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IT'S 2007!

Writer's picture: Sarah HogleSarah Hogle

Blogging is BACK. Time to straighten our side bangs and watch Mad Men.



Me in 2007. I loved that flip phone. :)
Me in 2007. I loved that flip phone. :)

(Blogging is probably not making a wide-scale comeback, but it would be nice to stretch beyond the character limit on Instagram...and I am not good at determining what sort of information is newsletter-worthy. Sometimes I just want to talk about Love is Blind, y'know.)


Blog Post No. 1 should probably be a little bit introductory, so here goes ~


I can't remember a time when I didn't want to be a writer. As a kid, I inhaled every book I could get my hands on and my idea of a perfect day was one spent on a bean bag in the library. I was very big into Sharon Creech's books (particularly Chasing Redbird and Walk Two Moons), the American Girl series (shout out to my favorites, Kirsten and Molly), Roald Dahl, the Baby-Sitter's Club series (shout out to Mallory and Claudia), the Dear America series (Anetka Kaminska and Hattie Campbell). I filled spiral notebooks with my own Dear America-style stories, illustrating them as well.


I was mostly focused on what all the characters were wearing and giving the girls long, elaborate names. Random side characters kept giving away their babies to the MCs because the MCs were, like, ten, so obviously they could not have kids of their own but how else was I gonna write about Annyabellia Rosettamaria dressing herself and baby Doravinia Elidea Nightingalia in matching lacy dresses with lace petticoats and lace bonnets? 10 year old Annyabellia was just living her life one day, journeying to the New World from Ireland or England or wherever, and some lady would run up to her on the ship with six month old twin girls and cry, "Please, kind stranger! Raise my babies for me! I miss Ireland and must return to my homeland right now, but the babies aren't allowed to come back with me. For reasons."


These things just happen in life!


Anyway, back to the books that made me:


Midnight Blue by Pauline Fisk, Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, and Howl's Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones were perhaps the three most influential books I've ever read. Fisk's strange world, Austen's humor, and Jones's whimsical magic were all so delightful and compelling to me when I first read them long ago that they infused themselves into my writing DNA, and without these three specific books as influences on my style and voice, I can't even guess what my own books would look like.


My very very favorite thing to write is strange magic. Magic that doesn't always make sense, that does as it wishes, that is gently chaotic and full of surprises. As much as I love my first three novels, it was while sketching out my fourth novel, Old Flames and New Fortunes, that I felt I could really start to spread my modern-fantasy-lite, cottagecore wings and create a world that feels like me. Like if I were unspooled into a string of 90,000 words. This is even more true for its sister book, The Folklore of Forever, which is concentrated Essence of Sarah Hogle. I wanted TFOF to be so personally satisfying to make that if it ended up being my last-ever published novel (hopefully, however, this is not the case!), I would feel like I had fully Pulled Bodily From Myself That Which Needed to be Written, and could rest easy. This mission has been completed.


Any time I give a character an element of myself, I have this feeling of "Ahhh, now that's better" because I've put it into words, I can look at it on the page and sort of make sense of it. A trait that Zelda Tempest, the heroine of TFOF, inherited from me is a propensity for typing out words in her head. I've done this pretty much ever since I learned home row in typing class. If there's a loose word or sentence running around my brain, I pull up my invisible mental keyboard and type, envisioning where each letter sits on the keyboard, like this:





If that makes any sense at all.


When I was little, before I learned how to type, I instead imagined words split into columns of two letters,


LI

KE

TH

IS.


And I had this thing about them needing to be even. If a line had an odd number of letters, like


TH

IS

ON

E


I would have to keep going to make it even:


TH

IS

ON

EI

SN

OW

EV

EN


I remember sitting in the car with my family as a kid, with one of my parents asking me a question I couldn't pay attention to because I was too busy internally spelling it out and evening the columns. And now that I have subjected you to this odd little habit of mine, I will say that it felt very NICE to put this typing-out thing into a book. I don't know why. It was simply incredibly satisfying to type out how I see words inside my head, like I did in this passage here:


Magic
Magic


Anyway, I'll wind this first post down, and explore more of what makes Zelda like me, and not like me, along with all of my other characters, in future posts. And also how I got into romance. And how badly I bombed my first queries. And about all of the books I've written that will never see the light of the day beyond me pulling up snippets on here and making fun of them.





🐣


Current favorites: Cinderella Boy webtoon, Resident Alien, deciding to make a blog instead of being productive in other ways.




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