Halloween Blog Bash with Sarah A. Hoyt
If on the other hand you’re looking to see what my novels are like, there are excerpts of all of them available. Try my space opera, Darkship Thieves; my Daring Finds Mysteries series; my historical books; my Urban Fantasy Shifter Series (Draw One in the Dark and Gentleman Takes a Chance); or my Steampunk Magical British Empire series (Heart of Light, Soul of Fire and Heart and Soul); or my Musketeers Mysteries series (Death of a Musketeer, The Musketeer's Seamstress, The Musketeer's Apprentice, A Death in Gascony and Dying By the Sword). Give a look in at my first Shakespearean Fantasy series (Ill Met by Moonlight, All Night Awake and Any Man So Daring).
Since the giveaway today is for her Magical British Empire series, which is amazing and you should all run out and order them post haste, I've decided on those covers. Comment below on Sarah's blog or on the fabulosity of steampunk to be entered to win one of three Magical British Empire shirts. (Heart of Light - large, Soul of Fire - x-large, and Heart and Soul - large.)
The Dark And The Light by Sarah A. Hoyt
The first associations of childhood seem to remain in the brain, despite all the overlays. I grew up in the North of Portugal, and with some furloughs, remained there until I married an American at twenty two.
October to me means lowering grey skies, a damp feel in the air, roasted chestnuts sold by street vendors, and the smell of my grandmother’s Franklin stove getting fired up after its summer hiatus. And October ends not with Halloween and the cutesy-macabre of grinning skeletons and flickering jack of lanterns, but with All Saints Night, before All Saints Day.
All Saints Day is, of course, a Catholic day of observance. All Saints Night is the something darker and more serious upon which All Saints Day was superimposed: an awareness of our mortality, a reaching of an outstretched hand to the generations that have gone before us into the void. In the region I grew up in, the origins of the rituals are probably Celtic - the North of Portugal was an integral part of the Celtic common wealth - but I suspect the Celtic traditions are overlaid on even deeper, darker traditions, all the way back to hands painted in ochre on cave walls. All the way back to sacrifices given to the dark to make it recede again.
Portuguese celebrations are not as gaudy or enthusiastic as those in Mexico - though they indubitably spring from the same source. The Portuguese are more muted in their acceptance of what comes after life. Families dress in their best - mourning clothes only - and head to the cemetery to clean the tombs and light candles. They talk about resurrection and their dead relatives as though they’d meet them tomorrow around the corner. They remember old stories. And the night feels thin and reality shifts underfoot, so that you feel anything could happen.
The local cemetery is all white marble, centuries old - one of the tombs, found inside a walled-in part of the adjacent church has writing in an unknown language, and a plaque on the wall of the same church states it’s impossible to determine when it was first built. It seems to always have been there. The place is called Aguas-Santas (Holy Waters) after a fountain on which “our lady” appeared. The Our Lady referred to has nothing to do with Christianity, since the apparitions took place before even the Greeks and the Romans colonized the area, much less before the dawn of Christianity.
There might have been public illumination in the cemetery, but in my memories of childhood, there isn’t. That night is all candles - multiple candles burning on each tomb - the light reflecting off the faces of sad angels, of the out-reaching hands of shrouded-figure statues, glimmering on the faces of crying cherubs in the children’s cemetery.
One night, when I was six, bored by the adult talk, playing amid the tombs in the children’s cemetery, a lady in black stopped beside me and offered me her hand. It was dark, and she looked enough like my mom, I thought mom was leaving and I should follow.
I remember the feel of her hand, cold and dry, as it enveloped mine. She walked out of the children’s cemetery and past the adult one, all the way to the front gate. Where my family caught up with us and called for me. The lady tightened her hand grip and pulled harder - my parents had to physically hold me and pull me away.
For years, afterwards, I had dreams where they didn’t stop me. My parents speculated that the lady had lost a daughter and was trying to replace her, but I don’t think they ever knew. She was a stranger and never again seen in the area.
In my dreams, she takes me by the hand, away from the light, into a primeval dark no candles could dispel.
This was the first time I became aware of things going on beyond the safe reality of my sunlit life. And every time I write - even when it’s not horror - I’m stepping into that unknowable world and playing in the area that normal people can’t see.
Is it worth it? Yes. Even when I can’t see where I’m going, I feel as though I’m privy to worlds in my own mind that most other people are never allowed to know - and from the textured darkness, dark and a paradoxical kind of light emerge. A light I can reflect back on the candlelit world and - by it - see much more clearly.
Since the giveaway today is for her Magical British Empire series, which is amazing and you should all run out and order them post haste, I've decided on those covers. Comment below on Sarah's blog or on the fabulosity of steampunk to be entered to win one of three Magical British Empire shirts. (Heart of Light - large, Soul of Fire - x-large, and Heart and Soul - large.)
The Dark And The Light by Sarah A. Hoyt
The first associations of childhood seem to remain in the brain, despite all the overlays. I grew up in the North of Portugal, and with some furloughs, remained there until I married an American at twenty two.
October to me means lowering grey skies, a damp feel in the air, roasted chestnuts sold by street vendors, and the smell of my grandmother’s Franklin stove getting fired up after its summer hiatus. And October ends not with Halloween and the cutesy-macabre of grinning skeletons and flickering jack of lanterns, but with All Saints Night, before All Saints Day.
All Saints Day is, of course, a Catholic day of observance. All Saints Night is the something darker and more serious upon which All Saints Day was superimposed: an awareness of our mortality, a reaching of an outstretched hand to the generations that have gone before us into the void. In the region I grew up in, the origins of the rituals are probably Celtic - the North of Portugal was an integral part of the Celtic common wealth - but I suspect the Celtic traditions are overlaid on even deeper, darker traditions, all the way back to hands painted in ochre on cave walls. All the way back to sacrifices given to the dark to make it recede again.
Portuguese celebrations are not as gaudy or enthusiastic as those in Mexico - though they indubitably spring from the same source. The Portuguese are more muted in their acceptance of what comes after life. Families dress in their best - mourning clothes only - and head to the cemetery to clean the tombs and light candles. They talk about resurrection and their dead relatives as though they’d meet them tomorrow around the corner. They remember old stories. And the night feels thin and reality shifts underfoot, so that you feel anything could happen.
The local cemetery is all white marble, centuries old - one of the tombs, found inside a walled-in part of the adjacent church has writing in an unknown language, and a plaque on the wall of the same church states it’s impossible to determine when it was first built. It seems to always have been there. The place is called Aguas-Santas (Holy Waters) after a fountain on which “our lady” appeared. The Our Lady referred to has nothing to do with Christianity, since the apparitions took place before even the Greeks and the Romans colonized the area, much less before the dawn of Christianity.
There might have been public illumination in the cemetery, but in my memories of childhood, there isn’t. That night is all candles - multiple candles burning on each tomb - the light reflecting off the faces of sad angels, of the out-reaching hands of shrouded-figure statues, glimmering on the faces of crying cherubs in the children’s cemetery.
One night, when I was six, bored by the adult talk, playing amid the tombs in the children’s cemetery, a lady in black stopped beside me and offered me her hand. It was dark, and she looked enough like my mom, I thought mom was leaving and I should follow.
I remember the feel of her hand, cold and dry, as it enveloped mine. She walked out of the children’s cemetery and past the adult one, all the way to the front gate. Where my family caught up with us and called for me. The lady tightened her hand grip and pulled harder - my parents had to physically hold me and pull me away.
For years, afterwards, I had dreams where they didn’t stop me. My parents speculated that the lady had lost a daughter and was trying to replace her, but I don’t think they ever knew. She was a stranger and never again seen in the area.
In my dreams, she takes me by the hand, away from the light, into a primeval dark no candles could dispel.
This was the first time I became aware of things going on beyond the safe reality of my sunlit life. And every time I write - even when it’s not horror - I’m stepping into that unknowable world and playing in the area that normal people can’t see.
Is it worth it? Yes. Even when I can’t see where I’m going, I feel as though I’m privy to worlds in my own mind that most other people are never allowed to know - and from the textured darkness, dark and a paradoxical kind of light emerge. A light I can reflect back on the candlelit world and - by it - see much more clearly.