Peter Peckerdale

Peter Peckerdale from The Fairy in the Bed series   Character Post 21

Peter Peckerdale is outspoken, tactless, cranky, passionate, possessive and opinionated. In other words, he's a typical pixie man, dialled up to the max. He has unsettling purple-blue eyes, but apart from that he looks more or less like a tall, sturdy human with red-brown hair that turns grey as he ages. 
Peter was born in the early 1930s over there in the fay homeland. As a very young man, while visiting over here, which is our part of the world, Peter had a love affair with a human woman. It didn't last, and it taught him to be wary of associating with anyone who wasn't a pixie. Soon afterwards, he met Pia Tillien, a pixie miss of boundless patience and good humour. Pia took him on and her devotion to him has convinced many onlookers that Peter must have a warm heart somewhere, otherwise Pia wouldn't look as contented as she does. 
Peter and Pia have four children, born over the span of fifteen years. When their eldest, Melody, matched up with a courtfolk man, Peter wasn't pleased, but Roderick Skipton showed plenty of spirit. Over the decades since, the two men have come to a wary kind of friendship. This unexpected match gave Peter a fascination for observing mixed marriages and unconventional families, and in the 1980s he and Pia got together with Peter's distant cousin and his wife to build an edifice now known as the Peckerdale Grene Community Tower. The ostensible reason for this gated community was for it to act as a kind of safe house for young fay venturing over here, but the real reason was probably to give Peter a kind of lab to observe the way different fay interacted with humans. 
Now in his eighties, Peter is every bit as opinionated and cranky as he ever was. His family do their best to keep him from his more outlandish plans, but they generally respect him and even love him from a cautious distance. One of his more unnerving habits is to corner young male descendants and lecture them on the proper treatment of their chosen romantic partners. Even though Peter's opinions generally match their own, the young men would still rather he didn't proclaim them out loud and in public. Over the years Peter hasn't precisely mellowed, but he has come a long way from the young man who got his pride and heart hurt by a human girl. He's had to, as only one of his several children and grandchildren has married another pixie.
Peter has been storming through this series for several books now, and his personality is persistent. Fortunately, his descendants have mostly picked up his better qualities, though it's a near thing with his grandson Peck Grene. If you asked Peter he'd no doubt claim all his qualities are better ones and he might offer to knock you down if you disagreed... As his daughter Melody once said, "He wouldn't really do it though..." Probably.
If you want to meet Peter, check out this link and pick out The Kissing Ring in which he makes his presence felt quite a lot. His first chronological appearance is in Midsummer Melody, which will be published in July 2018.


ABOUT THE BLOG

Sally is Sally Odgers; author, manuscript assessor, editor, anthologist and reader. She runs http://www.affordablemanuscriptassessments.com and Prints Charming Books. (Sally is me, by the way, and I am lots of other things too, but these are the relevant ones for now.)

The goal for 2017 was to write a post a day profiling the background behind one of my books; how it came to be written, what it's about, and any things of note that happened along the way. If you're an author, an aspiring author, a reader or just someone who enjoys windows into worlds, you might find this fun. The books are not in any special order, but will be assigned approximate dates, and pictures, where they exist. 2017 is now behind us, but I ran out of year before running out of books. As of February 18th 2018 I STILL haven't run out of books, but many of those still to come are MIA by which I mean I don't have copies and remember little about them. There are more new books to come, and I'll certainly showcase those, but in between times, I'm profiling some of my characters, just for a change. Thank you so much to everyone who's come along on this journey so far!