Featured Interview With Julie Rogers
Tell us a little about yourself. Where were you raised? Where do you live now?
My love for writing started in high school after I won a first-place award in a themed essay competition. Dad was always my encourager, to pursue a degree in journalism and to keep writing no matter what.
I enjoyed moving more than sitting at times, so I went for a BFA in Dance Performance and Journalism from Southern Methodist University instead, and completed two years’ post-graduate work at Stephen F. Austin State University. I wrote as a contributing editor for school papers, area newspapers, and a regional magazine called News of East Texas.
I currently work as a remote freelance ghostwriter and editor for julierogersbooks.com and Edioak (New York) in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, the setting of my seventh book, FALLING STARS. I live here with my husband, Jim, a primary care physician. We have three furry children–Madison, Kate, and Sukie–and two land snails who adopted us, Dewey and Decimal. Our son, Seth, works as a video game level designer in Austin, Texas.
At what age did you realize your fascination with books? When did you start writing?
I got tired of sending out SASE’s in my twenties and decided that indie publishing was my path, when indie publishing wasn’t really a thing just yet. My first book was hybrid-published when I was forty.
Who are your favorite authors to read? What is your favorite genre to read. Who Inspires you in your writings?
Where to start? Those authors I might emulate are ones who make me read between the lines. They can be all-consuming with their craft too. Some are from my formative years and many, quite old:
A.A. Milne, Lewis Carrol, Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, C.S. Lewis, Paulette Jiles, Jane Roberts, Earnest Hemingway, Karl Vonnegut, Thomas Harris, M. Scott Peck, Thomas Aquinas, the reformed Baptist preacher C. H. Spurgeon, John Grisham, Annie Dillard, Stephen King, Dean Koontz, Robert Greene, and Toni Morrison.
In FALLING STARS I didn’t set out to emulate any particular style, though. I did try to make readers think, to go behind the words and discover more than just the words themselves.
Tell us a little about your latest book?
In FALLING STARS, nine-year-old Tommy Lucas needs a bone marrow transplant to survive. But he’s convinced his disease is a curse on his bloodline, that he’s a vampire. His mother’s an oncologist, but Tommy believes only magic can cure him—or the same synthetic blood substitute developed for urban legend Viscount Claudius Fallon.
Tommy is stoked when he discovers a five-part series about Fallon in an online pulp fiction magazine called PHILLY’S ARGOSY. Descended from a ruling class of vampires in Cardiff, legend has it that Fallon traveled to Eureka Springs, Arkansas seeking a cure for his own leukemia during WWII.
Tommy’s quest leads him to befriend local artist and gallery owner Callan Masters, who struggles with his growing affection for Tommy’s mom, June—for he is Fallon, cured in 1939 at the Norman G. Baker Cure-for-Cancer Hospital.
Dedicated to living off-grid, Callan must decide whether he will take the risk involved in helping Tommy or falling in love with June. His bite is no longer capable of turning anyone—or so he thinks.
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