Author Interview: Tiffani Angus
JMR-Welcome to the
Books Delight, Tiffani. Tell our readers where you live, what you do for fun
and what does the perfect day look like?
TA-Hi and thanks for
having me! Well, I live in Bury St Edmunds, England. It’s a medieval market
town, and I live right next to a brewery established in 1799 and the ruins of
an abbey founded in 1020! For fun I like to read and do ‘homey’ things like sew
and bake. A perfect day for me is a day off with no schedule (my job is very
‘schedule-y’), with the weather not too hot, with someone else to cook for me,
and a trip to the cinema. Or a day at Disneyland, because I’m from California
and that is the best most perfect day ever!
JMR-What’s your
favorite historical time period? Why?
TA-That’s such a touch
question because I love so many of them. My favorite is often whichever one I’m
currently researching! I do tend to gravitate towards the Elizabethan era
because I find Elizabeth I fascinating, but the later seventeenth century in
Britain is also a draw because of the plague, the great fire of London, and the
developments in science—in it ‘as’ science—that were taking hold.
JMR-Who is your
favorite historical figure? Why? If you could ask them one question, what would
it be?
TA-Under normal
circumstances I’d say Elizabeth I, but right now I have to say Nicholas Culpeper,
who was an apothecary and physician in the mid-1600s and whose writing brought
medicine to the masses. I’d like to ask him about his wife: What did she teach
you about home remedies and how much did her experiences influence your work?
JMR- When I read your
bio it sounded like several people crammed into one! From technical writer to
copy-editor. How did you come to be a writer of historical fiction?
TA-I had a strange path
to being a fiction writer; I had this idea that I needed to go to university before
I could write, so I didn’t really get started until I was close to finishing my
BA! The first story I remember writing was for a class on the Black Death about
a village in the 1600s being infected by fleas in a fabric shipment, so I pretty
much started out writing historical fiction. When I realized that my comfort
zone was SFF, I melded the two together and write mostly historical fantasy
now. I like to take real historical people and tweak their lives and
experiences somewhat by inserting fantastical elements. The technical writer
and copy-editor gigs were to pay the bills, but writing fiction is what I love
to do.
JMR- I also write
historical fiction and have a time-slip novel. I often wonder if given the
choice I would time-slip. Would you? When and where would you go?
TA-Of course I would!
The first time and place I would go is back to the early 1500s here in Bury St
Edmunds. I want to see the abbey in all its glory before it was surrendered to
Henry VIII and demolished sometime after. I would have been able to see the
church’s tower from my house, it was so tall! After that I’d want to go to
Elizabeth I’s coronation.
JMR- Did you visit
anyone of the places in your book? Where did you feel closest to your
characters?
TA-When I was doing
research for the book, I traveled to various historical gardens, from
Sissinghurst to Biddulph Grange, Kentwell Hall to Hatfield House, and took thousands
of photos. The garden in the book is an amalgam of all these places, but the
closest I felt to any of the characters was in the walled gardens I visited. I
love a walled garden, whether for fruit & veg or for pleasure; they’re like
jewelry boxes, where precious things are kept, so of course they’re the most
magical part of any garden!
JMR- Tiffani, tell us
about your new book, Threading the Labyrinth.
TA-Threading the
Labyrinth is about 400 years in a haunted garden. It’s basically Tom’s
Midnight Garden or The Children of Green Knowe but for adults. The
book opens with Toni Hammond, an American, learning she has inherited the
remains of an estate in Hertfordshire, but what she really needs is money to
save her failing art gallery. When she gets to the estate, though, she starts
to experience unexplained things in the garden. The book is set up so that
readers can ‘thread’ the labyrinth of the garden’s history, with a narrative
that weaves in stories about workers from the garden’s past: weeding woman Joan
in the 1620s, who fears the voices she hears in the garden; Thomas, a man who’s
returned from fighting in the colonies in the 1770s to questions about where he
truly belongs, but the garden itself has plans for him; Mary, the head
gardener’s daughter, who uses her camera in the 1860s to capture mysterious
images in the walled garden at night; and Irene, a Land Girl in 1941 whose
personal loss prompts the garden to reach out to her. There’s so much more, but
I don’t want to give it all away!
JMR-What projects do
you have in the pipeline?
TA-I am nearly finished
with a full draft of my next novel, which is a total 180 from Threading.
As an academic, one of my research interests is apocalyptic fiction, and
women’s bodies in this subgenre. The novel focuses on that: I get to destroy
and then rebuild the world, with a mostly all-female cast! I’m also working on
a non-fiction book about writing that is under contract, and my next novel
after this is tentatively about Nicholas Culpeper, but will require a lot of
research.
JMR- Tell our readers
how to find you on social media and the web.
TA-I am all over the
place and easy to find.
My web site: http://www.tiffani-angus.com/
Twitter: @tiffaniangus
Instagram: doc_tiff
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/tiffani.angus/
JMR- What question were
you hoping I’d ask but didn’t?
TA-What was it like to publish a debut novel during a pandemic? It was definitely an experience! The book was supposed to come out April 13, 2020. Lockdown happened a month before, so Amazon canned pre-orders for physical books right then, which meant we (my publisher and I) had to shift the publication date to July, but the ebook still came out unexpectedly in April! My in-person signing at Waterstones in Cambridge was cancelled, by launch at Eastercon (one of the UK SFF conventions I regularly attend) was cancelled—as was the convention—and a party I had started planning to throw to celebrate the book (because when you’re an adult, you don’t have a reason to throw a party other than a wedding!) was cancelled. It was a huge letdown and I had to shift all the marketing online, immediately. It was a learning experience, and I am now ready for whatever happens next time round. If anyone is interested in how I tackled it, I wrote up a blog article about it here:
JMR- Readers, I know you'll want to check out Tiffani's book, so I've included a link.
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