Richard Abbott’s Half Sick of Shadows: I love it and look forward to revisiting it often. It’s unique. It’s timeless and beautiful. It’s a historian’s romantic poem of the ages. It’s a classic. 
 
I’m immensely proud to introduce one of my favorite authors to my readers. Dr. Richard Abbott’s books range from historical fiction to fantasy to science fiction, and that’s when he’s not working on computer applications or walking the moors in England’s historic Lake District. Welcome, Richard.
 
Before anything else, I’d like to congratulate you on your move from London to Grasmere. You are now living in Classic Writer Land! While of course I enjoy William Wordsworth’s poetry, I’m a lifelong fan of Beatrix Potter and have read so much about the beauty of the area. I’ve also enjoyed the photos from your travels that you’ve shared online over the years. Still, it has to be a major change from London. Has the transition been tough? What made you decide to make the move? Do you feel even more inspired to write?

Anastasia! It's a real pleasure to be chatting today, all the way from this side of the Atlantic. Thanks for welcoming me to your blog,
 
London to Grasmere - it's quite a change! In fact, there were also other transitions happening at the same time. As a place to live, there is no comparison between the two - even on a bad day, Grasmere is spectacularly more beautiful than north London. I do miss the accessibility of museums and such like in London, though of course with everything that's happened since March 2020 they would have been often out of reach, even though geographically close. But there were changes as well in my working life. I used to work as a software developer and tester as part of a team at various large firms: now I am one member of a very small family business (we run a guest house, pub, and micro-brewery). I still write software, but now I get to see the impact of it straight away, and it's great to be applying these skills at such a small level. The programs I write have so many more obvious benefits to us and our staff. But as perhaps some people reading this will know, there's always something else to do in a family business, and you have to be quite disciplined about time, just in order to do regular things like get out walking on the fells. So yes, some bits have indeed been tough... but worth it. As to what made me decide to make the change - well, there were a number of factors, some of which might well appear in disguised form in a future science fiction novel! But they are probably not suitable for today.

Do I feel inspired to write while living here? Well, yes, definitely, especially with a project I have had in mind for a while which I'll talk about in a while. There is so much history here, right outside the doorstep - for example, Cumbria has more surviving stone circles and other ancient monuments than any other English county. Every time I get out to walk one of the nearby ridges I start thinking about how the surroundings - both natural and of human origin - might be incorporated into the plot. The problem is making enough time to write in the midst of everything else. You'd have thought that this year, with so much of it closed as a business due to our three national lockdowns (mid March - early July, most of November, and late December to now), would have been an ideal time. Since March, we've been closed more than open. But in fact those months have been hugely busy for all of us, with all kinds of decorating, preparation work, and in my case programming tasks which you simply can't do when you're open. This year has to have been the hardest any of us have ever worked on the business, and writing is one of the things which has had to take a back seat for a while. Hopefully, as things get back to whatever new normal we find ourselves in, that will change again. I certainly have no shortage of subjects to write about! But right now, there's a difficult tension between the desire to write, plus the inspiration provided by the surroundings, and the available opportunities.

That is certainly understandable. I do hope that 2021 will be a good year for you and yours.

As you know, I tied myself in knots over this interview. I had so many questions I wanted to ask that it was hard to pick and choose. You write computer code, but you also have a PhD, hence the jaw-dropping Triumphal Accounts in Hebrew and Egyptian. Why don’t we begin with you telling us a little bit about yourself before we get to your fascinating body of work?

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The PhD was studying poetry in the ancient world, and in particular how ancient Egyptian poetry might have influenced that of ancient Israel, back around about 1200BC. It sounds a bit rarefied, but it was a whole lot of fun. I originally thought I was going to work on something about the chronology of the ancient world, but once I began, I realised that poetry, and its potential cross-cultural influences, was a whole lot more exciting than the regnal dates of rulers. So I studied a lot of Biblical poetry, focusing mainly on the earliest pieces, and - to cut a long story short - concluded that those early pieces of writing were influenced by Egyptian writers and Egyptian conventions. Some of the ideas turn up in my historical fiction series, starting with In a Milk and Honeyed Land. Poetry and song are at the heart of those books. And in fact, music of one kind or another features pretty strongly in all my writing, so the experience obviously rubbed off., But not just music - in the historical books I tried to combine that with cross-cultural influences between the various people of the age. I think that interest which we share in what happens when different cultures intersect one another is what first brought us together as friends, Anastasia - it's a theme I have always enjoyed and appreciated in your own writing.
 
What else? I have moved around a lot within England over the years, starting in childhood in the south, then moving into East Anglia when I went off to university, then into county Durham in the north-east after that. Somewhere along the way I spent a year in Seatlle, USA. And now here I am in the north-west, in a part of the country that over the centuries has forged close links with both England and lowland Scotland! Indeed, it was the last British kingdom to resist the Saxon invasion back in the days after the Romans left and before the Normans arrived. Dunmail, or more properly Duwnwahl, died in 975 in his last unsuccessful attempt to stem the tide, and can reasonably be called the last authentically British king. There's a ridge just up the road from here which is named after him, and a huge cairn of stones which, according to some stories, was first raised by his soldiers before that fateful battle.
 
Back at university I studied math, and really enjoyed it - long ago I used to be a bit embarrassed to admit to that, but I've got more confident about it over the years. My working life as a computer programmer was heavily involved with AI in one form or another. One of my favourite projects from that time of life was working with the UK airports authority and Met Office on an AI program to estimate cloud and weather conditions at airports based on regular and infra-red pictures. Eventually I moved into writing programs for Amazon Alexa (called "skills" in their parlance), and I still try to find time for that every now and again. Some of these experiences have been recycled into parts of the background for my science fiction books - a major theme in the plot is how humans and AI individuals which I call personas form working partnerships and relationships. Right now in the real world we are not at the point where an AI could be a meaningful work partner to a person, though of course some people seem to treat their mobile phones as frustratingly sentient. But I reckon that within the next fifty to one hundred years we could be at that stage of development.

​Your first published book, In a Milk and Honeyed Land, remains one of my favorite pieces of historical fiction. Your subsequent works, Scenes from a Life, The Flame Before Us, Man in the Cistern, and The Lady of the Lions are all set in the same area but not necessarily during the same time. Despite the truly ancient setting, you’ve brought the characters to life in ways that make it easy for us to relate to them. Your writing conveys a timelessness that I especially appreciate, as well as a strong, cross-cultural emphasis. What inspired you to write fiction set in such long-ago times? Please tell us about the books and your process – both research and writing.

Well, I've talked a bit about the research process from a poetry and history point of view, but there was a lot of other stuff of an everyday nature. What kind of houses did people live in? What was their social and family structure like? And so on. The book is set in the period when, according to the Hebrew Bible, the Israelites arrived into Canaan from Egypt. But I wanted to write the story not from the viewpoint which the Bible presents. but rather from the perspective of those who lived in that land - those who chose to associate themselves with these newcomers. But we know very little about how these people actually lived, outside of some rather ambiguous archaeological records. So I felt free to borrow something from other ancient world societies in order to put flesh on the bones, and chose to make that society a matrilineal one rather than patriarchal. So households belong to, and are maintained by, the women in a family and not the men. A man marries into a woman's family, rather than the woman leaving her household and going to the man. The woman of the house has the power to invite people in or shut them out. A number of cultures in the ancient world worked like this, but over the years, this pattern of society vanished. So as well as imagining what such a society might be like, those stories also explore how old values and habits of life are eroded, as newcomers and new ideas arrive and become dominant.​

There's not very much of Quarry written as yet, though the overall shape of the book is becoming clear in my mind. If all goes well, and if not too many other things intrude, I am hoping to finish it this year. We shall see!
 
Quarry sounds amazing! In the meantime, it’s comforting to know that your books are available on many platforms. The links follow, as well as an excerpt from Quarry.  ​