I used Forbury Gardens, the Victorian park in the centre of Reading, as the setting for the scene where Eleanor talks with her best friend Hugh, just after she’s told him she’s pregnant by a man she doesn’t know (and who might look a bit like George Michael).

I spend quite a bit of time in the Forbury for one reason or another, mostly because Fecklet loves the fountain there. The park always seems to contain the following people:

The park is bordered on one side by a church in the shadow of Reading Prison, where Oscar Wilde served his sentence; on another by an upmarket hotel and restaurant, an elaborate courthouse, and a gateway to the ruined Abbey where there is a small plaque saying that Jane Austen went to school nearby. Between this is the entrance to the historic abbey ruins (where you can usually find one person getting drunk and another getting stoned). It’s bordered on a third side by a churchyard containing, among other things, a memorial to a railway worker killed by a freak tornado; and on the fourth by a very ugly dual carriageway next to a poorly designed retail park and a weird looking 60s office building.

This, to me, is fairly typical of Reading: you have a place of Victorian beauty juxtaposed with rather awful developments, mixed in with the genuinely appealing and quirky.

There’s an interesting urban legend about the Maiwand Lion, which I put into One Night Stand. Legend has it that after he’d finished the lion, the sculptor discovered there was something wrong with it (there are different versions as to what, but it usually has something to do with lions not really walking like that), and killed himself. This didn’t happen. I’ve heard almost identical legends about several statues and buildings, both in the UK and in America. At Brown University (where I studied), they say that the science library is sinking because the architects didn’t take the weight of the books into account. Apparently they topped themselves, too.

I liked hearing the legend about the lion. It made me feel at home.

Now, I may be right or I may be wrong, but I believe that One Night Stand is one of the few, if not the only, romantic comedy novels to be published that are set in Reading.

If I am wrong, please correct me. Maybe there’s a whole sub-genre of which I’m not yet aware.

Anyway, I decided to set the story in Reading for three very simple reasons. One was that I wanted something different from all the rom-coms set in London and New York and exciting places like that.

The second was because of my heroine, Eleanor, the erotic comedy writer. I wanted her to be dissatisfied with her life–her job during the day writing smut, her job during the evenings tending bar in a dodgy pub, her lacklustre love life, her mysterious and far too exciting sister June, her boring mother Sheila, her best friend Hugh’s penchant for bringing home a new blonde or redhead every night. A part of that was being dissatisfied with where she lived. Now Reading is actually a quite nice place to live, but it does have its down sides, and Eleanor sees them all. It’s part of her emotional journey to learn about where she lives and to discover that she’s part of the community.

The third, simplest, and possibly the most compelling reason, was that I live in Reading and I was really, REALLY pregnant and I could barely haul myself out of my chair to go to the bathroom several million times a day. There was no way I was going to go research some exotic location for this story.

Reading it was.

Where’s your favourite setting for a romance? Ever read a good one set somewhere just a little different–or perhaps somewhere very, very normal?

If you’re a writer (and especially, for some reason, if you’re a writer of sexy romance), everyone always asks you if you base your stories on your real life. The answer, of course, is always No.

However, real life can often give you ideas for your story, which you then develop into fiction. For example I got the idea for my current wip by watching the awesome old 60s Adam West/Burt Ward Batman show on TV. I thought, “My next book is going to be about Batman.” Of course it isn’t (as Batman is property of DC comics) but that was how my heroine became a comic book artist, and the rest has come from that.

I can trace where One Night Stand came from quite easily. I wrote a joking email to my Harlequin editor at that time, where I wrote a sex scene from the point of view of someone who had the flu or something, and every erotic description could also be interpreted as being nauseating. Then, a bit later, I was pregnant and I had morning sickness and I was actually trying to write a sex scene, and every time I thought about sex and all it entailed I wanted to puke.

So I thought, “Hey, that would be a good scene: an erotica writer who can’t write sex because she’s got morning sickness.”

So I had my character: a pregnant erotica writer. What I usually do next in this situation is ask: Why is this a problem?

Ewwww! No! Get off, I’m gonna hurl!!

Well, of course, she didn’t know who the father of her baby was because she’d conceived during a one night stand.

I’d done a book where the heroine gets pregnant off a one night stand–Married in a Rush. In that book, the heroine is the sort of person who would have one night stands, and because this was a Harlequin/Mills & Boon novel and I wanted to use the great hook of a marriage of convenience, the heroine gets married to the father of her baby.

I wanted to do this one differently. I wanted my heroine not to be the sort of person who would ever have a one night stand, even though she’s an erotica writer. And I wanted her not to know the father, and not necessarily to fall in love with him. I wanted the story to be about her search for the father and, though she doesn’t know it, her search for her own happiness and self-knowledge.

And I also wanted her to have sex with someone who looked like George Michael. Just because.

I have one theme for my posts this month:

ONE NIGHT STAND IS OUT IN PAPERBACK!!

Yes it is. Yup. It’s out. I think the official release date is next Tuesday but hey, it says AVAILABLE on Amazon.

It is a beautiful, beautiful book. I can’t even begin to talk about how much I love the way it looks. Personally, I like the story, too, but I would say that, so you might want to make up your own mind.

But anyway. I’m going to spend some time talking about it over the next few days.

I’ve never done a link like this before, but I think it’s worked…anyway this is a copy of the VERY COOL two-page spread in the BCA Book Club magazine this month, in which One Night Stand is an editor’s choice. (That means you have to choose NOT to get it.)

BCAbookclub.pdf

(Scroll down to the bit where the editor says I’m one of her favourite discoveries of the past few years…*wild tickled laughter*)

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.

I got a copy of One Night Stand in hardback today.

How GORGEOUS is this. And the wonderful thing is, the paperback (out in January) is EVEN MORE GORGEOUS.

It almost makes me forget the crows. Almost.

12,000 words added, along with a vicar, a few friends, and a toddler named James. Something changed on nearly every page.

I’m going to celebrate by doing the washing up.

School finished at 2.00 today, and I didn’ t have to pick up the Fecklet until 5.30, so I had three hours to work on revisions, and I’m 1/3 of the way through typing the changes in. I also wrote a scene where the heroine reads aloud the subtitles of a film about Danish wife-swappers.

I’m very proud of the following line, which I think sums up the entire book quite neatly:

If you couldn’t accept unpleasant truths about yourself when you were up the duff from an anonymous one night stand, when could you?

The Fecklet made a Father’s Day card today with my wonderful childminder, of which I am inordinately proud, although his actual contribution consisted of having his feet painted with red paint and then pressed against a piece of paper while he sat and sucked on a rattle. I can see already that I am going to be the type of parent who has her child’s artwork up all over the house.

To bed. Again.

Okay, two people have contacted me about doing the first page challenge, and since the last time I did this was in October, I figure it’s about time to do it again.

The idea is to post the first few paragraphs from your wip–either here, or on your own website, posting a link here–and then examine them to see if they’re doing what you want them to do. First impressions are really important to readers–whether that’s an editor deciding whether to buy your book, or a reader deciding whether to take it home.

I did this originally in this post, and looked at the first page of my June release (OUT NOW!! hooray!), in this post, so today I’ll look at the first three paragraphs from the book I’m working on right now, One Night Stand.

Another Saturday night down the Mouse and Duck.
Here, I’m trying to give a sense of monotony, over-familiarity. This is the primary setting for the book, the heroine dislikes it, and I want the first line to have the quality of a resigned and bored sigh.
Jerry, the landlord, was swearing in the kitchen. Paul and Philip were nearing the end of their pints and arguing about football in the preliminary step to arguing about whose turn it was to get the next round in. Gets Drunk, Gets Horny, Gets Angry Man was steadily making his way through his fourth pint and was making the lip and eye movements that signified that he was having an imaginary conversation with himself. Maud and Martha were eying up the karaoke machine through their haze of smoke. And I’d spilled half a pint of Stella over my shoes when I was serving the group of students who were starting to get loud over in the corner.
I’m trying to give quick thumbnail sketches of these people, making them sound not very appealing, but instantly recognisable as pub regular types. We can see this isn’t an upmarket pub, and also that the heroine’s heart really isn’t in her bar job. This is a longish paragraph, written as a list, and I used the repeated present continuous tense (was swearing, were nearing, etc) to give a sense of being in the middle of something which happens over and over and over again.
I made sure that nobody was watching me, and topped up my orange juice with vodka from the House Special optic.
Anna didn’t like this line. She thought that having a heroine who drinks in secret whilst working was a bit unsympathetic. I kept it, though, because a) the heroine needs to get drunk in order to have her one night stand (hence book title), and b) I think it shows that something is wrong here. Why is she getting drunk in secret? Hell, if she’s drinking on the sly, why doesn’t she steal the good stuff? Why does she care if anybody sees her, especially as her boss is out of sight in the kitchen?

All in all, it’s not a bang-flash-wallop beginning. Not much is going on. However, that’s precisely the effect I’m trying for…Eleanor, the heroine, is bored bored bored and you have to understand that in order to understand why she does what she does next, which is something that changes her entire life.

What do you think? And more importantly…what’s yours?

Well, today we found a cup that the Fecklet drank from (eagerly and greedily), and immediately went out and bought two more just like it. Hopefully it’ll work tomorrow at the childminder’s.

In other news, I said I would blog about writing. While my husband took the Fecklet out for a long walk this afternoon, I went out in the garden and started my revisions on One Night Stand. My editor has pushed back the release date for this book (to October hardback and January 08 paperback) so I have time to do the revisions properly, which I appreciate, given the Fecklet and the day job. I think these revisions are going to be serious fun to do; they involve deepening character, strengthening plot and broadening setting. In other words: making more stuff up. Hooray!

In two hours, I worked on about forty pages and got a sunburn on one arm. It doesn’t seem like a lot to have achieved but perhaps it will get faster.

Tomorrow…reviews.

I just emailed the revised draft of One Night Stand to my editor, whom I will be seeing at the Romantic Novelists’ Association awards luncheon at the Savoy tomorrow.

Terrified? Me? Never.

crawls under couch