P. C. Hodgell is the author of the God Stalker series currently being reissued by Baen: God Stalk and Dark of the Moon in the omnibus The God-Stalker Chronicles; Seeker’s Mask and To Ride a Rathorn in Seeker’s Bane. The fifth in the series, Bound in Blood, was recently released. Pat lives, teaches, knits, and falls off horses in Wisconsin.

Are you a bookgeek?

Well, I love books, but I’ve only just discovered your website thanks to Jennie. I’ll definitely follow it in future.

Do you have an audience in mind when writing?

I was going to say, “Not really,” and I didn’t in the beginning when I only wrote what pleased me. But it occurs to me that now while I still try primarily to meet my own standards, I’m very aware of the readers who have been loyal to me for so many years and who, frankly, know my past work better than I do (I hate to re-read it). When they say they want to see more of a particular character or to have some issue addressed, I listen. Often, they put me back on track when I’ve lost it.

What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever been given (and do you follow it?)

That would probably be something I was told in Clarion: never give up, and I haven’t, despite years when no one would publish me. It’s very painful to be orphaned in mid-series and hard to get back on track, but over twenty years I’ve managed to do it three times.

Where do you write?

Thanks to my laptop, I can work almost anywhere in the house. Mostly, I curl up in a comfortable chair, but there’s also the back room with its view of the fish pond or the upstairs glass studio looking down on the whole side yard. I love my house and yard.

Which authors (fantasy or otherwise) do you find most insipiring as a writer?

I have trouble reading fantasy when I’m writing it, so I often turn to favorite historical novels, for example Cecilia Holland’s The Earl or Gillian Bradshaw’s Island of Ghosts, or anything by Mary Renault. What I want is that clear, singing style to inspire my own prose when it seems to have gone stale in my head. Also, good historicals are like fantasy in that they create worlds to which we have little other access.

What are you working on at the moment?

The sixth novel in my God Stalker series, the books I became a writer in order to write. Finally Jame is going to graduate from military school, assuming the institution survives that long.

Has your writing process changed over time?

When I started, I didn’t have a computer, so everything was written long hand on theme paper and edited literally by cut and paste, or rather cut and tape. You can take a razor blade to my first two manuscripts and see all the drafts sandwiched together like plywood. I still write all my first drafts on scraps of paper, trying to get at the story through as thin a filter as possible. Bit by bit I’m getting better at composing on a computer, but it isn’t my native palette.

Otherwise, from the beginning I’ve tried to write two pages or 500 words a day. Usually I write a very rough draft on scratch paper in the morning and then spend the rest of the day, off and on, refining it.

As an author, you are very available to your fans through the internet, LiveJournal, etc, was this a conscious decision or something that came about more organically?

I would say the latter. Basically, I’m a story teller. I like to tell my stories in progress to an audience to get feedback and to sustain my enthusiasm for them. I know the common wisdom is that one isn’t supposed to do that for fear of talking oneself out, but it works the other way for me. Also, I’ve been a teacher for years with my personal stories as my main stock in trade. The urge to teach is always there, even if that leads to a certain amount of self exposure. To write or to teach is to live your life turned inside out for the benefit of others. It’s to live without a skin. Plus, I miss having a writing community. Since I retired, I’m fairly isolated. The internet and LJ help to counteract that.

Jame, and the world she lives in, are filled with arresting (and often highly entertaining) details. Do you have all of Rathillien fully formed in your head? All of Jame’s story?

I know the general arc of the story, and fill in the details as I go along. If I’d waited to know everything, I never would have started. Some of my best ideas come to me when I’m doing research to explain something or other. For example, how to foreshadow an earthquake in a pre-industrial world? That led to the discovery that the Chinese still watch catfishes’ behavior as a predictor. Combine that with the walking catfish in Florida and you end up with catfish who leave the river and head for the hills before a quake. Otherwise, someone once compared my brain to a jackdaw’s nest. I’ve been collecting interesting details, just in case, as long as I can remember, hoping some day to make use of them.

Finally, Jennie asks: I remember reading, somewhere years ago, that there might possibly be a book version of your Ivanhoe thesis. Obviously, it would be fantastic to have another “Hodgell” to read and recommend, is there still a chance of it happening?

I have something like 100,000 words of notes on the Ivanhoe fantasy sequel. The outline by itself comes to 60 pages. Also, I have several chapters, started when it looked as if no one would every pick up Jame’s series again. I still mean to get back to it, but obviously it’s going to be a major undertaking. At the moment it’s one long story that has to be broken up (somehow) into a trilogy. When I finish Jame’s story, I’ll go back to it.

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