Best-selling award-winning novelist Sarah Sundin, author of beloved World War II stories, never had an ambition to write. She trained as a pharmacist, she was perfectly happy as a pharmacist, and then she had a dream that wouldn’t let her go.
She started jotting down her dream story in pencil in a kiddies notebook and six months later she had 700 pages…
Hi I’m you host Jenny Wheeler and today on Binge Reading Sarah talks about her latest daring, dramatic and romantic story, Embers in The London Sky, ...
Best-selling award-winning novelist Sarah Sundin, author of beloved World War II stories, never had an ambition to write. She trained as a pharmacist, she was perfectly happy as a pharmacist, and then she had a dream that wouldn’t let her go.
She started jotting down her dream story in pencil in a kiddies notebook and six months later she had 700 pages…
Hi I’m you host Jenny Wheeler and today on Binge Reading Sarah talks about her latest daring, dramatic and romantic story, Embers in The London Sky, exploring the war through the eyes of a mother who has lost her child, and a BBC journalist who knows reporting the truth will take him deep into the flames.
She tells all about that vivid dream that started it all, and recollects her own family connections with the war we just can’t seem to forget.
Our Giveaway – Romance
Our giveaway this week is Enemies To Lovers Clean and Wholesome romance. If you can’t resist a good Enemies to Lovers story this one is for you! Details of where to find the links to these books are in the show notes for this episode, and in the newsletter I send out with each podcast. If you want to join that just go to our website, the joys of binge reading.com.
https://claims.prolificworks.com/gg/INO60jP77KiIo9VCVyGS
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Links To Things We Talked About
American war correspondent Edward R. Murrow: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_R._Murrow
Some of Murrow’s WWII broadcasts:
London: First Night of the Blitz
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVXmJC6mPEk
From a London Rooftop during the Blitz https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Za2Lus0CkRc
From Buchenwald: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlhQvPfYSXk
Lofoten Island Raid https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q60pIny5WSo
Lofoten Raid: https://www.royalmarineshistory.com/post/operation-claymore#:
Lend-Lease Bill: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lend-Lease
Holly Varni, On Moonberry Lake;
https://www.hollyvarni.com/
On Moonberry Lake https://www.hollyvarni.com/hollys-books/
German Abwher; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abwehr
Scottish selkie; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selkie
Introducing author Sarah Sundin
Sarah Sundin, inspirational World War II fiction author
Jenny Wheeler: But now here’s Sarah. Hello there, Sarah, and welcome to the show. It’s great to have you with.
Sarah Sundin: Thank you, Jenny. It’s great to be here.
Jenny Wheeler: Sarah, you’ve been writing these World War II dramas with lots of romance and adventure in them as well since about 2010.
But before that, you were a pharmacist. That’s what your training was in. I wonder how you made that switch, and why you were interested in doing so.
Sarah Sundin: Honestly, I wasn’t interested in doing so. I was a pharmacist. I enjoyed my job. I, I had small children at the time, and one of the beauties of pharmacy was I was able to do a lot of part-time work.
I only worked one day a week and I was able to be at home with my kids. I thought I had the perfect career and then I had an idea for a story.
It actually came to me in a dream and I had to write it. I never had anything like that happen to me ever before in my life. I’d always been a reader and all little girls who love to read, imagine themselves writing a book. But I never took it seriously, any more than I did becoming a ballerina.
I loved doing ballet, but becoming an author that was, not gonna happen. I never pursued it at all. I love pharmacy. I had this a story idea and I had no idea what I was doing. I’d taken two classes in English in college because I was majoring in chemistry.
I had no idea what I was doing. I just started writing freehand. Literally with a number two pencil on my kids’ lined paper from school, because I didn’t wasn’t going to put it in the computer yet.
I wrote two books like that. And then I started going to writer’s conferences and I joined a writer’s group.
Learning by doing – in 700 pages
I learned I was doing everything wrong, but I learned how to fix it. It ended up -I don’t want to say discarding my first two books – but setting them aside.
They will never be published and that’s okay. They did their job. And my third novel, I started submitting that. That was my first World War II novel actually.
And it took me five years of rejection letters. But eventually I got a contract and that was my first published novel, A Distant Melody, and now I can’t believe it, but I have 16 novels out. It’s been a wild ride.
Jenny Wheeler: I do have to follow up by asking you about that dream. Just give us a very quick idea of what the dream was.
Sarah Sundin: Oh, it was wild! There was a young man in the hospital and he’d been in a coma and he woke up and the woman he was in love with was there, but neither of them knew they were in love with each other. She ends up blurting out how much she loves him and he’s too drugged up after his accident to really respond.
But something about those two characters and their dilemma and this, sudden declaration of love just got me.
That day after I had that dream, I woke up and I had three little kids. My youngest was still in diapers, so I was running the carpool for the oldest and taking the middle one to preschool and washing diapers with a third one.
The story idea was going and going, and the characters were developing. I was picturing scenes and dialogue in my head, and suddenly I had subplots and side characters.
Writing standing in line at Disneyland
I knew enough about books to know it was a novel and it was actually rather a disorienting experience because it never happened to me before, and here was this full form novel in my head and all I knew was I liked it enough that I had to get it down.
I loved those characters and the dialogue … the banter was just zing in my head and I wanted to record it so I didn’t lose it.
So it was weird, As I said, that book will never get published. It has so many problems with it, but I still have a very soft spot in my heart for it because it got me started and it showed me. I wrote by hand, that entire novel. The rough draft was 700 pages.
700 pages! Ridiculous. I wrote that all in six months by hand, during naps and karate practice and ballet practice, and I don’t know what else I was doing then. I even remember scribbling down a scene while we were standing in line at Disneyland. It was almost this manic experience, where the story had just taken over and I had to get it down.
It’s never been like that since. Since then, I’ve had lots of story ideas, but not this just obsessive need to get the story down.
I’m convinced now it was God’s way of getting me started on it because I needed a kickstart. Because there’s no way I would’ve done it if I’d had an idea, gee, I should write a novel and I never would’ve happened.
So I needed that intense experience to get me started.
Sarah Sundin’s first characters sacred
Jenny Wheeler: Do you think that some of the aspects of the characters and themes may have carried over into some of your other books? Are there bits of them that have become valuable or useful as you’ve gone along?
Sarah Sundin: I think all first time authors, most of us in our very first novel, the hero or the heroine is very much like us, and as you begin to write more and more, you realize you can’t write all your novels with your heroes or heroines with your type, your personality and all your experiences and stuff like that.
This novel actually had lots of characters in it, and it was this group of friends, and there were about a dozen really strongly formed characters in that novel, and they were all very different.
So it taught me to write from experiences and personality types that weren’t my own. The experience of doing it and getting comfortable writing in another person’s head, that’s what carried me over the characters themselves. I don’t think so.
The heroine was a nurse and I ended up having a series about nurses, but she was her own person and she hasn’t carried over.
I did end up using the hero. His first name was Tom and I vowed I would never have another Tom because he was the only Tom but I ended up having a Tom in my fourth published novel.
So nothing about them was truly sacred there, but they’re still very precious to me because they got me started in this crazy business.
Getting to know her characters like friends
Jenny Wheeler: It sounds as if they are real people to you.
Sarah Sundin: That’s the thing about being an author. Your characters really become real to you. They’re fully fleshed. I liken it to getting to know a friend.
I meet this character and think, oh, that’s an interesting person. I wanna write about them. But I only know little bits and pieces about them.
And then as I start to outline – I need to have it all set up before I start my rough draft. So, during the outlining process, I’m interviewing them.
I’m giving them personality tests. I’m filling out my plot chart. I have spreadsheet that I fill out, and as I’m doing this, they become more and more real. It starts off like a pen and ink drawing, and then it becomes like a watercolor or an oil painting.
And then when I’m writing the rough draft, then it becomes animated. Then they become. Really real.
It’s like getting to know a friend and the more you know that friend, you find new parts to them and you get deeper and you’ll have a friendship that you’ve had for a long time, and suddenly your friend will say something that makes me say “I didn’t know that about you.”
My husband and I have been married for 30 years. And he said, yeah, I always wanted to be an engineer.
Writing fiction with a God awareness
I said, no, you didn’t. You told me you wanted to be a physician. He says I did, but originally, I wanted to be an engineer. And I said “I did not know that about you.”
And our son’s an engineer, so I would’ve thought that would’ve come up earlier in our marriage, but it never had.
So still after 30 years of marriage, I’m getting to know my husband. It is a very, it’s a similar process with a character. I’m feel like I’m getting to know a friend and with each chapter I dig a little deeper and find out more about them.
Jenny Wheeler: That’s lovely. We must get your latest book, before because you mentioned the word GOD, and you are an inspirational fiction author can you tell us a little bit about that aspect. How does that fit into your book?
Sarah Sundin: I write Christian fiction. I am a Christian, so the way I see it is, we talk about a worldview, so we all have a worldview.
How we envision the world works and as a Christian, I see God as very interactive with us, with the world around us. And so, my characters interact with God. They pray to God, they learn about God, they learn about themselves.
They learn about how they’ve erred and their sins and how they need to change. And God, in a way I don’t want to call him a character in the novel, but he’s always present.
And just the way I see the world view with a hopeful ending as opposed to lot of the dystopian stuff that’s oh, the world’s falling pieces and it’s only going to get worse.
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A hope-filled story which ends well
And I tend to have a more of a hope-filled viewpoint because of my relationship with God. I can’t imagine not writing that way, with God being part of the world, because I can’t imagine a world without God in it.
Jenny Wheeler: Lovely, but you don’t particularly try and evangelize in your books, do you?
Sarah Sundin: No, I don’t. I have three characters who have become Christians during the novels. I just finished one that’ll be coming out in 2025.
She has a come to faith moment and, but in general, my characters are people who are already Christians and they’re learning how to be better Christians, because none of us are perfect and we’re all works in progress and growing in our journey.
It is very much keyed into who I am as a Christian. I do a lot of teaching, so I teach women’s bible studies. I teach Sunday school to fourth and fifth graders.
What I do within the church is I’m basically working with people who are generally already Christians and helping them grow in their walk.
With my characters, I have the same impact on their lives. As the author, I’m helping them grow in their walks with God. Though as I said, I have had a couple of characters who were definitely not believers at the beginning of the stories, and they do come to faith.
I try not to do a sermon and the character falling to their knees. And I try not to do like a conversion scene.
Conversion in a cockpit
I think my favorite one the hero is actually, he’s a pilot and it’s in the sky above us, and he’s just messed up and his whole life is messed up and he is actually cussing. I don’t show the cuss words on the page, but he is cussing and cussing and something, I can’t remember what it was he says to himself, but he just realizes that God is the answer.
And that because he’d been raised in the church, he just never believed it. And he actually hits the cockpit and starts bleeding and he thought of the blood of Jesus. And then I cut to black and then I show him a little later.
But, I actually have my conversion scene with him cussing up a storm in the cockpit of his P 51 Mustang.
Jenny Wheeler: In the Second World War, that was probably a pretty vulnerable place to be.
Sarah Sundin: It really was.
Jenny Wheeler: Let’s talk about Embers in the London Sky, which is the latest one of your books.
You do promise that they’re dramatic, that they’re daring, and that they’re romantic and they are. This one traces two key characters. Alida who is a mother trying to find her child who was lost in a chaotic scenes in a middle of a German bombing raid, and Hugh, who is a BBC war correspondent.
They meet and Hugh starts to help her to find her son.
Jenny Wheeler: I admit that I didn’t really think much about the children would’ve obviously got lost during a chaotic war scene.
And you make it clear in the notes at the back of your book that this was a very real thing. Tell us a little about the numbers that were affected.
Millions displaced in World War II
Sarah Sundin: I’m afraid I actually don’t have numbers on that, and I’m not sure we’ll ever get those. There were so many people who were displaced during the war and after the war. There were just millions of people on the road.
People being released from the concentration camps. People who’d been bombed out of their houses all throughout Europe. Soldiers who were trying to get back home.
So there were just millions of displaced people in Europe. But this story takes place early in the war during the invasion of the Netherlands and Belgium and France, and there were at least well over a million people on the road as the Nazis invaded.
And there were instances where parents who were on foot were desperate for their children and would thrust them into cars thinking that at least their child had a better chance to get away in a car than they would on foot.
And then after the war or after the invasion, everything settled down and people were going back home. This is mid-1940 and they couldn’t find their children and the newspapers in Paris were filled with their classified ads with people trying to find their children. That broke my heart as a mom.
That’s what inspired that story. I don’t know any numbers of how many people were separated because of the chaos of war. I don’t know if there are any numbers.
Later on in the story, I mentioned some numbers in Britain where they evacuate the children from the cities to the countryside.
Children were constantly on the move
And in the first couple days of the war, they evacuated one and a half million mothers and children to the countryside, which is a phenomenal logistical feat. They basically took over the railway system and just filed them- all the schools went in together and mothers with young children came together. A million and a half people were moved.
It’s rather incredible feat. Because of what we call the Phony War, where after the defeat of Poland the Western Front pretty much went quiet until April and May of 1940 when the Germans went on the move with the Blitz again.
There was this period about seven, eight months where there really wasn’t much happening and all these children who’d been evacuated to the countryside and their parents said their children are miserable.
We’re miserable to not having them with us. The bombs aren’t falling, so let’s bring our kids home again. All throughout the war, there was this tension being between the families who wanted to be together and the government, which really wanted the children in safety so they weren’t going get killed.
As things got worse, they would have another campaign to get the children to evacuate and then things would quiet down when children would come home. All throughout the war this went on, it wasn’t like children evacuated on September 1st, 1939 and didn’t come back till VE day.
There was this back and forth and I found that very interesting.
Some children never found their way back home
Jenny Wheeler: I guess there must have been some children who were never reunited with their families, even if their parents were still alive. It just would be the case, wouldn’t it?
Sarah Sundin: Yes. Even in Britain some of these children came from, bad homes to begin with, and so their parents really didn’t mind having them out of the house.
And some of them actually became very bonded to their evacuee homes in the countryside. And the foster families really loved their kids.
There were some situations where the kids would either not go home again or some would run away and try to go back to the countryside. But for everyone who did that, there were children who ran away from the country and went back to London because they wanted to be with their families.
There was just so much going on, and especially a lot of these lower income families. The parents – both were working – and oftentimes they depended on the school aged children to watch the little ones.
When the school aged kids were evacuated, that put a hardship on them, so they wanted those kids back for the childcare.
There were so many things that go on and we see these images of the children getting on the trains and we think, oh, it’s sad, but thank goodness they’re being safe.
But when you actually dig into it, imagine what the children were going through. Imagine what the families were going through.
Central character searching for he small son
Imagine where the foster families are going through in the countryside, and suddenly you have children in your home and they’re homesick and maybe they’re wetting the bed and they have behavior issues that you’re not used to because they’re city kids and you’re a nice clean country family.
There was this culture clash and some of the foster families were really willing to have the kids. They were super excited and very compassionate. And others were neglect neglectful, some were abusive, because people are people. There was this broad range of things that happened to the children.
And that’s what I wanted to show in the novel as Alida gets involved, working with the Ministry of Health, which was responsible for the evacuations, as she’s starting to talk to these evacuees and she’s talking to the families back in London and she’s talking to the foster families and the billeting officers who are responsible for keeping everything together in the countryside.
She’s starting to see these issues and it opens her mind. It helped her learn more compassion as she’s watching these people go through it, and it was a way to help her grow as meanwhile, she’s looking for her son.
Jenny Wheeler: Yes. So that’s definitely a very important part of the story. The other part is obvious is the whole scene with the covering of the war correspondents. At this stage of the war, the US had not actually entered action, but there were some very important US correspondents sending postings from London, telling the American population what was happening.
Give us an idea of why they were so important.
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