Interviews

January 2020 - Interview with Hafferby

Good morning everyone, elveloy here from AdultFiction with Hafferby, the author of Hand of Fate: An Anna Loveridge Novella

Elveloy: Welcome to our studio, Hafferby. Firstly, can you tell us a little about your non-Wattpad life?

Hafferby: Away from this place, I'm a forester and nature reserve manager which affords me a lot of time to hang around in the woods contemplating character arcs and writing it off as work. My work means I am often planning for outcomes 100 years into the future, there's something deeply satisfying about that. But mostly, I just muck around with a chainsaw.

Elveloy: Right... and what drew you to Wattpad?

Hafferby: I came for the bright colour palette, I stayed for the handful of wonderful people I've met who have helped me to beta test some of my work.

Elveloy: I agree. Wattpad is certainly a great place to find beta readers. I see that you're interested in cults and true crime. What draws you to those fields?

Hafferby: Where to start? I find cults and the psychology behind them fascinating. Pop culture has simplified the whole concept down to the basic notion of a wide-eyed hippy in a robe and a bunch of mindless automatons, but everyone is susceptible. You just have to take a look around you to see that. Everyone is in a personal cult of their own making these days. Everyone believes they would never fall for it, but social compliance is a strong force, you just have to look at things like Milgram and the Stanford Prison Experiment to see how easily people slip into roles once someone else takes the pressure of decision making from them.

It all started for me with Jonestown. I stopped writing for over a decade and then one night I woke with a start with this hare-brained scheme to write a short story for every person who died in the Jonestown massacre. That's the thing, rather than this reductive narrative we are sold, Jonestown has thousands of stories – big, small, funny, tragic, personal, brutal, off-the-wall bonkers. I finally abandoned the project a couple of years ago. It made me feel morally queasy, but also it started to send me ever so slightly doolally. I, um, started to hallucinate.

Elveloy: Uh huh... Moving on to fiction, do you consider yourself a 'plotser' or a 'pantser'?

Hafferby: Pantser all the way. I can plot the management of a forest a century or two into the future, but I can't tell you what my protagonist is going to do in the next 500 words. I'm a big believer in character-driven narrative, and I think it's hard to plot that. It takes 10,000 words to work out who your protagonist really is, for starters. You can plot something and then find that, actually, the character voice you have in your head would not go down that particular narrative alleyway.

I often write out of sequence, so it's sometimes a matter of finding a way to connect the dots. Quite often, plot is just a means to get from joke A to joke B.

Elveloy: I love your heroine, Anna Loveridge in Hand of Fate. Can you tell us a bit more about her?

Hafferby: Anna is a doll. She's a dream to write. I can sit down and knock out a thousand words in her voice in no time at all. She's a laconic, cynical psychic gun-for-hire working for the highest bidder. By the time of Hand of Fate, she's already been through a lot, and it's starting to show. It's the third project I've written for Anna. The first two (Who Put Bella in the Wych Elm? and The Last Witch in England) are split timeline between World War 2 and the present day. Hand of Fate is set in '68, so it's nice to see the sort of 'halfway point' in her character. She's working for the CIA on this occasion, investigating (you guessed it) a cult.

There's more than a touch of noir about Anna, but the most fun parts are writing her experiences of other people's minds. I'm not one for long passages of descriptive stuff, but there's something wonderfully psychedelic about her 'gift'. I imagined the whole process would be very disorientating, it has similarities with synesthesia.

Elveloy (glances down and quickly looks up synesthesia on her phone): Interesting. And what's next in the pipeline for you?

Hafferby: I've just returned after about 6 months away from Wattpad after I joined a cult... OK, that's not strictly true, but it's not far off. I got quite heavily invested in a true crime story I was researching (The Body in the Tree), and one day I will write the weird little coda to it.

But for now, I'm going back to fiction. In the next few months I'm going to be posting The Loveridge Chronicles, a series of short stories charting Anna's career as a freelancer through the fifties and sixties, working for the CIA, MI5, MVD and MGM studios. What can I say? She likes an organisation that can be condensed into three easy to remember initials.

I'm also extending a short story (Burnt) into a full length novel and I'm working on a pirate yarn about Sir Francis Drake. Oh, and at some point later this year I'm going to be setting up a mass, audience participation game of Wattpad Cluedo.

Elveloy: Sounds fascinating. I can see you'll be very busy in 2020!

And to our readers, you can find Hand of Fate: An Anna Loveridge Novella by clicking here or by checking out Hafferby 's profile. The work is complete, so no need to wait for updates. You can also read more about the story in our AdultFiction Book of The Month for January 2020, by clicking here.

(Editor's Note: Unfortunately, since this was written, Hafferby has left Wattpad)