P.C Hodgell
Oshkosh, WI
USA
Good morning, Pat, and welcome to Vision and Verse.
What have you written?
Ten novels and assorted short stories, most of them part of the same fantasy series:
God Stalk
Dark of the Moon
Seeker’s Mask
To Ride a Rathorn
Bound in Blood
Honor’s Paradox
The Sea of Time
Gates of Tagmeth
By Demons Possessed
Deathless Gods
What is your favorite genre to write?
Fantasy
Favorite food.
Currently, sushi
Tea or coffee?
Both
Pizza or ice cream?
Neither
Wine or beer or soda or what?
Irish Coffee, Sparkling Ice
Where would you like to visit?
Wales
Favorite musical artist.
Randy Rainbow
Do you listen to music when you write?
Yes
What?
Classical music. WPR is the sound track of my life.
What makes you laugh?
Absurdities and cat videos
Favorite work of art or sculpture.
Anything by Rodin, especially The Gates of Hell.
A ceramic sculpture created by my father called “Bringing Her Home to Mother” (Young man with “Mom” tattooed
On his shoulder inside a heart and a lovely, naked young woman perched on his shoulder.
How old were you when you started writing?
I wrote snatches of stories as a child while gorging on Victorian novels and comic books, but didn’t get serious about it as a career until I’d earned my M.A. in English Literature at UMM and was about to enter the Ph.d. program there (eventual dissertation: The Nonsense of Ancient Days: Sources of Scott’s Ivanhoe).
By that time, I had much of my fantasy series (aka my life’s work) sketched out in my imagination but had been hesitant to commit it to paper.
Between degrees, I took off a year from academia, wrote some stories, went to the Clarion Writer’s Workshop, and gained the confidence there to embark on my first novel, God Stalk.
Do you plan out your book with outlines and notecards? Or just write?
Lots of outlines, lots of notecards. With God Stalk, which consists of many interwoven subplots, I created a wall chart to keep track of what happened when and how various plot points interacted. I still fall back on this tactic at least once per novel.
Describe your perfect evening.I have a new knitting project in hand (preferably one that will take a long time), yarn up to my knees (there are seventy boxes of it in the house), a cat on my lap, an Irish coffee beside me, and one of my favorite novels playing on audible or a good movie on TV.
Where do you get your inspiration?From five main sources:
(1) Hands-on research. When I was young, I studied judo and aikido. While I was never much good at either, I learned enough to write about a warrior class to whom the martial arts are very important. Later on, my heroine Jame accidentally blood-bound a rathorn (think in terms of an ivory-clad, carnivorous, bad-tempered unicorn). While I have loved horses all my life, I hadn’t up until then had much practical experience with them. At 50, I bought a green-broke Saddlebred mare, helped to train her, and fell off more times that I can count. She was indeed a kindred spirit to Jame’s rathorn, Death’s-head, and taught me more than I probably needed to know.
(2) Second-hand research.
Non-fiction books are a
wonderful source of inspiration for a fantasy writer. To give just one example, I wanted to write about an earth-quake. First, how to foreshadow such an event? The library provided When the Snakes Awake, about how animals sense coming quakes. The Chinese look to the behavior of catfish in a tub of water. Add that to the strange walking catfish of Florida, and a fantasy writer gets fish that leave the river and head for the hills before a quake, coming back only after the last shock. In my story, the tremors themselves are caused not by plate tectonics but by monstrous serpents lying under the riverbed. And what happens during the quake itself? I found an old government pamphlet about the New Madrid quakes (1811-1812) that were strong enough to ring church bells in Boston. Islands sank and rose in the Mississippi. The river itself flowed backward in some places. Oh, so many wonderful details, all true but more fantastic than I could ever make up.
(3) Consulting with experts. I used to go on road trips with a geologist to various national parks, also to science fiction conventions. She would point out interesting natural features that I could incorporate into my fantasy world.
(4) Other writers. Read a lot. Read widely.
(5) Art and crafts. I have about 4500 different skeins of yarn, all the colors of the earth, sea, and sky. Working with it stimulates my visual imagination. Studying art in general will do that too.
What do you do when you get a writer's block?
Suffer. Writer’s block is a recurrent feature of my career. In the past, it has only lasted for a few days. Now, with the last novel in my series, it has lasted for over a year. I don’t know how to get past it. This is agony.
Who is your favorite author?
There are so many of them. It depends on my mood at the time.
Last book you read.
I’m currently reading These Burning Stars by Bethany Jacobs for book club. While well-written, it’s a bit hard to get into because all the characters so far seem to be psychopaths.
What would you do for a living if you weren’t a writer?
I was a university professor for many years. Some of it was all right when they let me choose my subjects (“Wisconsin Gothic” was my signature composition course), but I retired as soon as I could.
Who is the one person who has influenced your personal life the most and why?
That would be my father. My parents divorced when I was two, leaving me to be raised by my maternal grandmother in the 133 year-old house where I still live, so they weren’t personally in my life a lot. However, I really looked up to them both. Dad in particular was the consummate artist, as you can see on my website, pchodgell.com, my tribute to him. He taught me to appreciate creativity, dedication, and professionalism.
On the other hand, he was a hard act to follow. The last art class I took in college was taught by him. He looked at a set of collage bookplates for The Lord of the Rings that I had spent many hours making and asked, “But was it worth it?” Since then I have mostly stuck to crafting images with words, or yarn, or stained glass. I don’t know, though, if either he or my mother ever read my novels.
If you could sit down and have a conversation with ONE person, living or dead, real or fictional, who would it be and why?
My father. We never really talked, and now I regret that.
What advice would you give someone who aspired to be a writer?
Hope for a good life, but be prepared for a hard one. Writers aren’t all best sellers. The only things you can control are being true to yourself and to your craft.
Do you have some links for us to follow you?
I don’t do much on social media. LiveJournal@tagmeth sometimes. And then there’s my website. Readers who want to learn more should google me.
