Angela Shelf Medearis’ career as an author began the day she was fired from her job as a legal secretary. She decided to pursue her dream of writing so that she could be a stay-at-home mother. After four long years, hundreds of painful rejection letters, and numerous unpublished manuscripts, Angela decided to stop sending her work to New York publishers and submitted her manuscript PICKING PEAS FOR A PENNY to a small, regional publisher in her hometown, Austin, Texas.