INSPIRATION (PART ONE)
Ellie Dean
I was born and raised in Tasmania, Australia, by my grandmother and two of her sisters. They were great story-tellers, so I learned about their experiences during WW2 at an early age. My grandmother sailed on one of the last convoys to Australia in 1940 with my mother, and they spent a day and a night on deck in their life-jackets as their ship was being tracked by a U-boat. One great aunt worked with Barnes Wallis on the bouncing bomb, while the other tested the strength and thickness of ship's hulls in Liverpool.
CONDEMNATION
These stories were just the start, and having heard about their mule rides over the Rockies, their dog-sled races across the frozen wilds of Canada, and my grandmother's romance and marriage to a handsome cowboy in New Mexico, I was inspired to one day write a book. But when I came to England to finish my education and the class was asked what they wanted to do as a career, the exchange teacher scoffed at my dream of being an author, saying that at best I might just get a job behind the counter in Woolworths.
DETERMINATION
It was a while before I actually set out on my writing career. A divorce, two husbands, three children and a home and business to look after gave me very little time for anything. But the idea for a book was growing, and when the children left home and the second husband decamped for greener fields, I sat down and wrote a story loosely based on the lives of those three women who'd raised me. It turned into a giant tome which even then I could tell was nowhere near good enough, so I started another book and joined a writer's group to get some feed-back and advice.
FRUSTRATION (PART ONE)
It was a battle to keep my head above water as the business was shut down, the bailiffs arrived and I couldn't sell the house, let alone heat it. But I kept at the writing, bundled against the cold in woolly sweaters, socks, trousers and a bobble hat - it kept me sane and took me out of my fraught situation into a make-believe world that was much more pleasant. And it paid off, because having finished my third novel, an agent took an interest in me. Unfortunately he considered the next three books to be 'not quite right,' suggested I wrote thrillers instead of sagas, and in the end we went our separate ways.
INSPIRATION (PART TWO)
It was at this point that I knew I needed help if I was to succeed. Pauline Bentley, gifted author and editor used her blue pencil to destruction, crossing out page after page of waffle to show me where I was going wrong. It was my light-bulb moment - and when I wrote my next psychological thriller, it was snapped up by an agent who sold is as part of a two-book deal for Hodder & Stoughton. It was a good year in 1995, for not only had I sold my first book, but the house was also gone, the debts paid, and I could begin my new life as a bone fide author.
FRUSTRATION (PART TWO)
The two thrillers sold reasonably well both here, Australia, and in the USA, but the next two were turned down by my publisher, and I was on the point of giving up. But the urge to write, the absolute belief that I was good at it and would succeed if I just kept going spurred me on. I went back to the sagas, re-writing a story that had got my first agent so excited - but which he'd deemed as 'not quite right for publishing.' Matilda's Last Waltz went up for auction in the year of the Sydney Olympics - and not one British publisher wanted it! I was told that Australian stories didn't sell in England, and that I should write something different. But I had something to prove and I knew that book would somehow change my life.
JUBILATION (PART ONE)
Matilda's Last Waltz was taken by a German publisher, and then the rest of the world saw its potential, and it has since had global sales of over twenty million copies. I eventually got an English publisher who went on to publish the next six books set in Australia. Hodder & Stoughton took the Oceana Trilogy, and my career as an author was well and truly launched.
FRUSTRATION (PART THREE)
The tenth Australian saga sold everywhere around the world, but no English publisher would take it. Down in the doldrums, I once again contemplated retirement - after all, I'd achieved far more than I'd ever dreamt. But I hadn't had a top ten best-seller in England, and that really niggled.
JUBILATION (PART TWO)
I was approached by Penguin Arrow, and asked if I'd be interested in writing a series of sagas set in a boarding house on the south coast of England during WW2. After a few minor hiccups the first in the Beach View Boarding House series was launched. As the series has progressed the books are now regularly in the Times Best Selling List - I'd finally achieved what I'd set out to do.
PERSPIRATION
At the same time as the success of the Beach View series an English publisher picked up my tenth Australian saga as well as the back catalogue. Quercus has since published The Ocean Child, Firestorm, Savannah Winds, and Echoes from Afar, with Spindrift due to be released in 2017. But at the same time I'm contracted to Arrow write two Beach View books a year. It's hard work writing three long books in twelve months, but I love it, and with Shelter from the Storm due to be released this August, I think I can now say to that teacher who laughed at my childhood ambition, 'Thank you; for without your scorn, I might not have been quite so determined to prove you wrong.'
Shelter from the Storm by Ellie Dean is published by Arrow, priced £5.99