Celebrating Writing Friends 2 - Julie Cohen

I’m working through these Celebrations in alphabetical order – that must be the former librarian coming out in me. The other thing that I noted as I started to write this post this morning is that yesterday I wrote 1000 words about Anne – 1000 words! That could have been part of a book. It would at least, I think, have got my current hero, Vito, aka Sicilian 2 into bed with his heroine. So he’s not best pleased that I spent more time with Anne yesterday than I did with him. To soothe his outraged pride (he is Sicilian after all) I’ve spent some time with him before I started blogging today.

1000 words? Well no – not yet. But 500 words before breakfast is a start
And is he in bed with his lady yet? No – but I’m using that as an inducement to co-operation for the rest of the writing day.


So that I can talk about Julie Cohen.

Without the internet, I would never have met Julie Cohen. I would probably never even have known she existed. In our other lives – with me living in Lincolnshire and being a generation or so older – and her being an immigrant from America, living in the south of England and teaching there, our paths were unlikely to cross. The BM, in lecturer mode might have connected with her – though Julie teaches in a secondary school and his work is at university level. So we could have lived in the same country, as we did for years, and never have connected, if it hadn’t been for the eHarlequin message boards. Way back when, in 2001 – I remember because I had a book called Rafael’s Love-Child out in America – I ventured on to the message boards on eHarlequin.com, and my life hasn’t been the same since. When I first joined, the boards were small, intimate – sometimes very crazy – The Teahouse of the Writer’s Moon was a ‘meeting place’ for many would-be writers and the Gonnabeez writing group was formed, later giving me the honour of being their ‘Queen Bee’. As a writer in the UK, I soon discovered that several other posters on the boards also live in England – notably two people called AnnaofCumberland and one Julie Cohen who later became known as Feckless because of her determination to get the phrase Feckless Ne’er do well into her current book. As fellow Brits (well – Brits and an adopted Brit) we bonded and so by the time the 2002 RNA Conference was planned, both Julie and Anna booked to go.

If you’ve read the comments on my first Celebrating Friends post, you will see that Julie has recalled our first meeting. Perhaps I should explain the ‘Virgin’ reference. As I had been to a RNA Conference before, I knew that arriving at the first one, knowing very few people could be a nerve-wracking experience, I wrote to the Brits from the boards (there were two others Pat and Jane) and suggested that as they were ‘Conference Virgins’ we should get together – at least by email and I could answer any questions offer advice etc. This is why, when Julie first appeared at the conference she was ‘another virgin’ – which also led to me being labelled The Virgin Mother! Which was a Virgin too far for the RNA who, having later adopted my casual scheme (can one be a ‘casual virgin’?) after I’d run it for three years, have now decorously renamed it the First Timers’ Network. But that’s sad as no one can now be the ‘First Timers’ Network-Mother.


Anyway – here’s Julie describing the moment we first met
I remember the first time *we* met, Kate W--I recall walking into a very busy dining room full of about a hundred and fifty strangers, and these women suddenly yelling out, "It's another virgin!"


From that point on the Durham Virgins became real and not just cyber friends – and I gained another title that of Cyber Mum. Which is another title I regard as a great honour.

In her blog at the moment, Julie is writing about her third book, Delicious which is out this month and which is the title that will be in the Bag of Books prize. I could have chosen either her previous book Being a Bad Girl or the very first Featured Attraction, which is the one I know best of all. But Delicious is actually the first Julie Cohen book I learned about in those first emails before we ever met in person. I didn’t know it was Delicious then but I do know that Julie described it like this:



>> an intense and sensual relationship, with its ridiculous moments, and quite a bit of repartee.















And that really sums up a lot of what Julie brings to romance writing. Add in some emotional intensity and you have a winning combination. I always knew that Julie could write - I’ve read several versions of Featured Attraction – I had a bit of input on the way to rework that one – and I’ve watched that vital emotional intensity grow in Julie’s work over time so I wasn’t very surprised – but I was so thrilled when on July 20th 2004 I received an email that just said I SOLD. That was the book that became Featured Attraction - Since then there’s been Being A Bad Girl, now there’s Delicious and soon there will Married in A Rush.


I’m so happy to see the list of titles grow – not just because Julie is a friend and my Cyber-Kid - but because I firmly believe that this genre of romance writing that I love always needs new blood. It’s not a question of ‘training up the opposition’ but the fact that Romance writing, contrary to popular believe that it’s ‘always the same’ is a living growing, developing genre. And to keep living, it needs new writers who will take it forward into the future. Julie is, I’m convinced, one of those new writers who will do that. She’s a writer with her own individual and unique voice, a writer who loves romance for what it is and isn’t just writing in the hope of making a fast buck. She has a youthful, modern voice that will bring new readers to the genre and will wake up some of the critics who say that romance is old-fashioned stick in the mud and - heaven help us – not sexy ‘chocolate box’ type romance.

Which is great for romance readers – but also a loss for the teaching profession. Before Julie was a published author she was also the sort of teacher that I wished I could have had teach me Tess of the D’Urbervilles etc. I've been to one of her workshops - on writing sexual scenes in romance - and came away inspired and entertained (And not just because she started the whole thing of showing picturesof Hugh Jackman in a towel - see my post on Anne McAllister below)> So perhaps I ought to say that another honour Julie has given me is that she is the only teacher I know who actually put one of my books on the National Curriculum when she used The Sicilian's Wife in the topic of "Language and Gender" with some of her A-level English language students.

As I’ve been writing this post, I’ve been checking back over some of the emails I had from Julie and I find that the one in which she tells me about the book that became Delicious is actually dated 6th June 2002 – so there’s a wonderful coincidence and sense of serendipity to know that the book we talked about then is now actually on the bookshop shelves, exactly four years later. Congratulations on that Julie – and on the other wonderful news that was the other thing that made me cry – with happiness this week.