Today I have the pleasure of introducing Jean Fullerton - Author of Perhaps Tomorrow
Perhaps Tomorrow - Jean Fullerton
Publisher - Orion - 3rd Feb 2011 (UK)
ISBN - 978-1409122913
Thank you Jean for taking time out of your busy schedule to answer some questions for me
Jean, please tell us something about yourself
I’m a cockney, that is, a native East Ender born within the sound of Bow Bells and have traced my family back to the 1820s in Wapping, which is the area around London and St Katherine Docks. I lived in the area until I was five them my family were moved out as part of the post-war slum clearances to Stepney a mile away. I was a pupil at Sir John Cass Foundation School in the City of London and left when I was seventeen with a handful of GCEs. I read Katharine, by Anya Seton in my early teens and fell head over heels in love with historical romances.
I just love all eras of history but is fascinated by the 18th and 19th century and I love my native city. I’m totally obsessed with historical accuracy and I enjoy researching my stories almost as much writing them. I can assure you that if one of my characters walks down a street to somewhere that street actual existed.
Where did the inspiration for Perhaps Tomorrow come from?
Perhaps Tomorrow is the third in the Wapping series it is set in 1847 three years after the last one, A Glimpse at Happiness. The idea for Mattie’s story came to me as I was writing the previous book as I felt she needed a story and a handsome hero of her own.
Life has not been easy for Mattie Maguire her since her husband died three years ago. She has struggled to keep the family’s East End coal business solvent, raise her young son and care for her troubled mother-in-law alone. And now everything that Mattie has worked for is under threat. Maguire’s is in the path of the proposed Wapping to Mile End railway extension and the coal yard deeds are firmly in the sights of corrupt local benefactor Amos Stebbins.
Fugitive Nathaniel Tate is a man who knows just how ruthless Amos can be: he was wrongfully imprisoned for embezzling money that Amos stole. After learning of his family’s tragic death, Nathaniel escapes and returns to London to bring down the man he holds responsible for his family’s destruction. Tracking Amos down to Maguire’s, it is there that Nathaniel meets Mattie, who offers him work.
As Nathaniel begins to help Mattie turn around the fortunes of the business, and the pair grow ever closer, he starts to think less of revenge and more of the possibility of a new future with Mattie. But then his true identity is revealed. On the run from the police, Nathaniel has to prove his innocence, expose Amos, and win back the heart of Mattie. But a furious Amos has other plans…
Who inspired you to start writing your own novels?
The trainer on a NHS stress management course I attended in 2002. Let me explain. I am District Nurse and eight years ago I was a manager in the NHS in charge six community clinics when my boss sent me on a stress management course. In order to unwind at the end of the working day the tutor advised us to take up a hobby. A good friend of mine had just signed up for a creative writing course and as a life-long reader of all types of historical fiction I thought I’d have a bash at writing a story- just for fun. You know. Nothing serious! Anyhow, I sketched out a rough plot on a sheet of A 4 and opened my lap top on the kitchen table and typed Chapter One. After just a dozen or so pages the story just seemed to pour out as if someone had shaken up a bottle of cola and undone the top.
I finished that book in about four months – it takes me considerably longer now I can tell you- then I started another. Again the story flowed. Of course, I had no idea about technique or formatting, I learnt that later, I was just telling the story.
After I’d written three books my hero-at-home encouraged me to send one off to see if they were any good, which I did. With trembling hands and naive dreams of agents and editors fighting over my brilliant book, I would post a handful of submission out on Monday morning only to have them fall back through my letter box on Thursday with a photo copied rejection letter shoved inside.
Then in 2003 I joined the RNA via the New Writers Scheme and sent in my second novel. Thank goodness it landed on the mat of Rachel Summerson who in her reader’s report opened by saying ‘before I say anything else you have what it takes to be a novelist because you create believable characters and put them in gripping plots that makes the reader want to turn the page but…’ I still cherish that report.
But! I suddenly realised I knew nothing about the craft of writing, formatting or any of the other skills that are essential to produce a publishable novel. So I spent the next 5 years learning them which wasn’t easy as I’m dyslexic. I had to work a night shift in a local nursing home every other week to afford to have my manuscripts copy edited in full before I could submit them.
After writing 10 books, submitting to umpteen agents and editors I finally wrote
No Cure for Love which won the Harry Bowling Prize in 2006. That got me my first two-book deal with Orion and when
A Glimpse at Happiness was shortlisted for the 2010 Romantic Novel of the Year, I got my second two-book contract. Winning the Harry Bowling was my big-break but the hard work goes on. In fact, it never stops.
Perhaps Tomorrow is your third novel, what are you working on at the moment?
I have just handed in my fourth novel,
Hold onto Hope, to my publishers and I’ll be starting my new novel, as yet unnamed, in a few days.
I will be staying in the East End of London but jumping forward a hundred years to 1945. Millie’s story starts the day Churchill declares peace in Europe. We will follow Millie, who is a district nurse, as she cycles around the bombed out streets delivering babies and tending the sick in the three years before the NHS and welfare state was introduced. We see her and the plucky East Enders struggle to put their lives back in order after the blitz, rationing and as the troops return home.
What book is on your bedside table at the moment?
The book on my bedside table and in my handbag when I travel, is No Time for Romance by Lucille Andrews as I’m reading it as background for my new novel.
Lastly, thank you, Carol, for reviewing
Perhaps Tomorrow and for interviewing me on your most excellent Dizzy Little Book blog.
Thank you Jane, and good luck with the new novel.
You can find out more about Jane, the East End of her childhood and her novels here
