Interview with Hoodie622
Thanks for taking the time to do this, Hoodie! I know you’ve been there for the full drama of everything, but let’s start by you telling us how your love of Sanditon began?
H
Well, I don’t think I quite count as “the full drama of everything” because I wasn’t here for the campaign! I completely missed it! But I was present from Season 1 onward. During February, 2021, I was teaching (kindergarten!) online and we weren’t really going out much, so I subscribed to the Masterpiece add-on for Amazon Prime because I wanted to re-watch the 2006 Jane Eyre, which is my favorite adaptation of that novel. After I did that, Sanditon came up in my list of suggestions. I clicked play because what the hell else did I have to do during a pandemic? I got to the end and yelled at my screen, “What The F*#$! That’s not how Jane Austen is supposed to end!” I looked for Season 2 on Amazon. Nothing. I immediately googled “Sanditon season 2” and found out it had been canceled. I felt betrayed, honestly. I loved Charlotte and her plucky spirit so much and I wanted her to get her happy ending! I just gave up on the whole thing and moved on with life. Of course, by that time the campaign to #SaveSanditon was already successful, but I did not know that! Nothing came up in my Google search about the #SaveSanditon campaign.
LH
Oh I’d always thought you were involved in the campaign, I hadn’t realised!
H
Interestingly, even though I really enjoyed Season 1, I was not inspired to write Fan Fiction to “fix” that ending.
LH
Something you have in common with all the Heybourne writers it seems - well Janice has gone there a bit I suppose, but not to change the ending…
LH
That’s funny! I do the same.
H
I knew absolutely nothing about the campaign to #SaveSanditon and did not know that Theo James had refused to return, so I was very surprised by the opening. But I had never been a die-hard Sidlotte fan. It was always Charlotte’s story for me. First I thought, “Hooray, now Stringer has a chance!” I thought he might somehow go out and make his fortune so that he could marry our Austen heroine - because they don’t marry stone masons. It turns out that he did do that, but off screen. And THEN this adorably cute, obviously dorky man in a yellow waistcoat walked around a desk and started flirting with our heroine and my heart thumped on Charlotte’s behalf and I said to my screen, “Damn, girl. Get you some of THAT!” Rose and Ben created such chemistry between these characters! It’s magical. By the picnic episode I was absolutely team #Heybourne and screeching at my screen like a teenager!
LH
It was definitely a great ensemble cast.
H
Every once in a while, a show comes along that has characters you simply can’t let go of. The Sanditon characters are those characters for me. It is such an example of what excellence can look like. Excellent writing, set design, costume design, cinematography, directing, and of course fabulous acting, in all roles, from top to bottom!
The end of season 2 absolutely gutted me. I still had no idea about the campaign to save it and no idea that there was such a wonderful online community. I just could not accept it and sat down and started a “fix it” fic for my own sanity, which turned out to be the first five chapters of After the Storm. I wrote those chapters in a matter of days and posted it on my very old, very dusty fanfiction.net account.
LH
So you were writing before you’d connected with others online? That’s so interesting. The need to fix it really was burning in you, huh?
H
It really was! I had written a decade or so earlier and had really enjoyed it but then…..life. And nothing had really inspired me. Heybourne did, and so I thought “Why not write this and see if anyone else hated this cliffhanger as much as I did?!” It turns out, a lot of people were also burning to bring Heybourne together. People were reading Susan Firth’s fic on fanfiction.net at the time and so there was kind of a built-in audience for After the Storm. It was through fanfiction.net that someone mentioned #Sanditon on Twitter. I started a Twitter account and that’s when I finally learned the lore of the #Sisterhood, the sand art, the campaign, and the renewal. I had so much fun wading through a year’s-worth of posts. I posted my fic to Twitter, started an Ao3 account and the rest, as they say, is history. There is not a more welcoming group of people than this fandom!
LH
I came to the show really late and have been really welcomed, everyone is lovely.
So your love of the show and the fandom shines through, tell me more about why you write Heybourne?
It is easy to give a flippant answer like, “Have you seen this man? Honestly. How does he not fill your dreams?” In some ways, that is true. I am a #Benthusiast, absolutely. But the less flippant and more truthful answer is the subtlety of writing and acting on this show. The writers achieved the perfect balance of rich and sparse. The characters so often say the opposite of what they mean and show their inner feelings “with a look” rather than words. They imply backstory in very few words, without the time to develop it. The subtlety leaves chasms of space for fic writers to imagine the thoughts of the characters, continue conversations, and flesh-out relationships. It was also quite rushed, which also leaves gaps for explanations and longer conversations. GatHeart told you that Sanditon is “perfectly imperfect.” I love that description. My reason for writing them is much the same.
LH
Oh completely, when GatHeart said that I thought she absolutely nailed it.
I started writing Heybourne because of the unspoken passion between them. Tree Kiss absolutely knocked me over. We already know Charlotte is passionate from two seasons of her amazing boldness and determination. Tree Kiss showed that she had found someone of equal passion. If Mrs. Wheatley had not interrupted, Xander would have proposed then and there. After going from tree kiss to that gut-wrenching ending at Trafalgar House, I was literally dreaming these characters. I couldn’t get them, or their passion, out of my head. When I say that the fic simply became a way for me to deal with it, I really do mean it. After the Storm was therapy for Hoodie.
LH
Ha! Yes I talk about that all the time with LushnessJackson, how the writing is therapy.
H
It was also a way for me to try to get my fiction writing feet under me again after more than a decade of writing only informational graduate school papers.
LH
It’s so exciting how this fandom is encouraging people either back into fiction writing or to start for the first time ever.
H
Yes! We have recently had a slew of first time authors and the Sandition fandom is such a welcoming place. That is not the case in all fandoms.
LH
So what is the easiest part of writing? The hardest?
For me, the easiest part is the dialogue. These characters are so alive for me and they start speaking in my head. After I jot down the dialogue, I rewatch scenes from the show to really try to get the tones of the actors and the word choices of the writers in my head and tweak what I wrote until I think it really sounds like them. That is why, when someone tells me I nailed the voices, like some commenters did with my recent Journey from London, I feel quite gratified!
LH
Yes, that's the nicest feedback to receive, isn’t it?
H
It really is!
The hardest part for me is descriptions and tying it all together into a coherent story. Scenes pop into my head, and I write them down. That makes writing drabbles or short stories like Missed Opportunities or By the Fireside fairly easy. But for my longer works such as Two Weeks in London or From Here to There, tying it all together is by far the most difficult. It is very important to me that what is essentially a novel hangs together as such, with references at the end to what happened at the beginning, foreshadowing, rising and falling action, etc. I did not start publishing Two Weeks in London until it was nearly finished, because I do not write linearly.
LH
It creates a lot more freedom not writing linearly, doesn’t it? Which is the biggest advantage of not publishing til you’ve drafted everything. Well that and not being under pressure!
H
Yes. I agree! I will put something in a chapter and then think “Oh, I could put foreshadowing for that in Chapter 3.” Or, I will realize that I want the characters to end up in a certain place and I need to go back and edit an earlier chapter to make that happen. That is also what made writing From Here to There so difficult! It is the first (and only!) time that I published a story, knowing it would be multiple chapters, without having the entire thing nearly written (or even planned!). I am not a fast writer and so From Here to There took fourteen months to write!
LH
I think that’s brave, but then I would say that as I’m a plotter not a pantser! So I do always have a plan.
How do you go about planning your stories?
H
I don’t plan them as much as start writing them and see where they take me. I will make notes to myself as I go in a separate document. It is sort of my “what if” document. As I am writing, I will think of something that my current writing could lead to. I don’t want to forget, so I’ll take a moment and go to my “what if” document and get it down. Then, I return to what I am currently working on.
I also do not write linearly (except for From Here to There). I will write something for the middle, then something for the end, then go back and figure out how to get the characters where I want them.
LH
How do the characters form in your mind? Do you hear them telling you what to do or what they want to say?!
H
I absolutely hear these characters in my head. It is fading now, but for at least two years it was not uncommon for me to dream in Heybourne, roll over, pick up my laptop and get it down before closing it and going back to sleep (or not!).
LH
What research do you do for your stories?
I do ridiculous amounts of research. Sometimes, I just have to stop and write. For Two Weeks in London, I had to learn about the Sons of Africa, the sea voyage from Antigua to England, the most popular stories and operas at the time, coaching inns, the Chancery courts of the era, LGBTQ+ history during the Georgian period, different forms of Caribbean English and, most disturbingly, the horror that was the sale and enslavement of human beings. But research was especially important in that story because as a white, cis-gendered American, I wanted to do my utmost to handle the details as respectfully as I could. I wanted to remain respectful while still creating the characters the way I envisioned them in my version of a possible Season Three.
LH
You did a really good job with that.
H
Thank you. That is kind of you to say.
LH
That’s funny! The algorithms don’t know what to make of us Heybourne writers!!
What’s the scene from the show that you go back to again and again?
H
My favorite scene is the silent (but not at all silent!) forty-seven seconds outside of Trafalgar House when they return from retrieving Augusta. I’ve no idea how our fabulous leads didn’t get a BAFTA for that one! I have tried to write the characters’ thoughts for that scene so many times, but I simply can’t match in words the perfection that these two actors portray with only looks. I find it absolutely mesmerizing!
But for writing, I go back again and again to whatever scene has the tone I want to match. For example, when I was writing Journey from London, I watched the scene where Xander retrieves Sam and the scenes in episodes 3 and 4 where they are having their brotherly teasing and jabbing. I really needed to work on Sam’s tone in that piece and so watching those scenes helped me to revise his dialogue until it sounded like him. When I wrote One Minute Seven Seconds and a Lifetime of Regret, I think I watched that hand touch 200 times at every slow motion speed available!
LH
Good old slow mo!
What are you most proud of having written?
H
Two Weeks in London, without question. I love it because it is truly a novel and hangs together like one. I set out to write it and I achieved even better than what I set out to do. I found a tone as a writer that I was proud of. I was proud of the research I did to make it believable. I was also proud that I was able to get a lot of things “right” that showed up in Season 3! Even though my Sam is bi-sexual in that story, his conversations with Xander ended up being very much like they were on the show–as foils for one another in many ways but both with the same sense of integrity. I had Heybourne holding hands at the opera and I had Georgiana and Lockhart battling it out in court. I had G’s mom show up, too! I was really proud that I was able to assemble so many of the spoilers and hints we had into something coherent and enjoyable for people to read.
LH
Because I came to the fandom late I hadn’t realised when I read Two Weeks when you’d written it, so I had thought that it was a really interesting variation. I hadn’t appreciated the way you were predicting the characters!
H
I jumped into that one as soon as I was finished with Portrait of a Child in the summer of 2022. I was absolutely in the Heybourne zone and it was flying out of me. It took me all of four months to have it mostly written. Also, it was summertime so I had more free time on my hands. There were days that I wrote for 8-10 hours!
LH
Wow! That’s a real luxury isn’t it? And I love the days like that when it feels like it’s flowing and the words are flying onto the page.
You mentioned an old ff.net account, so do you write in other fandoms? If so, what are they and why are you drawn to them?
H
Not currently. I wrote a bit back from about ‘08-’11 and not anything I am particularly proud of, but then I had a child and went to graduate school.
LH
What scene by another writer (fanfic, screenwriter, or any writer actually!) are you most jealous of and wish you’d written?
I get jealous when I read a passage that is both evocative and succinct. I struggle with that. We have several writers in our fandom, such as Jaysie1967 and BillberryLane who are good at that! Another thing I love about our writers is that we all have strengths that make our writing unique. String_of_Stars creates such amazing original characters that enrich the lives of our Sanditon favorites even more! I adore her Heybourne scene in the church in Willingden in the “Un-” series. And Augusta and Simeon have such a complex, stirring relationship in A Remarkable Young Woman. Elanor_Tinuviel gave us staff at Heyrick Park who are now just part of canon, like Mrs. Birch, the cook. PeasemealBrose has this amazing way of creating absolute fire between Charlotte and Alexander within a T rating. It is ridiculously hot, even though they are not physically doing much. She layers them with such emotion and longing. I mean, the “water basin” scene after the bullet pudding - come on! What writer in the fandom isn’t jealous of that one!? This is also the first fandom that convinced me that modern and cross-over AU could be fantastic. I never enjoyed reading those in any other fandom. The Plan Bee by Eviejean and Tale as Old as Time by Downagravelroad convinced me that in the hands of brilliant authors, these genres can be amazingly enjoyable to read. I also love seeing other writers grow to become amazing. Aries614 is an example of this. She had the confidence to step off a cliff and into a giant first fic with Profoundly. Over the course of it, we got the pleasure of seeing her find her writing wings and take off! Her wedding chapter at the steward’s cottage is one of my favorites. I like it so much more than my own!
LH
Aww that’s lovely, great shoutouts!
H
I hope those I didn’t shout out won’t be offended! There are so many wonderful stories in this fandom. I’ve not read another fandom that consistently has the quality that we do. I guess that’s what happens when a bunch of people who like Jane Austen come together!
LH
What is the essence of good writing, for you? What do you always hope people experience in yours?
Good writing is absorbing. There are many ways to achieve it - with amazing descriptions, snappy dialogue, spot-on characterizations, wonderful character insights - just to name a few. Each of the writers I mentioned above achieves it in different ways.
LH
Yes it’s incredible that there’s so much variety of styles in this fandom among the great writers. There’s no way you can compare DAGR and Bilberry Lane, but they’re both extraordinary writers.
H
But no matter how the writer achieves it, when you get done, if you’ve been transported completely into their world for the time you were reading, that is good writing to me. I hope people experience that with mine. If they do, then the writing is worth it. Helping people escape from this crazy world and into another for even a few brief moments is something I can contribute to make the world a bit better place to be.
LH
That’s a great way to put it, Hoodie, and thanks for sharing your work with us to keep the love of Sanditon alive. And thanks for taking the time to answer my questions, I’ve been having such fun chatting to people and hearing about different writers techniques and motivations. Cheers!
H
The pleasure was mine! Cheers!
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