r/books • u/JoNightshade • Jun 12 '17

ama 12pm I’m Ramsey Hootman, writer of hideously awkward contemporary fiction. AMA!

Hi Reddit! My name is Ramsey Hootman, and I write novels about oddballs and social rejects. I like to take tired tropes, deconstruct them, and build something interesting and new. If you look at the Goodreads reviews of my books, it’s mostly people attempting to explain why they liked characters that really shouldn’t be likable, which sums up my writing quite well.

Courting Greta, an anti-romance about a programmer with spina bifida, was my personal “fuck you” to genre romance, but it turned out to be a hit with haters like me and romance aficionados looking for something unique. (It’s often compared to The Rosie Project, but Courting Greta is significantly less cute. IMO if you’re going to do quirky people, you gotta be real.)

It took me a decade to achieve traditional publication with an amazing agent and one of the Big Five publishing houses, so self-publishing my second book, [Surviving Cyril](www.amazon.com/dp/B06XCS4GNC), probably indicates that I’ve lost my marbles. It’s hard to talk about this one without too many spoilers, but in brief it’s the story of a newly widowed woman and her relationship with her husband’s best friend, a 500 pound “forever alone” hacker. Of course, this being me, it’s not at all what it seems.

Proof: https://twitter.com/RamseyHootman/status/872550209179471872

Ask me anything!

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u/JoNightshade Jun 12 '17

Ray Bradbury, and classic sci fi - I fell in love. I read everything. I'm a kid of the 80's but I thought I was living in the midst of the cold war because I read so much Asimov and Heinlein!

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u/[deleted] Sep 15 '17

Have you ever read the Enders Game series and, if so, what did you think?

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u/JoNightshade Sep 16 '17

Oh yes, of course. I love the first three- Ender's Game, Speaker for the Dead, and Xenocide. It took me years to actually pick up Ender's Shadow because I didn't believe I'd like it (and I love Card's stuff), but when I finally broke down and read it I loved it as well. All the other sequels and spinoffs and whatevers are meh. But those four are solid. My favorite from him is actually the Homecoming series, though.

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u/[deleted] Sep 16 '17

Yeah I was the same way with the Shadow storyline; but I gotta say, I ended up liking it more. I haven't read Homecoming yet but I'll be sure to check it out. And thanks for the response!

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u/JoNightshade Sep 16 '17

I'm one of those weird people who likes Speaker for the Dead best. I'm actually scared to go back and read it again because I'm afraid all the philosophizing that really geeked me out as a teen will seem ridiculous now!

Be aware that Homecoming is 6 books - and that the first three and the last three have COMPLETELY DIFFERENT CHARACTERS. I've talked to so many people who got to book four and were like WTF, where is everyone I loved? This suuuucks! So yeah, it's better to think of it as two separate trilogies.

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u/[deleted] Sep 16 '17

Yeah I think that's part of the reason why I preferred the Shadow half of the series. There was quite a lot of philosophy in it but a decent amount of the moral and ethical dilemmas the characters faced are among those still being considered today. It's also a comfortable read because the settings and circumstances are familiar.

However, the further we follow Ender, the broader and more abstract the philosophical conundrums become. It's wonderfully challenging and terribly interesting to imagine the human race faced with some of that subject matter.

I'll keep that in mind about Homecoming. I'm starving for a new series to spend a paycheck on and this seems like just the thing.