Observance!

Christopher Hooton is a policy wonk turned sci-fi writer. How does that happen? “I had always liked writing from when I was a kid and in high school. I actually wrote my first book when I was 21 in undergrad,” he told Hollywood on the Potomac. “It was the summer between my junior and senior year that I wrote what was kind of a travel memoir that has since turned into an actual novel. I had finished this trip where I had gone backpacking for ten weeks in Germany and Central Europe after my freshman year of college; then, a couple years later, I just realized I should write what I remembered down somewhere. It was kind of a slow process over about nine, ten years. I also wrote a travel memoir about a trip with my parents to Peru. I had always enjoyed writing, but I’d never really seen myself as a writer, for whatever reason. It wasn’t until I started to travel, and would tell stories to friends of mine, from trips that I had done, that I realized that I had some good stories, that I had seen some interesting things, and that some of it could actually be written down. More than going into writing as, ‘This is what I’m going to do for my career,’ I’ve always just enjoyed it. I’ve always found it relaxing.”