Its All In the Game with Sarah A. Hoyt

Blog Tour-- Darkship Renegades

 In this smaller world of Internet communication, it is hard to explain how I found Sarah. I think I was wandering through a "how to publish as an Indie site" when I found this interesting blog called According to Hoyt. I virtually met Sarah and her cohorts of readers and writers who are working on making Space Opera and other Sci-fi and Fantasy genres fun and interesting. Instead of worlds of despair, Sarah and others are creating stories of humans (and other beings) who work towards better lives.

Darkship Renegades  is a continuation of Darkship series and the sequel to Darkship Theives, winner of the Prometheus Award.


This book can be found on Baen and Amazon.com.

As a special treat, Sarah has answered some of my pressing questions. I want to thank her in advance for taking her tour to this blog.

Sarah A. Hoyt

Why did you start writing?

 I actually don't know.   I don't recall a conscious decision to start writing.  When I was very young, I was also very sickly, the result of being born premature.  So I was in bed a lot, and because of the philosophy of illness at the time, I didn't have many visitors.  At any rate, I was the youngest in my extended family by a good ten years, so there weren't many relatives my age who could visit, and the neighbor kids would often forget me, I spent so much time indoors, being ill.

My brother used to come in and read me books, but of course he couldn't do it all the time.  My earliest memories are of making up stories when I was left alone.  (Sometimes I built places and cars out of legos and "played" the stories.)
When I started writing it just seemed natural to write those stories.  I think I was six when I realized people got paid for this.  Of course, I didn't realize how little they got paid.

Who are your favorite writers? And why?

It's... complicated.  It's very hard, for instance, to evaluate favorite writers growing up with favorite writers of the people working now.  Growing up first my favorite science fiction writer was Clifford Simak.  This changed to Robert A. Heinlein, who you could say had the greatest influence in making me who I am (including an American.)  I was well into my thirties before I dared disagree with RAH.  Now, even though we have points of disagreement (he believed in Malthus, for one) it's sort of like disagreeing with your dad.  You still love him, and you still have respect for his opinions, and you see how he "got" there, even when you think he's wrong, wrong, wrong.  So he's still a favorite and often re-read.  In the same vein, so is Agatha Christie for mystery -- though I never took her opinions seriously, except about how people work at the individual level.  It really is an eye opener how such a shrewd observer of human nature could be so blinkered on the social stuff.  But I don't evaluate her objectively.  At this point her writing is comfort food, and returning to a safe place.

Of writers still working today, my favorite is Terry Pratchett.  I also enjoy F. Paul Wilson and (recently dead) Diana Wynne Jones. Pratchett because he touches something deep about human nature, F. Paul Wilson because he has an uncanny ability to create the eery (And I don't even like horror) and Diana Wynne Jones for her characters and the way her world building mixes the mundane and the uncanny.

I could list another dozen writers, but most of them got on my radar with one or two books, then vanished forever.  Such is publishing for the last ten years.

Have you ever had a writing partner? Who? What projects?

Yes.  In both cases, it was to help with specialized knowledge.  I have this ... dysfunction, even with my own worlds, but worse with other people's.  No matter how much I've read a series and how much I like it, if asked to write in the world, my head blanks all the details I need.  So I wrote If I Lose Thee for the Strange New Worlds (Star Trek) contest with my friend Rebecca Lickiss, who supplied all the details.

Then when I was invited to write a story set in Mercedes Lackey's Valdemar world, I was talking my idea over with my friend Kate, and I realized she could fill all those holes that had suddenly developed in my memory (er... dur... how does magic WORK?) so we decided to collaborate.

In both cases, my partners did way more than provide details, of course, and the stories are true collaborations. The ideas were hammered out between us, and we passed the stories back and forth.

Kate and I now have about 40k words in that world.  We're going to take the boys and put them in our own magical world (the part of Valdemar we set them in is very portable, and it's best to avoid entanglements) and probably put out a series of short novels staring Ree and Jem.

How do you decide on the type of stories you write?

hahahahha!  Oh, wait.  You're serious.

The process of selection goes something like this:
Story idea shows up.
I spend days ignoring it.
Story idea is still there.
Write down idea and shove scrap of paper in desk drawer.  Hope that will shut it up, because, you know, now I can't lose it.

Idea is still there.

Tell myself why story/book is a REALLY bad idea.

Character for story idea shows up in head and demands to be written.

Explain that I have a ton other stories waiting that are better than THAT.
Character starts showing up in my dreams.

Give up and write the damn story.

How do you pick your characters?

Still serious?  See above.  The little sobs tend to show up, fully formed.  

Sometimes, of course, they don't tell me little things, like what their name is, but I can't write them till I find the "right" name.  Thank heavens for behindthename.com.

Yes, there are instances in which -- a story I get requested to write; a novel that is under contract -- where I have to build a character, logically, Pygmalion style, and hope it all coalesces and they come alive.  But, most of the time?  It resembles nothing so much as possession.

Do you have any writing rituals?

I TRY to get out of bed before starting to write.  This, mostly, because unless I happen to have the laptop by the bed, I might end up writing long hand on the sheets.  Okay, the straight answer is "no."  Though sometimes, like every other writer, I need music to write to.

Did you ever want to have another career?

I have taught off and on, and I enjoy it about as much as writing -- though I never expected to, so it wasn't really something I WANTED to do as such.  

(Un)Fortunately I'd need to jump through so many hoops and go back to school to be allowed to teach in public schools and I'm not in the mood for it.  And teaching Community College has morphed into a bunch of paperwork, which I ALSO don't have the patience for.

I was pretty good as a multilingual translator, but I hated it with a purple passion, and I'm now too rusty at all other languages (even Portuguese.)
So....  um....  No. 

Panster or Planner?

Yes.  :)  I started as a pantser, evolved into a detailed plotter.  Then somehow, without explanation, novels started arriving which only let me see a chapter ahead.  I don't LIKE it, but it seems to make for stronger books? 

Did your schooling and/or younger life prepare you for writing?

In the sense that it prepared me to write MY books.  I mean, our books are the products of ourselves, and we're the product of our experiences.  But in general terms: if you want to write, read a lot.  Read everything.  If you must get a degree, get it in something lucrative, and something you can do easily, so you can save your energies for writing.  Creative writing degrees are by and large useless, and you might have to unlearn some of it to be successful.

Tell me about your latest project.

This blog tour is to advertise Darkship Renegades, which will come out... in less than a week.  After that, in March, there is A Few Good Men, the last book I've actually finished.  It's about a revolution and the men who get caught in the middle of it, and how they rise to the occasion.  The book I'm stuck in the middle of, partly because the series has been on hiatus so long, and partly because I've decided to get sick with everything possible, one after the other, is Noah's Boy, the third in the shifter series.  After that comes Through Fire, the sequel to A Few Good Men.

I'm also about ready to finish Witchfinder, the novel I've been writing on my blog, one chapter a week.  And I'm editing a drawered novel, Shadow Gods to bring out indie sometime in December or January.

Sleep, as you can tell, happens to other people.