Penny Jordan Talks Sins

4 months ago 24th Jun 11:41

Penny Jordan is an author who has been having her work published for thirty years working for Mills and Boon and Harper Collins.

I caught up with her to talk about her new book Sins, her writing career and what lies ahead for her.

- Your new novel is called Sins so can you tell me a little bit about it?

It's a second book in a trilogy about a family that begins in Macclesfield, the first book starts in Macclesfield in the late twenties early thirties and the family own a silk mill. I lived in Macclesfield for twenty years and silk mills are part of the history of the area and I had the idea to write the books because I love fabric and could use some of my local knowledge on the subject.

The first book follows the patriarch of the family and the second book is about her daughter, two step daughters and her nice; and the sins refers to the sins of the past, some of which are secrets in the family that cause problems for the characters in the ongoing book.

I set this book in the late 1950's all the way to the seventies so I start off with them as four young women in London just before the swinging sixties and then into the seventies when they are married women and mothers.

It's about their lives and their problems and how the past has affected their present and their future and how things that have gone wrong and happened in the past have effected their childhood and putting in place certain beliefs and jealousies which cause a lot of trouble between them.

They each feel that they are not getting the parental love that they want and that has had an effect of then as women and how they react to other people. So the story of the book is really about unravelling the tangles of the past allowing then to move on with their lives.

- You have been having novels published for thirty years so how did you get into writing?

I have been writing for thirty years; I write for Mills and Boon, the short romances, and I write for Harper Collins with world war two sagas and now I’m going back to what I wanted to write about when I first started out.

What I like writing about are people’s relationships, not necessarily great big dramatic things but the smaller things in life  and how they affect characters and challenge and change the people that they are,  I do like a happy ending so my books have to have a happy ending.

 - How did you get into writing in the first place?

Well as a child I had always had a good imagination and made stuff up inside my head but I never thought of having a career in writing, I went to the grammar school only got three O Levels, trained as a secretary and had a job as a secretary. I was always a keen reader, I jotted down one or two things, but it never occurred to me to think of a job in writing, I thought that writers were like demi-gods I don’t know what I thought.

But as I got into my twenties I started to want to write more, if I had read a book and enjoyed it I was carrying on the story inside my head.  Then I read somewhere that the Romantic Novelist Association were holding a competition for new writers and my husband said ’why don’t you go in for that? So I wrote a regency romance, because I like regency romances, and it didn’t win but I got semi-picked up by an agent and I wrote for a little while for him.

That taught me a lot about writing, because obviously I had had not formal training, and it helped to work out how you go about things, although I still think that I have a lot to learn, then I read that Mills and Boon were looking for new writers as they wanted to expand.

So I did one of those and they took me on so a lot of it was being in the right place at the right time, you can be a wonderful writer and not get the chances and be an ok writer and build on those.