other projects.

The idea, however, stayed in my head. About ten years ago I dragged out that old manuscript to see if I could salvage it but there was a lot wrong with it and I wasn’t enthusiastic about reworking old material. I moved not long after that, and the manuscript got tossed out.

However, I still liked the basic idea and I finally decided to start fresh with a new protagonist, new plot, new everything except the initial premise. In Stolen Children a young teen is hired to baby-sit for a wealthy family, and while she is there two thugs show up to kidnap the baby. They take Amy, too. Hidden away in a remote cabin, she needs to save not only herself but the toddler. 

If I had sold that novel when I first wrote it, I would have been thrilled. Stolen Children is my fiftieth book – and I’m still thrilled to have it published.

Kids often ask me how long it took me to write a particular book. If they want to know how long Stolen Children took, I’ll say, “Thirty-five years!”

Lucy is better. Hooray!  I spent much of yesterday in my recliner with Lucy in my lap, reading. Once again, books helped me escape my problems. 

Most of life’s difficulties must be met head-on, and action taken. Once I’ve done all that I can do to solve a problem, I find that reading allows me to relax and helps me keep my perspective. Yesterday I had done what I could for my dog: I took her to the vet, I gave her medicine, I soothed her. Having done all that, it was good to lose myself in a well-written novel. 

My eye surgery went well and I’m feeling fine. My grandson, Eric, is staying with me for a few days and he’s been an enormous help. The new lens that was put in my eye has improved my distance vision so much that I had to have the corrective lens on that side of my glasses removed. After the second eye surgery, I’ll  get new glasses for computer work and reading. For now, my eyes are not coordinated with each other. The only way I can read the computer monitor is with one eye closed so I won’t be doing any writing for a couple of weeks.

This experience has made me appreciate my eyesight even more than I did before. I also appreciate my friends! Vicki drove me to the surgery and back, and Heidi drove me to my follow-up appointment the next day. Normally, one of my kids would have been able to drive but my surgery happened to fall on the first day of school in the district where my son and his wife both teach, and it was also the day that my daughter and her husband moved my granddaughter, Brett, into her dorm at Whitman College, and attended all of the special events for parents. I had many friends volunteer to drive me.

Exciting news: I received my first hot-off-the-press copy of STOLEN CHILDREN. It is always a thrill to finally hold the published book in my hands. The official release date is October 16.

I received an e-mail from a woman who said her daughter planned to perform a monolog that I had written. She asked if the monolog’s narrator was based on a character in one of my books or if I could give her any other background information. She sent a copy of the monolog, which was titled, “Mandy.”  As I read it, my jaw dropped.

I wrote a monolog called “Missing Mandy” which was published by Meriwether Publishing in the book WINNING MONOLOGS FOR YOUNG ACTORS. It is still in print.  The piece this woman sent me had the same first line. Its last line was a direct quote from my monolog, too, although in my piece it was not the ending. The rest of “Mandy” is based on my idea and contains several sentences or partial sentences that I wrote, but it also contains actions and dialogue that I did not write. The end result is not something I would have published.

Anyone familiar with my books would be shocked to read one where a child discovers the dead body of her friend, covered in blood. I would never include such a scene. Yet, there it was, with me listed as the author.

 In “Missing Mandy” a child is asked about a burn on her hand and replies that she burned it while baking cookies. In the revised “Mandy” monolog, this child says she was scratched by her cat – also something I would never put in print.

I wonder how many copies of this distorted version of my work are circulating. I hope not many.  

When I responded to the mother’s e-mail, I explained that someone took my monolog, “Missing Mandy,” and rewrote it but left my name on it. I said that if her daughter performs the monolog she sent me, I should not be credited as the author.  I’m debating what else, if anything, I can do about such blatant misuse of copyrighted material.   

Yesterday was my mother’s birthday. I spent the day with Brett, driving home from Whitman College. We’d had a wonderful time exploring the campus, deciding which classes she wanted to take, and feeling pampered in a fine old Bed and Breakfast. It seemed a perfect way to celebrate my memories of my mother.

Mother always ended each visit by saying, “Didn’t we have fun?” No matter what we had done, it was always, in her view, the best visit ever. She had a knack for creating good times in any circumstances and for seeing the good in every situation.

My dad spent his last nine years in a nursing home, a victim of Alzheimer’s disease. Because he had been an executive with the Hormel meat company, my parents had a pig collection. Mother decided to have a “Pig Parade” at the nursing home.  I baked dozens of pig-shaped cookies, packed them in a box, and carried them on the plane from Seattle to San Francisco. Mother and I packed all of her pig figuerines and other pig memorabilia in boxes and transported everything to the nursing home.

The dining/recreation room was lined with patients in wheelchairs, and curious staff members took their breaks to watch the Pig Parade. We displayed each pig and Mother told where it was from. Those that weren’t breakable got passed around. Even patients who couldn’t follow the explanations seemed to enjoy touching the stuffed pigs, and my dad acted pleased to see the pigs again. I served the cookies on napkins decorated with pig stickers.

That night, as we put the pigs away in her condo, Mother said, “Didn’t we have fun?” and I could honestly answer, “Yes. The Pig Parade was wonderful.”

When Mother had cataract surgery, I went to stay for a few days to be her driver and to help with eye drops, etc. On the second day of her recovery, she felt well enough for us to have lunch at a small cafe’ near her home. “Isn’t this fun?” she asked, as we waited for our lunches. “Aren’t we lucky that we could do this today?”

Each Christmas was the best one we’d ever had. Every birthday celebration topped the charts of birthdays.

What a gift she gave me! By example, she taught me to appreciate each moment, to live life with joy no matter what the circumstances, and to find something to celebrate in every situation.

I miss her every day and always will, but oh my, didn’t we have fun?

One night when my good friends, Larry and Myra Karp, came to dinner, Larry asked me, “How do you spell kidnapped?”  I replied, “k-i-d-n-a-p-p-e-d.”

He explained the reason for his question. He had been proof-reading galleys of his next book, King of Ragtime, and the spell-check system on his Word Perfect software had highlighted kidnapped. It gave the correct spelling as kidnaped. That looked wrong to Larry so he did what any good writer would do. He got out his Webster’s Dictionary and looked it up. To his surprise, it said that both versions are correct but the preferred spelling is kidnaped. One P. He changed the spelling throughout his book, but it continued to bother him.

We decided to see what happened with Word, which I used on my computer. I typed in kidnapped, ran the spell check, and it was okay. When I wrote kidnaped, the spell check said it was incorrect. Next we got out my Webster’s Dictionary. In my edition, both versions are correct but the preferred spelling is kidnapped.

Larry and I also looked up Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic book which, as we both thought, is Kidnapped, with two Ps. We found many other books with kidnapped in the title and none were spelled with only one P.

This incident made me realize once again how difficult it can be for a writer to get the details right. Larry and I care deeply about using proper grammar, spelling, and punctuation. In this case, his sources disagreed with mine. While kidnapped and kidnaped are both correct spellings, kidnapped is more commonly used. It would be my preference because if I came to the word kidnaped in a book, it would stop me. I would think about the spelling, rather than the story.  Larry agreed and changed every kidnaped in his book back to kidnapped.

I’ve had several letters this week from readers who want to write fiction. They all say basically the same thing: they get an idea, write a beginning, and then can’t figure out what to do next. The story bogs down in the middle so they give up and start something else. “How do you do it?” they ask. “How do you write a whole book?”

It isn’t easy. Not for me, at any rate. I know of a few writers whose first drafts flow from their fingers to the keyboard with no hesitation, but I am not one of them. First drafts are difficult for me and I sometimes resort to small motivational tricks to keep myself going.

I am currently writing a middle grade novel called HOW I WONDER. That may not be the final title but I have to call it something while I’m writing it. As often happens, I had the book about half finished when it seemed to be dragging. The fast action ended and I didn’t know what should happen next. I like the book and didn’t want to give up on it so I set a goal to write 1,000 words per day on HOW I WONDER.

A word count showed that I had 24,736 words at that point. I wrote the date, May 25, on a piece of paper, with the number of words beside it. Then I got to work. I told myself I didn’t have to keep what I wrote. If it was awful, I could always delete it later but I had to get 1000 words down. At the end of that day, my count was 25,753.  Since then I’ve kept track of how much I write each day.

I was up to 33,832 words when my editor called to ask if I was working on a new book. She’d just come from an editorial meeting and hoped I might have something new for her soon. Because I was immersed in the plot, I was able to tell her exactly what HOW I WONDER is about and also how close I am to being finished. She asked for a formal proposal so for the next two days instead of writing 1000 words a day on the manuscript, I wrote a synopsis, revised the first chapter, and chose a representative section from the middle of the book. Those three items went off to my agent, who will read them and send them on (assuming she doesn’t see a problem) to the editor. Then I returned to the book itself, which is currently at 36,223 words.

Having a positive editorial reaction to the basic premise of HOW I WONDER gave me fresh energy to finish the book, but it was the day-after-day act of writing 1000 words that prepared me to respond enthusiastically when asked if I was working on a new manuscript. If I had not made myself be productive, I would not have been able to explain the book so well or to be specific about when I could deliver a final manuscript. I did not know this editor was going to call, but because I had been working regularly, I was ready for the call when it came.

Many people, myself included, want to have written a book. There is only one way to make that happen.  One at a time, you have to put the words on paper. 

There were two peacocks in my yard yesterday morning. If you have read The Ghost’s Grave, you will know why I began laughing when I saw them.  They belong to my neighbors, and I often hear their raucous cries, but I had never seen them on my property before. They wandered to the bottom of my porch steps, then looked up at the house before they ambled back home.  I had already written The Ghost’s Grave when my neighbors got their peacocks and, as far as I know, these birds are not anyone’s reincarnated relatives.

A fawn was born here yesterday. I saw the pregnant doe grazing, mid-morning. Then she settled down in the tall grass, where the deer often sleep. I was writing and have a view of that area from my office window. I looked out every so often, and she was still there.

After about an hour, she got up and walked toward my window, with a brand new fawn!  When they were out of the tall grass and on the area that I mow, she stopped to clean him. She licked every inch of that fawn, while he (she?) stood on wobbly legs and looked around at his first view of the world.

The fawn is tiny – I’d estimate two feet from nose to tail, and about two feet high. When I got my camera and tried to take a photo through the window, Mama deer heard the shutter click and led her baby off into the woods. The fawn is adorable!

I found a snake skin yesterday. It is from a garter snake, about sixteen inches long, and it is intact, including the head. I had never seen a snake skin outside of a museum, so I am excited to have this treasure. I didn’t bring it in the house because I was afraid it would be the victim of a cat attack; I have it on a shelf in the garage.

Of course, this discovery sent me on line to learn all about how snakes shed their skins. It is a fascinating process. When I look at all the wrinkles I’ve accumulated with age, I think the snakes may have the right idea.

Three deer curled up in the long grass behind my house this afternoon and took a nap. They slept there for over two hours.

The lilac bush outside my office window is in full bloom. It attracts the hummingbirds, and I love having a close-up view of these tiny birds as they feed.  And, yes, Yo-Yo Bird is still flying up and down by my front porch.  Life on a wildlife sanctuary, even a small one like mine, is never dull.

More good news for The Ghost’s Grave.  It has just won the Nevada Young Reader’s Award. I am the first author ever to win this award three times. What an honor! Thank you to the children of Nevada.

The good news keeps coming. I learned today that Escaping the Giant Wave has won the 2008 Young Hoosier Award. This is the fifth time that one of my books has won in Indiana, a new record for me.

The five winning books represent three publishers, and include two mysteries, one memoir, one adventure story, and one novel that I don’t know how to categorize. (I only write them; someone else has to figure out what they are.)

Here are my Indiana winners, and the year that they won:

1992 – Nightmare Mountain

1995 – Horror at the Haunted House

2001 – Small Steps: The Year I Got Polio

2007 – Abduction!

2008 – Escaping the Giant Wave