Valerie Anand (a.k.a. Fiona Buckley) Part III: On Writing and the Business of Writing

This is Part III of a three-part interview with historical fiction writer Valerie Anand. In Part I, Ms. Anand discussed how she became a historical fiction writer.  In Part II, she discussed her Ursula Blanchard series and her feminist leanings.

FAITH L. JUSTICE: Have you been able to make a living as a fiction writer?

VALERIE ANAND: A lot of people said you’ll never earn a living as a writer, but I’m laughing last.  It was hard in the beginning.  I worked a 4-day week at the office and wrote the whole day on the fifth.  It was physically very demanding.  In 1989 I became redundant just as I received the contract to write the six-book series Bridges Over Time. I said, “Right, take the golden handshake, buy a word processor, convert the garage, and trust to luck.” I’m very pleased to say I’ve earned a living off my writing for quite a long time.

FLJ:  How involved are you in the marketing of your books?

VA: I do occasional book signings.  The marketing scene is not quite as lively over here as in America.  I once went to a seminar run by the Society of Authors and there were a number of marketing Bobs on the panel. The authors gave them such a barraging that the whole thing felt rather like a rout or political meeting.  The whole place was filled with authors who felt they were short changed.

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Valeria Anand (a.k.a. Fiona Buckley) Part II: The Ursula Blanchard Series and Feminism

This is Part II of a three-part interview with historical fiction writer Valerie Anand.  In Part I, Ms. Anand talked about how she became a writer. In Part III she talks about writing and the business of writing.

FAITH L. JUSTICE:  How would you characterize the Ursula Blanchard series?

VALERIE ANAND: I’ll start by saying what it isn’t. It isn’t dark, grim, violent or unflinchingly realistic (this usually decodes as full of descriptions of torture and disgusting executions but it’s historically accurate so it isn’t porn. Yes, it is!).

Another thing that the series isn’t, however, is ‘cozy.’ Ursula comes up against moral dilemmas, finds herself forced to accept responsibility for violent deaths (although I don’t describe them in detail), and also has to realize that there are times when the needs of a realm must take precedence over private happiness. At the end of Queen’s Ransom, she finds that Elizabeth and Cecil have betrayed her in the interests of England. At the beginning of the current book, she comes, reluctantly, to see their point.

Now to what I feel my Ursula Blanchard series is. It’s essentially a mixture of mystery and Elizabethan espionage and it is more concerned with detection and mystery-solving than with violent adventure. This is one of the reasons why the main character is a young woman.

I decided on that partly because most (though not all) lead characters in this type of novel are male and I wanted to be different. But I also felt that merely because Ursula is a woman, she can’t get out of difficult situations just by knocking her opponents down or felling them with broadswords. She has to use brain instead of brawn, and this is my favorite kind of thriller. I have a weakness for Agatha Christie and this is partly because Hercule Poirot depends on his little gray cells and not on violence, while Miss Marple is even less capable of violence than Poirot and most certainly has to work by thinking. You may be getting the feeling that I don’t like violence. That’s true. I don’t. Of course I accept that to fight in self-defense is legitimate (you can’t have people like Hitler just trampling all over everyone in sight and do nothing about it). But it is intelligence, not muscle, that makes human beings different from the animals.

In Ursula, I have tried to create an intelligent, normally feminine woman who is involved in espionage. She is often handicapped by being female, especially since she lives in the days of Elizabeth I, not Elizabeth II. She has to find ways round that. Her manservant Roger Brockley is there to do the bits which have to involve muscle. I have also tried to keep the tone entertaining. I want people to enjoy my books, to be amused as well as interested. I wish the books to be fun as well as accurate and – I hope – properly plotted and tense.

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Valerie Anand (a.k.a Fiona Buckley) Part I: Becoming a Historical Fiction Writer

Popular British historical fiction and mystery writer Valerie Anand brings past times and conundrums to life with fascinating characters, abundant detail and meticulous research in her twenty-one novels.  In the U.S.  she’s been known under her pen name Fiona Buckley for her historical mystery series set in the early years of Elizabeth I’s reign featuring Ursula Blanchard.  Ms. Anand talked to me about her writing, love of history and feminist leanings from her South London home.

FAITH L. JUSTICE: Do you have writing in the blood ?

VALERIE ANAND: For me, writing is a natural function, like breathing. No one can do without breathing and I can’t do without writing. I don’t know why. It satisfies a very deep need. At the age of six, just after I had really learned to write, I suddenly announced that I was going to write books when I grew up and I actually started trying, then and there, on a piece of doubled over paper, with a red crayon. The best moments come when I am trying to transmit something subtle, or very deeply emotional and difficult to express, and feel, after much writing and re-writing that yes, that’s it, I’ve got it right at last, that’s it.

My father was a good teller of stories to small children and so was his aunt, my great aunt Clara. They both made up tales to amuse me. On the same side of the family, I had a cousin (now dead) who although a scientist, was also keen on books and wrote a couple of science fiction paperback novels.

Going back to my father; he loved words. He lost his parents when he was only 14 and after that was cared for by an uncle who, poor man, did his very best for his nephew, but not very successfully. He had apprenticed his own son to the drapery trade so he did the same for my dad. He gave his son and his ward exactly the same chance, in fact. But whereas his own son prospered, my father just loathed drapery. His love of words made him want to work with them – in any capacity. In the end he left the drapers, took to doing part-time proof-reading for national dailies and eventually became permanent. The drive to work with words must have been hugely powerful because he took that risk in the middle of the slump of the 1930s, and was very hard up – in fact unemployed – for a time. Because of that, his first engagement broke up. Luckily for me! He met and married my mother later on.

I was born in 1937, before the war. When war broke out and my father knew he would have to go into the forces, he gave up our rented home in Kent and left my mother and me with his Aunt Clara in Leatherhead, Surrey, just south of London. Dad went into the RAF where he was an Armourer, and we lived in my great aunt’s bungalow which was out of London, but still prone to a few bombs. I can remember being carried into the garden and seeing the glow in the sky, the night the City of London burned.

I can also remember the V1 doodlebugs very well indeed. We used to crouch in the hall of the bungalow, between the strongest walls of the house and away from windows, listening to the beastly things as they droned across the sky, and waiting for the engine to cut out. If it stopped overhead, we were all right, because momentum would carry it onwards. If it stopped before it got near, anything might happen. Fortunately, nothing ever did.

I grew up, didn’t go to university, joined a publishing house as a secretary but turned myself eventually into a trade journalist, specializing at first in business systems and equipment. Later on I became an industrial editor, and ran the house magazine first for Heals, the furniture retailer in Tottenham Court Road, and later for Matthew Hall, a big engineering group. They did everything from put the services into pharmaceutical plants and new office blocks to putting the topsides on oil platforms. It was very interesting.

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