Author Archives: Lizzie Lamb
Guest Blog: Jean Fullerton and Her Writing Life
We are delighted to welcome the lovely Jean Fullerton to our blog today. We put her on the spot and asked her a few questions about her life as a writer.
Tell us all about you
I was born and raised within the sound of Bow Bells in the East End of London and grew in the Jack the Ripper old stomping ground, Wapping and Whitechapel. I’m a District Nurse and have worked in East London for twenty-five years.
My first four novels No Cure for Love, A Glimpse at Happiness, Perhaps Tomorrow and Hold on to Hope were set in Victorian East London and were shortlisted and won various prizes.
Call Nurse Millie, was released in 2013, and All Change for Nurse Millie, a year later. There are also two seasonal novellas, Christmas with Nurse Millie and Easter with Nurse Millie. The third in the series, Fetch Nurse Connie has just been released.
I live with my very own Hero-at-Home, a massive Bernese Mountain Dog called Molly and two cats called Tilley and Fudge.
What is a typical writing day?
I wish I had one! Contrary to popular belief most of us still have day jobs. Mine is teaching nursing at a London University and I squeeze in at least four hours writing in the evening and am often am at my desk until 1 or 2 in the morning.
How does the writing process work for you?
As I weave at least six patients’ stories through Connie’s over-arching story so I plan extensively to help me evenly space Connie’s meeting with her patients, family and her ex-fiancé Charlie. Of course it changes as ideas come to me but it gives me a place to start.
I do the research as I go and I’m not a fast writer 1500 is a good day and that’s because I worry over every word and shift dialogue around as I go.
Social Networking – a help or a hindrance?
Both. It helps me keep in touch with writer friends and fans but can be very distracting especially when you’re in a knotty bit of the book. I make a rule that I allocate 2 hour block of writing time during which time I will not click onto the internet or emails.
Do you have some advice for fledgling authors?
Just write the story. That’s what keeps readers sitting up to the wee small hours not the writing techniques. That said, and although it might sound contradictory, you do have to perfect the craft and that is hard, very hard. If it weren’t everyone would do it but if you’re in love with storytelling, as I am, that will carry you through the pain.
What are your top five writing tips?
- Learn your craft-plot, pace, structure, characterisation, dialogue.
- Read your chosen genre as this will help with the above.
- Don’t force a character to act out of character.
- Everyone gets stuck on chapter 5 so just keep writing.
- Never, never, never give up.
Who or what has inspired you the most to become a writer?
Bestsellers that were rubbish- we’ve all read them and I’m absolutely not naming names. I thought ‘I must be able to do better than that.’ It’s for readers to decide if I have.
If not a writer – then what?
What I am a nurse and teacher. Despite all the back-breaking hard works, government-driven targets and out-of-touch management nursing is still the most rewarding job in the world.
Tell us a little bit about your love for the East end of London
It’s a bit difficult to explain the affinity I have with the place where I was born. I feel very privileged to have been born in a unique culture The Fullertons arrived in East London in the 1800s while the ‘O Rileys were later amongst the wave of Irish migration triggered by the potato famine. The area became legendary for its Blitz spirit and thanks to popularity of music malls, cinema, war-time radio and early TV the Cockney culture is an integral part of London’s identity.
Someone once said to me that I was lucky to be able to draw on such a rich heritage and they were right.
Tell us about your current book
Fetch Nurse Connie
Connie Byrne, a nurse in London’s East End working alongside Millie Sullivan from Call Nurse Millie, is planning her wedding to Charlie Ross, set to take place as soon as he returns from the war. But when she meets him off the train at London Bridge, she finds that his homecoming isn’t going to go according to plan.
Connie’s busy professional life, and the larger-than-life patients in the district, offer a welcome distraction, but for how long?
Available from Orion Fiction on kindle, paperback and hardback on 4th June 2015. Check it out on Amazon here
Some reviews of your work
‘A delightful, well researched story that depicts nursing and the living conditions in the East End at the end of the war’ (Lesley Pearce)
‘…The writing shines off the page and begs for a sequel’ (Historical Novel Society)
‘…you will ride emotional highs and lows with each new birth and death. Beautifully written with some sharp dialogue.’ (THE LADY) (59 words)
Finally – what are you working on at the moment?
I’m working on the second of Connie’s books, as yet untitled. She is still working in Spitalfields as the deputy Superintendent and has the usual collections of eclectic mix of patients to deal with. Now, I don’t what to give too much away but look out for the new GP, Dr Hari MacLauchlan, survivor of the infamous Burma Railway, who is six foot one and half-Scottish, half Indian. Need I say more?
*****
Lizzie is so loving the sound of THAT one. Good luck with your writing Jean, and thanks for being a great guest on our blog.
Passion, Tenderness, Love – or 50 Shades of Greece
And now for something completely different to follow June Kearns’s thoughtful and humorous Romantic Lurve – or 50 Shades of Beige.
Greece is oh so not monochromatic beige or grey. Her colours are intense, sublime –
Adam wished he could paint, sea-jade, sapphire, fir-green, brilliant white, Cal an ideal model . . . creamy skin deepened to tawny gold . . . hair bleached lighter by the sun, caught the afternoon light. She lolled like an odalisque in the prow of the boat. He wished he could paint like Matisse . . .
The scent of earth-rooted herbs from the rocky shoreline was intense, an invisible umbilical cord connecting them to their Earth Mother.
Beguiling to the eye, Greece is a feast for all the senses.
They ate their first Greek salad of the year dressed in rich olive oil . . . tomatoes flavoured by the hot sun, cucumber crunchily refreshing, slices of sweet red onion, succulent olives and tart green peppers topped by a slab of creamy-sharp feta sprinkled with basil. They drank white wine full of fruit with an aftertaste of honey.
. . . She wanted to be alive to the sounds and smells of Ithaca, schurr of sea on shingle, those unrelenting cicadas . . . feeling the sun’s warmth on her body.
[From Twins of a Gazelle]
Surrounded by such sensuality, such fertility, little wonder Shirley Valentine didn’t dream of “being bent over the hostess trolley and beaten on the bottom with Woman’s Weekly” [see 50 Shades of Beige]. Instead, she swam naked in water like silk on the skin – you perhaps know how it feels. Afterwards, dried by the sun’s warmth, she chose to have hot sex with Costas on his boat. And, finds out who she really wants to be, just as Calista does in Twins of a Gazelle.
In our culture, our attitude to sex seems ambivalent. We cloak our uncertainty with humour, and, prurient, veer between being curious about its sterile mechanics – pornography, BDSM, ‘I **** hard.’ – Or, afraid of feeling too deeply, inhibited settle for something almost asexual. Fondness steeped in a superficial sentimentality which has little or no bearing on the rough and tumble (no pun intended) of a sexual being.
Where’s passion – ardent love; sexual desire; an enthusiastic interest or direction of the mind; [Chambers Dictionary].
Where’s love for another so intense, “You love her because everything about her makes your heart sing.’ Will was never so emphatic. . . . ‘Is that how you feel about me?’ ‘Since I set eyes on you,’ he said, returning her kiss. [From Last Bite of the Cherry]. Something so fierce to begin with it will sustain a relationship “in sickness and in health”, through all subsequent trials – paying off the mortgage, rearing children, learning to tolerate one another’s irritating foibles.
In my opinion, during the first throes of passion, the mutual pleasure and enjoyment of each other’s naked bodies is a given with no need for the titillation of concealment. If, when I write about love-making and sex, I try to make what happens integral to who the characters are and will become. Love scenes which do raise the temperature, and arise out of the natural progression of the plot. I appreciate June’s point ‘that what floats my boat, may well scupper yours’, but I very much hope I don’t cause my readers to cringe with embarrassment. Only they can say whether I do or not.
A thought to leave you with – “To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead.” [Marriage and Morals, Bertrand Russell 1929] No chance of that if you surrender to 50 shades of Greece. And afterthought, passion can also mean suffering. By ’eck, so can love, and then some.
Mags Cullingford
Guest Blog: The Company Of Women by author June Kearns
Guest Blog: The Company Of Women by author June Kearns.
If you were born in the late 40’s/early 50′, this post will have a resonance for you. Fabulous.
An Englishwoman’s Guide to the Cowboy
The double whammy today for June. Another fabulous blog about her books.
Letter K The April A to Z Blogging Challenge #AtoZChallenge
Lovely blog post about June.
April Author Spotlight 2015
Letter ‘K’ is for June Kearns author of The 20s Girl, the Ghost, and all that Jazz
Why do I recommend The 20s Girl, the Ghost, and all that Jazz?
I really enjoyed this wonderful novel. It draws you in from page one with the settings, writing style, love story, and hint of humour. It’s set in the emotionally and financially challenging post WWI years, and you will experience the fertile, green and rainy English countryside, with its polite and quaint inhabitants, as well as a hot and dry, Texan ranch, with its rough cowboys!
I loved the unusual romance, with its drawn-out courtship, ups and downs, transatlantic twists and turns, and of course, the ghost who is cleverly, and convincingly, wound into the story from the beginning. I was so worried about loveable Gerry, who was almost compelled to marry the wrong person out of…
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Life Cycle of a Writer: Receiving that Magical News.
Our dear mate, Jan Brigden has found her way through the maze and is going to become a published author. Go Jan
Well, since my last update, things have gone ever so slightly crazy. Wonderfully crazy! All in all, it has been a sparkling six weeks.
On February 14th, I found out that my first novel ‘As Weekends Go’ had been shortlisted in the Choc Lit and Whole Story Audiobooks Search for a Star competition.
I’d made the final six!
Cue stupid grins and shrieks aplenty at both Chez Brigden and Romaniac HQ. It was going to be an extra special Valentine’s Day.
I then discovered I’d made the final two!
Which, naturally, called for fizz and chocolates … 
And THEN … on Saturday March 14th (I’ve decided I rather like the number 14!) came the official announcement that I’d won the Search for a Star Competition
I can’t describe how elated I felt. Choc Lit would be offering me a contract. As Weekends Go was really…
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New Romantics Press 