Anthony Aberford’s Writing Journey Continued
Anthony Aberford’s Writing Journey Continued
Welcome to Anthony Aberford’s Writing Journey Continued, another in the occasional series of guest posts by authors who reveal their journey to getting published. As the title suggests, this is a return visit for Tony. He appeared on the blog last year as AJ Aberford to talk about the route to publication for his Inspector George Zammit crime/action series set in Malta. He’s back now as Anthony Aberford, embarking on a journey into a completely different genre. The Conservatory is the first book in his Aunt Lily Yorkshire Dales Mysteries, where cosy crime meets magical realism.
He explains all in our interview here:
You’ve had a lot of success with your Inspector George Zammit series. What made you change genres?
I have written six books featuring Inspector George Zammit (let’s call him George from now on!). Rather than freeze time and write each book in a non-progressive manner, George has got older throughout the series, he has become a grandfather; his career and rank have progressed (more by luck than any application of effort on George’s part!) so, over the series, the years have passed and it seemed a natural time to take a break.
Also, I started writing quite late in life, and for purely selfish reasons, I want to explore different genres and voices to see what works best for me. The George books are more adventure and thrillers than pure crime books, driven by action, as he stumbles around a criminal underworld spread across the southern Mediterranean landscape. I wanted to see if I could write a series with female voices and less reliance on high-octane action. While I could never write a strict ‘cosy’ or a ‘locked-room’ mystery, working with a more gently paced plotline, featuring a host of female characters, has been an interesting challenge.
I also wanted to write a series set in my local area of the UK, so went for Ilkley in West Yorkshire.
What is the new series about?
It is a story of four female friends and practitioners of alternative therapies, at a local wellness centre, trying to unravel the riddle of their friend's death in her restored Victorian conservatory. Behind it all is their discovery of a 16th-century book of medicinal remedies, the Medicina de Herbarium, that also contains dark, mysterious secrets sought across the centuries by a Faustian doctor with a dark history. There is a strong historical element, and the series introduces Aunt Lily, a wise, timeless eccentric with a deep connection to the book, who travels by adult tricycle and appears to survive solely on cake.
Did you set about plotting in the same way?
The George books worked to a formula in which each character had a chapter, and the plotlines gradually converged toward the denouement. In The Conservatory, the story is more linear. One device I do use to move the plot along is having the friends resort to Tarot readings when faced with difficult situations. Tarot is interesting in that it is not a divination tool, i.e., it does not foretell the future; rather, it uses the 78 images in the pack to facilitate introspection and the discovery of hidden truths. I enjoyed exploring the world of Tarot and as a device, found it was quite fun to use to keep the plot moving and create tension and atmosphere.
How does the writing style differ?
Within the Medicina de Herbarium, we find the written recollections of a 16th-century gentlewoman. These recollections occur throughout the book and are written in Early Modern English, the language of Shakespeare. This was the time of the Reformation, and her stately home provided sanctuary for healers, midwives and others facing persecution or accusations of witchcraft. I tried to keep this voice relatively authentic, while avoiding the more cliched exclamations, such as ‘forsooth’, ‘verily’ etc.
The other challenge was getting the female voices right, especially in conversation.
Other than that, I didn't deliberately change my writing style and, as with the George books, there is a healthy scattering of humour throughout.
Was it easy to find a publisher/how did your current publisher react to the change?
I was very lucky in that Hobeck Books, who published the George series, ultimately took the project on.
Initially, I wrote The Conservatory as a ‘one-off’, but fell in love with the deeply eccentric and enigmatic character of Aunt Lily. I realised early into the writing that I would not need to explain her backstory or her ultimate purpose in the first volume, and the plan for a three-book series evolved. This made the search for a publisher more difficult.
Adrain and Rebecca of Hobeck Books agreed that there was a story to be told, but had misgivings about whether the book would fit within their categories of ‘crime, thriller, mystery and suspense’. They were also concerned that the early drafts jumped around in terms of timings, which led to an unbalanced narrative and long descriptive passages. Several rewrites followed. Compared to a George book, this one took at least twice as long to write.
Their judgment was correct; the book had needed more work. Ultimately, it fell into place, and I persuaded them that it was within the ‘mystery and suspense’ element of their catalogue. Having published six books with Adrian and Rebecca, we have established a great relationship, and I am delighted they have agreed to support me in this new endeavour. Let’s hope the readership there share our enthusiasm!!
What has early feedback been about the genre change?
It is probably too early to tell. There is a hard cadre of George fans, particularly in Malta, where I spend most of my time, and where the George books are very popular. News that I have turned my attention away from writing more George books has not gone down well! I have casually let slip that there are 20k words of a George 7 lurking in a file on my laptop, but I am determined to deliver the three Aunt Lily books and then complete a personal project involving a family saga set in the north-east of England across the war years. The first draft of the wartime saga is written, and it is a chunky tome!! Then who knows, more George? The characters are like family to me now, so maybe we’ll see what George has been getting up to in his dotage!
Insofar as a change of genre is concerned, I just hope people buy into Aunt Lily in the same way that they bought into George. If that happens all will be well. I hope that The Conservatory might appeal to a wider range of readers, who may be more at home with its themes of female friendship and loyalty, alternative medicines and spiritual well-being, the historical elements, and encounters with the supernatural. It also has humour, dark-arts, tarot cards, morphing portraits and killer plants – so I don’t think it can fail to be a winner!
How does it affect your social media profile and how you engage?
This is tricky. Changing my author name has certainly impacted the marketing process. What I realised was that a name change was necessary: if George fans bought an Aunt Lily book, they would find a story in a genre and setting they were not expecting. The change is so radical that an adaptation of my existing pen name was the only way to give them fair warning.
However, having invested so much time in my social media (5000 Twitter followers; 2000 FB friends, etc., etc.), it would be folly to ignore the size of the current AJ Aberford author profile. The handle I am planning to adopt on social media is ‘AJ Aberford, also writing as Anthony Aberford.’ I am hoping many George fans could be turned into Aunt Lily fans, so, certainly in the early days, I will promote the new series across all the AJ Aberford platforms, with that caveat.
The Conservatory, by Anthony Aberford, will be published by Hobeck Books on 21 April.
More Publication Journeys
I hope you enjoyed Anthony Aberford’s Writing Journey Continued. Here are links to other authors who share their Publication Journey stories on this blog: