Archive for October, 2007
October 31, 2007
happy Hallowe’en!
October 30, 2007
catching up
I’ve spent today putting together three workshop proposals for the RWA conference in San Francisco, July 2008. One on writing sex scenes, one on polishing your first page, and one on a synopsis boot camp. You have to submit a proposal and a full outline or handouts, so even though I’ve done classes on these things before, it still took a lot of work.
They’re gone, anyway. I have doubts that I’ll get chosen, since all three workshops are pretty generic. But I can but try.
It’s been a pretty eventful week around here. One of my friends, expecting her first baby, went into hospital this morning for a scheduled c-section. I had lunch with her yesterday–the last lunch of freedom for her before she becomes a mum! We ate far, far too much Thai food and had several teary moments.
I haven’t heard anything yet but I’ve been thinking about her all day. I wonder if her little boy has been born yet.
Tonight I’m going out for a writerly dinner with my friend Lee Weatherly. While I spend my days writing about hot men, she spends hers writing about fairies. We have very interesting conversations.
Tomorrow I plan to drag out a pillowcase and make a sort of ghost costume for the Fecklet. It is bound to be rather pitiful but I don’t care. Fecklet’s young to go trick-or-treating but I want to take pictures.
What are you doing for Hallowe’en?
(And if you haven’t yet, don’t forget to enter my contest!)
October 28, 2007
a slave to the telly
For days now, every time I’ve stood in my kitchen I’ve had the song “Barbara Ann” in my head.
“Ba-ba-ba, Ba-barbara Ann. Ba-ba-ba, Ba-barbara Ann. Oh Barbara Ann…”
I like the Beach Boys all right, but not really this song. And yet it’s been in my head without fail. While I’m making the tea, while I’m buttering toast, while I’m cutting up pears for Fecklet’s breakfast.
Why? Is there something about tea or toast or breakfast that reminds me of this song? The Fecklet likes to say “Ba-ba-ba”, but not as often as “Da!” (”Da!” is the all-purpose word meaning “Cor blimey, look at this interesting sock / brick / toy / radiator / ball of fluff / shoe / hand /sock / bit of dirt-strewn grape / sock / stranger / lunch / incredibly dangerous thing to climb on / book / sock!”)
Finally I figured it out. It’s not the Fecklet, though it is the cheese I’ve bought for him. A little mesh bag of Babybel cheeses, in the door of the fridge, which I see every time I open it. And of course the adverts for Babybel use the same tune: “Ba-ba-ba, Ba-Babybel.”
Who says advertising doesn’t work?
Anything like this ever happen to you?
contest update
Hooray! I’ve had enough entries for my contest so that I can offer not one, but TWO mystery prizes!
There’s still time though…I’ll add another mystery prize for every ten people who answer. So keep on sending those emails.
October 26, 2007
bad writer here!
So on Wednesday I went to my writers’ group for the first time in ages and was given a clipping from the local newspaper, that appeared back in May when I spoke to another local writers’ group. The photo was fairly awful, though you expect that of course, and I happily read through the article which was more or less an accurate reporting of what I’d said to the group about how I got published and how I go about writing.
Except near the end. I quote:
“If she is stuck she refers to the post-it note on her computer which says ‘write rubbish’. What this means is that it better to write badly than write nothing at all.”
In my talk, I went on to say that you can’t fix a blank page, and I feel it’s liberating to give myself permission not to get it right the first time and improve what I’ve got later.
Write rubbish. AND THEN FIX IT.
But no. The newspaper left that bit out. What the newspaper says is that I believe it’s better to write badly than not at all.
So now all of Reading (or at least the ones who read the paper) think I am advocating bad writing.
*bangs head on wall*
Oh well. Just as well I didn’t see the article back in May. Hopefully people will have forgotten by now.
Anyway…please enter my contest! (see post below) I still need more entries before I can offer a mystery prize…
October 23, 2007
One Night Stand contest!!
It’s no good. I’ve got these gorgeous, gorgeous hardback copies of One Night Stand sitting here in front of me and I have to give one away.
So…I’m having a contest. All you have to do is to email me, using the contact button on the right. Put “contest” in your subject line.
(If the contact button doesn’t work for you, email me at julie at julie-cohen.com–using @ for “at”.)
And after a decent interval I will choose a winner totally at random.
Also…if I get twenty or more entries to this contest, I’ll add a mystery prize to go to someone else…and I’ll add another mystery prize for every ten people who enter over twenty. So the more people who enter, the more prizes there will be!
Come on, enter! Tell your friends! Tell your granny!
Small print: if you enter, I’ll add you to my newsletter mailing list, which is a text-only email that is sent whenever I have a new release. You can easily unsubscribe whenever you like.
October 20, 2007
Albus
Hey, Dumbledore is gay.
I’m about two chapters from the end of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, and what I thought was going to happen hasn’t happened yet! I wonder if it will. I did cry at one point, which is new for me with Harry Potter. The middle of the book is slow (that said I whizzed through it), but the ending is explosions, excitement, and emotion aplenty.
I had to put it down to take care of the Fecklet and can’t wait to finish it with dinner tonight.
It’s nice to know that Dumbledore is gay though. I didn’t really suspect it. I guess it was his haircut that fooled me.
I have some quibbles with JK Rowling’s writing style (especially her use of punctuation!! AAGH!!) , but I like her world and her characters and that she knows lots more about them than she reveals in her books.
October 19, 2007
good news from London
Well, my agent liked Honey Trap. So much so that she suggested no revisions (I nearly fell down with shock as this has NEVER happened to me) and I was able to send the ms straight off to my editor. I expect revisions from her, of course.
Fecklet has expanded his sock obsession to also include his parents’ feet, which he will ambush and attack with hoots of excitement.
October 18, 2007
good news from abroad
Yesterday I received a package in the post from Headline. I had no clue what it was, since I’d already received my hardback copies of One Night Stand. Imagine my delight when I opened it and found lovely glossy trade paperbacks of Spirit Willing, Flesh Weak, in Dutch!
It’s called Charmante Leugen, which means “Charming Lies” and is very appropriate. I’m not sure where the yoga lady comes from but it’s an attractive cover, and, flipping through the pages, I have discovered that the Dutch word for “llama farm” is “lamafokkerij”.
Cool.
I also had a great email from a reviewer from the French cultural website Onirik (www.onirik.net). She’d reviewed Driving Him Wild (out in France as La maison des amants, “House of Lovers”), and sent me the link. My French is pretty rusty but even I can tell it’s a good review..it’s here.
October 17, 2007
reading and movies
When I’m writing furiously I rarely get time or head space to appreciate other stories–if I read, it’s nonfiction. So now that I’ve finished I’m having a great glut of fiction.
First, I read Armistead Maupin’s The Night Listener. I did this because some of my nonfiction reading led me to the strange case of Anthony Godby Johnson, who was a 14-year-old author who didn’t exist. He’d written a book about surviving horrific abuse, but no one had ever seen him–not his agent, not his editor, no one. Only his adopted mother, who, years later, it was proven had been pretending to be Anthony all along (although she has never admitted to it).
Maupin knew Anthony (or whoever he really was) through telephone conversations, and came to have a close relationship with him. When he started to suspect Anthony was a fake, he fictionalised his experience in The Night Listener. I love fakes and frauds and find them endlessly fascinating, so a fiction about a fake is total candy for me. I couldn’t put it down.
Yesterday I went to the movies for the first time in ten months. I saw Superbad, just because that was what was on when I turned up, and I really enjoyed it, mostly because I liked the two main characters and their sidekick so much. There was a real warmth to the film, which I didn’t expect in a teenage let’s-get-drunk-and-laid movie.
Then last night I watched a DVD of Little Miss Sunshine, which was pure pleasure all the way through.
Meanwhile I’ve bought the last Harry Potter book and have started reading that (though I had to read the synopses of the two previous books on Wikipedia because I’d read the books so long ago I’d forgotten what happened). It’s a total page-turner, of course, so much so that I stayed up later than I wanted to last night.
It’s so great to read and watch films again! I should get revisions from my agent any time now, though, so I’d better enjoy the reading while I can.
October 15, 2007
a little break
I’ve sent Honey Trap off to my agent and took yesterday completely off work, which I also intend to do today. No writing, no thinking about writing, no blogging.
See you tomorrow.
October 12, 2007
DONE.
On the advice of my critique partners, have revised two of the last chapters and rewritten the final one. I like it much better, though I’m not 100% sure of the last paragraph. It revisits the first time the hero and heroine meet, but will a reader remember that?
Anyway, I’m going to bed.
