This week I am thrilled to be interviewing author Jane Jesmond, who will be sharing with us details of her writing life, telling us all about her new book ‘On The Edge‘, which was released on 26th October 2021, and answering a few fun questions. This post contains affiliate links.

On The Edge is Jane Jesmond’s debut novel and the first in a series featuring dynamic, daredevil protagonist Jen Shaw. Although she was born in Newcastle Upon Tyne, raised in Liverpool and considers herself northern through and through, Jane’s family comes from Cornwall. Her lifelong love of the Cornish landscape and culture inspired the setting of On The Edge.

Jane has spent the last thirty years living and working in France. She began writing steadily six or seven years ago and writes every morning in between staring out at the sea and making cups of tea. She also enjoys reading, walking and amateur dramatics and, unlike her daredevil protagonist, is terrified of heights!

I spent most of my childhood with my head in a book or inventing fantasy games and adventures some of which I forced my brother and sister to play while the rest took place inside my head. I still remember one game where I played the role of Westia the Wild Girl – a sort of hooded cowgirl who had daring adventures and rescued a lot of people and animals. I was lucky enough to have teachers who encouraged my writing as a child and teenager without forcing me to obey the rules of grammar!

I read my way through Enid Blyton as a child from The Magic Faraway Tree through the Famous Five and The Secret Seven to her school series such as Mallory Towers, with diversions into Josephine Pullein Thompson’s pony books. The magic and myths in the writing of Alan Garner, Roger Lancelyn Green, CS Lewis and Tolkien all fired my imagination and I remember loving Elizabeth Goudge’s The Little White Horse and everything Daphne du Maurier wrote.

I’m not someone who can write at odd moments of the day. I need long periods of undisturbed time and I have huge admiration for authors who juggle full time jobs and children with writing, so I didn’t start writing until I was semi-retired with grown-up children. I remember realising that if I didn’t start then, I never would. Once I started though, I wished I’d begun earlier because nothing is as engrossing nor as much fun.

By nature I’m a terrible pantser. There’s nothing I love more than letting my story and its characters take me where they want to. However they’ve led me down some crazy paths in the past so I now make myself plot and plan at various key stages.

I like to start writing in the morning before real life has had the opportunity to intrude into my thoughts so I tend to get up, make myself a cup of tea (the first of many) and head upstairs to the place I write which is a little corner of our sitting room with a view out over the Iroise Sea. On a normal day, I’ll write until lunchtime and hope the postman doesn’t call and catch me in my pyjamas. Then I’ll head downstairs and try to banish the world I’ve invented from my thoughts and fill it instead with real life.

Where Jane Jesmond Works and View From Desk

Being an author means you’re allowed to live in a fantasy world and spend hours imagining exciting things without other people thinking you’re mad. Or if they do, they don’t feel as though they can say anything.

On The Edge starts with a storm and a lighthouse with an unconscious and dreaming figure hanging from its top. The figure is Jen Shaw, the protagonist of the book and a passionate and daredevil free climber. However I have never climbed. The second rung on a stepladder is as far as I dare go. So I spent a lot of time researching rock climbing and even longer listening to and reading about how free climbers feel about their sport as well as watching some of the most fearless advocates in action in order to gain an understanding of the forces that drive them to such extraordinary exploits. It was fascinating.

For On The Edge, which is my first published novel, it took a few years although I wrote a couple of other books over the same period. It takes me around six or seven months to produce a readable draft of a new novel and then I love to be able to put it aside while I work on something else so I can return to it with completely fresh eyes. After that, it completely depends on how much work it needs.

I’m not sure I chose it! I think it might have chosen me. When I started writing I thought I might write contemporary literature (if I considered genre at all) but when I came to write the climbing sequences and the chase over the rainy moors in On The Edge I realised my heart lay in the thriller and mystery genre. They were just so much fun to write.

Sometimes my characters arrive already named like Jen. Sometimes I have to look up lists of names, as for Jen’s mother who I knew needed a particularly Cornish name. Occasionally there’s a little piece of back-story attached to a character’s name, which only I know. For instance Jen’s brother’s name is not what readers will assume it is.

Jen Shaw, the protagonist of On The Edge, is an impulsive, risk loving free-climber and I love her for her fearlessness and spirit. However one of her dangerous exploits has left her ex-boyfriend with life-changing injuries so she’s given it all up… Or, at least, she thinks she has, until she comes to hang from the top of the lighthouse and has to use all her skills to climb her way to safety.

Her hunt to discover how she ended up there involves many of the cast characters that people On The Edge: The enigmatic Nick Crawford who Jen comes across in a strange encounter on the coast road after her escape from the lighthouse and cannot make up her mind about; Old Gregory the retired lighthouse keeper who lives in a tiny cottage beneath the lighthouse and knows more than he lets on.

There’s Jen’s ex-boyfriend, Grid, who suffered a life-changing accident because of her reckless behaviour. And, of course, Jen’s family. Her free spirit and new agey, hippy mother, clinging onto Tregonna the old family home and her estranged brother slowly falling apart under the weight of his debts.

To mention but a few!

I remember wanting to linger over the final corrections at the proof-reading stage and feeling strangely bereft when I sent them off to Verve, my publisher. I’d written and rewritten and edited and re-edited On The Edge so many times it felt as though this was really Goodbye. From now on the book would belong to the people reading it rather than wholly to me. Then I started writing Book 2 in the Jen Shaw series and instantly felt a lot better!

My favourite quote is Carpe Diem – literally “Seize the Day”. For me it has a message of living in the present instead of worrying about the future. It’s advice I try to follow but fail a lot of the time!

I have a beautiful black panther cat called Talisker who is a little quiet at the moment as her lifelong companion, Arran, died a few months ago. They’ve been together since she was a few weeks old and she still sits by the window every night waiting for him to come in. Unfortunately for me she adores playing with post-it notes, which I use for plotting and I often get up in the morning to find an essential part of my plot lying in chewed-up morsels on the carpet.

It’s been a bit of a whirlwind of a year with the publication of On The Edge and one of the best things about it has been making friends with a large number of fellow 2021 debut authors. Many of us have second books published in 2022 and I’ve been lucky enough to have some advance copies to read! So top of my list are Simon van der Velde’s The Silent Brother, Sarah Clarke’s Every Little Secret, and Lora Davies’s The Widow’s Last Secret. I know they’re all going to be very different and I can’t wait!

It’s a bit more than a cameo role but I’d love to play the part of Jen’s wafty, eccentric and frequently very annoying mother.

I’d travel to the world of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. Magical, haunting and, somehow, so real, I can’t imagine anything more wonderful than spending a day there. Not the least because I’d get to meet my own Daemon.

“Did you know there’s a three year old to-do list among the bits of paper strewn over your desk and you’ve only ticked off half of them?”

A big thank you to Jane Jesmond for sharing her writing life with us and a wonderful interview.

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