Welcome to Spotlight Sunday. I’m Liz Gavin and today I’m thrilled to introduce you to Sarah Zolton Arthur.
LG: Where are you from? Michigan. By the bay.
LG: Do you have hobbies? What’s your favorite pastime? Do I have any hobbies? Well, I read for fun. So I suppose you could call that a hobby. Favorite pastime? I love going to see musicals with my sons. I used to go all the time when I was younger, before I became a mom. Now that they’re old enough (19 & 14) the three of us go together. Sometimes with the addition of my mom. Together, we’ve seen Diary of Ann Frank (not a musical), American Idiot, James and the Giant Peach, Man of La Mancha and Rent in the past year. We have Dear Evan Hanson scheduled for Spring. We’ll have to see what all we can get tickets for.
LG: If you had a TARDIS – or any other time machine – would you revisit any period of your life? If so, what advice would you give your younger self? Yes. I would definitely go back. I would tell myself not to listen to my mom and to definitely join the peace corps. My mom talked me out of joining. I would tell myself that you have to live your life the way that it makes you happy because life has a way of getting away from you and then you wake up one morning and realize that you’re no longer a spring chicken.
LG: Tell us about something your readers would be surprised to learn about you. Hmm… well, for one, I moved around a lot as a kid and went to twelve different schools by the time I was in 6th grade. Oh, and I met my late husband when he hacked my computer. It was the late 90s. We didn’t have the same protections on computers that they have now. I’d happened to be online at the same time he was testing this new hacker software for his job. He hacked me, saw my pictures and found me on a chat platform called ICQ. First he’d loaded all my pictures onto my desktop so I’d known I’d been hacked then the chat bubble popped up and he introduced himself and told me he hoped he hadn’t scared me. Obviously, I wasn’t scared.
LG: What was the kindest, nicest thing anyone has ever done to you? Was it unexpected? That’s easy. After my husband had passed away, since I’d been a young stay-at-home mom, everything was in his name. I had to move closer to my family but we still had a loan out on our car. The bank wouldn’t let me keep it because I had to change the plates to a new state and that wasn’t allowed with a loan on the car and it not being in my name. My best friend got her brother who worked at a car dealership to get his boss to donate a car to me. It was a gamechanger for me. I’m forever grateful for that act of kindness.
LG: How long have you been an author? Why did you decide to write? I’ve been a published author since 2015. I’ve been a writer all my life. I wrote because I had to. I wrote because moving around so much as a kid meant I was perpetually ‘the new kid’ and that’s usually a lonely place to be. I decided to try publishing because one of my boys is special needs and had (and still does have) a whole lot of appointments, therefore, I needed something with a flexible schedule.
LG: What was the inspiration(s) behind your bestseller title? That would be Bossman Undone, the first book in my MC romance series The Brimstone Lords MC. I lived in a small town in Kentucky with my husband (as do the hero and heroine of Bossman). He wasn’t in an MC, but loved bikes. We loved going out on his. Several years ago, I became a fan of MC romances and decided that I wanted to write one. The hero in that story, Bossman aka Beau is based on my hubby. All those jokes that Bossman cracks in the book came from my husband.
LG: Is there any message from your bestseller book with which you wanted readers to walk away? Good question. I write more for entertainment. I know some people want their heart ripped from their chest and stomped all over by a book. I guess when you experience that in real life, you no longer seek that in a story. But there is a running theme in my stories and that is you can find happiness after loss and heartbreak. It might take you a while and you’ll never be the person you were before the loss, but you can still have a good life. You just have to be open to receiving the happiness.
LG: Have you ever learned something surprising about yourself while researching and/or writing a book? If so, could you share it with us? Yes, I learned that my heart was strong enough NOT to explode after a 24 hour, no sleep writing marathon to get a story finished before it had to be at the editor – and consisting on nothing but regular coffee and coke zero. But I don’t recommend it.
You can find me on:
Twitter: @sarahez74
BookBub: @SarahZoltonArthur
GoodReads: Sarah Zolton Arthur
My newsletter: sarahzoltonarthur.com/subscribe
