Indie Author Spotlight: Hannah Foster

Welcome to our first Indie Author Spotlight! Today, please welcome my friend and fellow writer, Hannah Foster!

About the Author

Hannah has authored two sweet short stories, "Ella Pursued" and "A Family for Christmas". My reviews of these stories will come out Thursday!

For now, though, let me introduce Hannah!

Hannah Foster was born and raised in North Carolina where she was homeschooled with her eight siblings. She attended college in Minnesota where she got her bachelor's degree in literature, learned to survive temperatures of below zero, and became Mrs. Foster. From a young age, Hannah has loved reading. Throughout her teen years, she also enjoyed journaling and blogging, but it wasn't till her mid-twenties that she discovered her love for penning her own stories. Hannah's desire is that the words she writes would bring hope and light in a dark world. Besides reading and writing, she also enjoys baking, watercolor painting, and all things vintage.

You can connect with Hannah at her blog, https://hannahfosterwrites.wordpress.com/, or on Instagram, @coffeebooksandteatime.

Now, time for a short Q&A and a guest post!

Q&A

What first inspired you to start writing?

I’ve often had a hard time expressing my feelings or thoughts aloud to people, but when I was younger I found that I could work through my emotions much better if I wrote it down. My love for journaling eventually led me to blogging and a little bit of poetry. But while I have dabbled with stories in the past, I didn’t really start writing fiction till I was 25. 

Do you plan to keep writing and publishing books?

I definitely plan to keep writing while I have the time and I have at least one more short story that I hope to publish in the next month or two, but I have no real definite plans after that. I have lots of stories in progress, some further along than others and some full length novels, but I just don’t know if I will actually get around to publishing them or not. I would like to, but at the same time my life will probably be changing drastically in six months, so I might not be able to put so much focus on writing then.

What is your current work-in-progress?

Oh dear! I honestly have lots! I have a novel that is with a few beta readers right now. Let’s Fly a Kite is Christian contemporary romance and has a small town feel with a dash of mystery. 

What is your favorite thing about writing?

I love seeing my stories come alive. So probably writing the first draft is my favorite part although I hate it when I get a tiny spark of inspiration, but then it dwindles after the first few pages. 

What theme(s) are the most important to you in books?

When I first started writing fiction, I really wanted to write about hope in the midst of grief. But the more I’ve written, the more I realized a lot of my stories also had a theme of facing fear, not running from it or letting it control you. So while a theme of grief and hope is still very dear to my heart I also want to encourage others to live fearlessly.

Writing Journey: Guest Post

I’ve already shared just a bit about how I got into writing. It mostly started with journaling. Much of my early years of journaling was pretty simple, like the things I did that day with my siblings. But as I got older, writing also became a way for me to work through emotions and scrambled up thoughts. Sometimes my head would get so full of thoughts, emotions, and ideas, but it was always such a mess inside my head, so writing became a way to organize the confusion and work through my problems. When I was sixteen I started my first blog, which I kept up with for ten years. 

As much as I enjoyed writing at this point, I really had no plans to ever publish a book. I’ve had passing ideas of publishing, but never fiction. When I was younger, my family used to visit an older lady who lived alone near us. She would tell us stories about when she was little and grew up on a farm. It was so interesting to hear her stories and it inspired me to want to write down the real stories from the ordinary people of today. While there are lots of biographies about famous people, there are ordinary people who also have beautiful extraordinary lives. It is not just the famous people who have a story worth sharing, but really every individual. 

While I have never pursued publishing a book like that, I have always enjoyed listening to the stories people have to share or turning my own life into stories. Some of my earlier blog posts were of adventures with my siblings. I also had several pen pals that I wrote to and would often enhance the things that happened so I could have fun stories to write to my friends. I suppose some of my friends have my first stories I ever wrote. 

In college, I kind of lost some of the zeal for writing because I had to write so many research papers and I hated that kind of writing. But after I graduated, I was in my first year of marriage and I was working at a Christian ministry thrift store. On the morning shifts, my boss would have a little devotional with us before we started our day. One day, he asked us what we would talk about if we were ever on a thirty-minute podcast? That got me thinking about what I am most passionate about and how I would want to use my voice to make a difference in the world. 

While I hate the idea of talking on a podcast, I realized I could use my voice through writing and one thing I am passionate about is the topic of grief and hope. Finding joy even when life throws us really hard things and encouraging others to cling to Christ no matter how tough the road gets. This is something I am passionate about because my whole family has walked through this together. I lost a brother when I was only twelve years old and consequently have watched each family member face suffering and grief differently. Some ways are good and some are not so good. Some of my siblings pushed God away from their life and some have drawn closer to God through it. That is why this topic of grief and hope are so precious to me. No matter how dark the road, God is still there and he still cares. So when I started writing fiction that was my main focus. I wanted to write about grief, hope, and joy in the midst of suffering. 

While my journey with fiction is almost another story that I don’t have time to write, it has been about a year and a half since I really started writing fiction in earnest. I have written a lot of stories and books in that time (only two short stories are published so far), but as I would edit and look back over the things I had written, I realized so many of my stories had a theme of battling fears. Fear is a huge theme in my own life. Some people say I am like Piglet from Winnie the Pooh because I can get really fearful about things, but I also end up facing it and pushing through. Most of the things are super silly or irrational, but it’s still a fear, yet God has grown me so much in learning to trust him and not be afraid. So I want to encourage others to face their fears too and not run away from them.

Thank you so much for reading today's spotlight! I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did!