Writer Spotlight: Julie Cohen

On Coffee and Roses I like to bring you news of exciting authors who are either waiting to be published or published and worth checking out.

This week, I'm really excited to welcome the thoroughly lovely
JULIE COHEN into the Coffee and Roses Writer Spotlight.

When did you first decide that you wanted to write?
I’ve always wanted to write. I made little “books” out of paper when I was a kid and made up stories about my marble collection. I was forever playing Dungeons and Dragons, which is basically collective storytelling. I remember very clearly when I wrote my first actual novel. I was about eleven and I’d just read the Earthsea trilogy by Ursula LeGuin, and I sat right down and wrote a 125-page handwritten story about a female wizard who gets kidnapped by a really sexy evil king. I made maps and illustrations and everything. (She didn’t end up with the evil king, though; she chose a humble but pure-hearted sailor instead. I think I missed a trick there.)

My teachers at school were encouraging, and I had poems and short stories published in small press magazines. I recently found a photocopy of the first money I ever earned writing – it was a cheque for six US dollars paid for a poem. But I had no idea of how to become a novelist, and nobody could really advise it as a career path, so I plumped for academia instead.

I probably should have noticed something when I kept on putting off working on what was supposed to be my PhD thesis so I could write a Mills & Boon novel. But it wasn’t until a couple years later when I was teaching secondary school English that I suddenly thought, “This is silly. I’ve been playing around enough with writing. I should try to write that book and get it published.”

So that’s what I did. Not that first book, obviously, which was awful and got rejected pretty much by return of post, but a few books later.

What interests you as a writer?
I find myself drawn again and again to similar themes in my stories: of deception and truth, identity and outsiderdom, acceptance and forgiveness. I like reading books about these themes, too. I love, love, love writing those parts in a novel where the heroine realises that she’s been wrong and that she really can open her heart. Lately, I’ve enjoyed writing in first person, because I enjoy the limitations and constrictions that it imposes on the writer. I’m a total sucker for dramatic irony, when the reader realises things that the viewpoint character doesn’t, and it’s so delicious writing that in first person. Yes, I know I’m geeky like that.

One of the greatest things about being a writer is that you can build your books around topics that interest you. So with Getting Away With It, for example, I’ve had the perfect excuse to research ice cream and twinship, stone circles and cereology, fast cars and memory loss. I spent several days in Avebury and other neolithic sites in Wiltshire, as research for the setting. Lovely.

Do you have a typical writing day? If not, when is the best time to write for you?
I’m not a morning person as a rule, but I have a young son and I have to write while he’s in nursery, which is in the morning. So I slave away at the keyboard from 8 am till about one o’clock most days. I try to write 1000 to 2000 words a day while I’m in first draft mode – though I might end up cutting all of that later, or I might end up writing more if I’m really cruising, like at the end of a book.

What made you decide to write Getting Away With It?
Twins. I just love identical twins. I think the whole concept is fascinating. And because I’m obsessed with stories about identity and deception, I was hooked by the idea of a woman taking over her identical twin sister’s life when her sister disappears. I think I was having an ice cream on the Isle of Wight when it first struck me. I knew it was going to be a bigger book than anything I’d written before, so I was thrilled to get the opportunity to write it for Headline Review.

What are the best things about being a writer?
The two best things are probably getting so involved in the world of your characters that you forget everything else. That’s just magical. And, I can’t lie – the other best thing is when someone reads your book and says they like it. I’m a sucker for positive reinforcement.

And the worst?
Being attacked by crows of doubt – you know, those moments when you’re sure the book doesn’t work, that you can’t write, that you suck, that you’re going to crash and burn. It happens at some point in every single book for me, and I never really believe it will all work itself out. Even though it always has, so far.

Tell me about what you're working on now.
I just gave in the manuscript for my second book with Headline Review. It’s a contemporary women’s fiction novel about a woman who gets a job as costumed historical interpreter in a restored stately home where they’re re-enacting the summer of 1814. There are two story threads – the contemporary one in the heroine’s real life, which is a bit of a mess, and the pretend-1814 one, which is a Heyer-esque Regency romp. Eventually the two threads start coming together in some unexpected ways.

You're a much-loved speaker and workshop leader at writing events across the country. What would be your top three tips for aspiring writers?
1) Read.
Good writers are voracious readers. How else are you going to learn about characterisation, story structure, the mechanics of writing? Or what you want to spend your time writing? Reading is probably the best training for writing, except of course, writing.
2) Write Crap.
I have a post-it note on my computer saying this. What it means is, just get the first draft written. Don’t spend a lot of time fretting about how bad it is. Just do the best you can with what you’ve got. Once you’ve finished your first draft, then you can think about how to change your work to make it suitable for a reader. Of course, maybe you’re a genius and your first draft is solid gold. But all of my first drafts are crap, and most writers that I know say the same thing about theirs. For some reason, you have to give yourself permission to write badly before you can get down to work on making your writing good.
3) Get a Support Network.
When I decided I wanted to write for publication, one of the first things I did was to join writing groups. I joined my local writing group, Reading Writers, and I also joined the Romantic Novelists’ Association in the UK, and Romance Writers of America. All of these groups helped me materially on my way to publication (for example, I made the final in a RWA contest which got me noticed by editors, and I met my agent at an RNA meeting). But more importantly, they’ve given me a support network who I can lean on when the writing’s not going well, and who I can celebrate with when it is. You don’t have to be a joiner to get a support network – one writing friend, online or in real life, is enough to validate your perception of yourself as a writer. This job is hard enough without trying to do it in a vacuum.

Do you have a dream project you'd love to write?
You know, I’m lucky enough to feel like every project I’m working on is my dream project at the time.

Big thanks to Julie for her brilliant questions. I can’t wait to read Getting Away With It - it’s going to be my Christmas treat this year!

Julie's gorgeous book, Getting Away With It, is out now in hardback and will be released in paperback next year. To find out more about Julie, visit her website.

If you would like to feature in a future Coffee and Roses Writer Spotlight, drop me a line at coffeeandroses@gmail.com and I'll see what I can do!

Here it is!!

Finally, after a year of pretty much hard slog, here is my new sparkly novel, Welcome to My World!
The first copies arrived this week and I have to say they look throughly gorgeous.
Here are the first-look pics:

This time, the sparkles continue in full glorious technicolour on the inside cover and I even have a strap-line now: Escape with Miranda - how mad is that?!

The thing I love the most is the 'By the same author' page - so nice to have not just one but two books out there now (or soon...)

So it's all really exciting! I'm also chuffed to bits because, after five years of begging studio time and lots of writing, my very first album About Time is going to be launched on the same day as Welcome to My World - 11th November! Here's a sneaky peek at the album cover:

Keep your eyes peeled here on Coffee and Roses for a chance to win signed copies of Welcome to My World and About Time coming very soon!

It's all ridiculously exciting and I can't quite believe it's all happening. Seeing my book for the first time was amazing - I've written about the moment I saw the finished copies of Welcome to My World for the first time over on the Authonomy blog this week.

You can hear some of the tracks from About Time here - and, although the completed master mixes on the album are much better than these, it should give you an idea of what my music sounds like!

Writer Spotlight: Tom Cox

On Coffee and Roses I like to bring you news of exciting authors who are either waiting to be published or published and worth checking out.

So this week, the Coffee and Roses Writer Spotlight falls upon the brilliant (and very lovely)
TOM COX.

When did you first decide that you wanted to write?
As a very young child I would always nag my parents to read to me before bed and I remember when I was about seven I had three ideal jobs: writer, librarian or inventor. Somehow, things all went awry in my adolescence and I decided I wanted to be a pro golfer, and essentially didn't read a thing between the age of ten and eighteen. I then got back on my original track when I decided I wanted to be a music journalist, but I was always a stage ahead of myself: as soon as I got my dream job writing for the NME, I was yearning to write about other subjects other than music; as soon as I'd started broadening my journalistic canvas, I started yearning to stop doing journalism altogether and write books.

What interests you as a writer?
Finding the humour in the mundane has become a bit of a theme, recently. I also love writing about weird parts of British life. More and more, I like the actual detail of writing - fiddling with sentences until they're nice and clean. For several years I beat myself up for not having written a "serious" book. I've started (fairly humourless) works of fiction twice, got up to around 30,000 words, and scrapped them. I'd love to write a ghost story or a horror story or a historical novel but I don't think it's where my real talent lies, or at least not if I approach it in the style I was approaching it before. I'm now thankfully over the idea that a very funny book can't be serious as well. My favourite writers - Richard Russo, John Irving, David Sedaris, Kate Atkinson - prove this pretty comprehensively. When I think about what really makes me happy as a writer, it's conveying something funny or absurd that's happened to me or people I know in the most economical and pithy way, or discovering a new turn of phrase, or that moment when you actually learn something as you're writing it. Plot is not something I've found myself hugely interested in yet - I like to have as little idea as possible where a book is going when I start - but that might change. I'd still love to write fiction one day, but I don't want to be the person in that Peter Cook anecdote who's always "working on a novel" ("Oh, really? Neither am I.").

Do you have a typical writing day? If not, when is the best time to write for you?
I remember Salman Rushdie saying that there's a specific writing energy first thing in the morning that has to be bottled before it escapes. The belief in that might just be the only thing Salman Rushdie and I have in common as writers. My ideal day would involve working from about six am until one pm, with cocktail gherkin and cold Malteser treats as incentives for finishing paragraphs, then spending the afternoon lazing about in cafes people-watching and reading, but it never quite works out that way (apart from the cocktail gherkins and Maltesers). My life is a fairly comprehensive lesson in how not to time manage at the moment: I spend far too much time socialising to be a Proper Writer, find it hard to not see another human being for more than 24 hours, and get too caught up in the stuff surrounding writing (Twitter/chasing for money/convincing myself I can't write a decent sentence before I've vacuumed my floor), but I keep hoping I'll be a better-behaved crafter of prose. One thing I've learned, as a slightly reformed workaholic, is the importance of battery-recharging time.

What made you decide to write 'Under the Paw'?

I think there were originally seventeen references to my cats in my previous book, Bring Me The Head Of Sergio Garcia. Even the most ardent cat lover - and certainly the cat-disdaining editor of the book, who quite understandably asked me to remove several of them - would probably agree that that's too many cats for a book about golf. This kind of thing had been happening for years, though: my cats bullying their way into totally inappropriate areas of my writing. I thought I'd relent and give them centre stage - especially as they treat my house like a hotel, and it was about time they started pulling their weight financially. One thing that probably stopped me writing the book earlier was the inevitability of being known as "The Cat Man" but maybe I'm more comfortable being weird, as I get older, even though "Cat Man" is only one of many weird shelves of the weird cupboard that is my brain. Publishers are going to want to use that gimmick in the marketing of a book like Under The Paw, and I accept it. But I'd like to be known as a humour writer more than someone who writes about cats, or golf (or - especially - music, which I don't think I've ever written really well about), and I think that's one of the challenges I face with future books. I'm hoping I've started meeting the challenge with Talk To The Tail which, though a form of sequel to Under The Paw, is only 50% about cats, with other animals "getting the floor'" for the other half of the book. Some of the non-cat essays in the book are my favourites. But I feel sure I'll be writing again about cats in the future.

What are the best things (so far) about being a writer?
1) Ability to choose your own hours.
2) The strange assumptions people make about what The Writing Life might be comprised of.
3) The fact that my whole house can become an office.
4) Snacks.

And the worst?
1) Ability to choose your own hours.
2) The strange assumptions people make about what The Writing Life might be comprised of.
3) The fact that my whole house can become my office.
4) Snacks.

Tell me about your new book, 'Talk to the Tail'.

At the moment, I'm feeling very pleased with it. I want to remember this feeling - that I've done my very best with it - because (and I think this happens to everyone who has a book published at some point, no matter how successful) there'll inevitably be a time when a bad review or a comment here or there makes me question myself. I think it's a (deliberately) messier book than Under The Paw, which doesn't run in chronological order, and a more profane one (mainly due to my dad's greater presence in the book, and my cat Shipley's increasing bad language), but I hope a slightly more strongly felt and funnier one. I was late delivering - mainly for the reason that during its inception, in spring 2009, my relationship broke up. It's ultimately supposed to be a fun read, so I didn't have to write about the break-up in great detail, and wouldn't have felt that was fair on my ex, but because that relationship was a fairly sizeable element of Under The Paw, it would have been an insult to my readers not to write about it at all. I needed time to get the distance to write about it the way I wanted to.

You've written about pop music, golf, growing up and cats. What's next?
More growing up - in the form of a book about being from the Midlands, or a "A Middle Person". I wrote about the golf stage of my adolescence in Nice Jumper, but I feel there are still a lot of odd stories from my childhood and early twenties that are untold: stuff that I've only now realised is genuinely odd. For example: living in a small town where every boy except you gets his hair cut for 50p in exactly the same style by a man called "Mad George", or imbibing no beverage but Special Brew for your first two years as a consumer of alcohol. I used to think that was run-of-the-mill stuff. The Midlands is an odd place and I'd like to try to capture it. I'm also working on a "very Norfolk" project, in a similar vein. So, all in all: more light, inconsequential stories about provincial British life that might hopefully make a train or plane ride go a little bit more quickly.

Anything else you'd like to say?
Thank you for having me!


You can see all of Tom's books here. Read more about Tom's feline residents at his Under The Paw blog. Also, check out parts one, two and three of the Marathon Diaries that Tom wrote about his dad (which may appear in his next book). Big thanks to Tom for giving this interview! I'm reading Under The Paw at the moment and loving it - it's a brilliantly written, hilarious and very real account of the various moggies Tom has shared his life with. I can thoroughly recommend it!

If you would like to feature in a future Coffee and Roses Writer Spotlight, drop me a line at coffeeandroses@gmail.com and I'll see what I can do!

A bit of silliness for a dreary Monday...

It's August, but nobody seems to have told the weather that.
R-r-r-r-rubbish.
So, in the name of all things Eternally Optimistic, here's a little bit of silliness (with a classical theme) to brighten your day. Enjoy!

Ever get the feeling you're in the wrong place..?

Having been in various bands for years, I've occasionally found myself playing gigs with people I don't quite feel as connected to as I should...

...such as the gig I did with a frustrated 80s-style lead guitarist, for example, where he turned every song into an eight-minute, plank-spanking epic. Or the gig where the drummer ran the band and didn't stick to the setlist (so the start of every song was like a live version of 'Name That Tune'...). Or the time I did backing vocals for a Nigerian gospel singer and had to do them all in a faux Nigerian accent so they didn't sound out of place...

So when my drummer mate, Nic, told me about this video and I just had to share it with you. Enjoy!

Short Story Special

Every now and again on Coffee and Roses, I want to bring you bits of writing I've done in the past that you might not have seen - just for fun!

In 2008, before I was published, I decided to start a short story blog. The main reason for this was just to have an outlet for my writing (in the vain hope that it might be read by someone other than me!). The result was September's - a series of short stories set in a small Shropshire cafe. Unfortunately, because the blog is - well - a blog, it means that the first story is hidden beneath all the others. It kind of sets the scene for the rest as it introduces Nessa, who manages the cafe.

I think you might like it... Read Open for Business - Meet Nessa and let me know what you think!

Writer Spotlight: Jamie Guiney

As a new feature on Coffee and Roses I am going to bring you news of exciting authors who are either waiting to be published or published and worth checking out.

One of the first successes I had in writing was when Steve, a friend from writer's forum MyWritersCircle.com published one of my short stories on his blog. As a startlingly unsuccessful aspiring writer until that point, it gave me a massive confidence boost - so I would like to do the same for other writers. After all, you never know who might be reading!

So this week, the Coffee and Roses Spotlight falls upon the immensely talented JAMIE GUINEY.

photo ©Jamie Guiney 2010

I met Jamie when I first joined Authonomy.com in 2008 - and his novel A Man in Grey Shoes was one of the first books I read on the site. I loved it immediately and it's remained on my Authonomy bookshelf ever since.

This week, Jamie announced the brilliant news that two of his short stories, Christmas and Changes, have just been published worldwide for iPad and iPhone by Ether Books. You can read them with a free app which you download from the iTunes store here. You won't be disappointed, trust me. Both of the stories are fantastically written - Jamie brings a real sense of place and time to his writing, with vivid characters moving through evocative landscapes. You can feel the bitter winter wind in Christmas and the brooding summer dust bowl of Changes... A real treat for the eyes and imagination!

Check out Jamie's website here.

If you would like to feature in a future Coffee and Roses Spotlight, drop me a line at coffeeandroses@gmail.com and I'll see what I can do!