Firstly, I would like to say I do not consider myself an author. I’m a meagre ‘back yard writer’.
My stories were written for my pleasure. So, if you find a comma missing, where one shouldn’t be, or other errors, I accept that. My books are for fun and meant to be enjoyed. They were not written to be a study in English, or literary techniques.
In short, I’m not perfect but I do enjoy writing. If my stories make you smile or think, I have done my job.
It is fair to say, JulieA was born with ‘Roger and The Bum-Bubble’. It took about 30 years to get to publication because ‘life’ got in my way! I’ve always loved steering a pen, but started writing stories when we had ten acres of land on the perimeter of a tiny town. My kids had horses, motorbikes, a dam to swim in, and enough freedom to explore the world around them.
This kept me busy, yet I needed more. So I set my mind to learning so I didn’t stagnate.
I did a course to be a Justice of the Peace (JP), but did not want to be sworn in. I did freelance journalism, but never took it on as a career (I was already a Registered Nurse). I did a short writing course, and this was where I wrote A Dream For Inca. I was told to find a publisher, but hid Inca instead. I wrote under the car port. My table was an old discarded wooden Telecom spool. I used a portable typewriter (it was pre computer era). I did these courses and that was that!
The day my youngest child started school I started full time work.
Years passed…
Kids grew and left home. For some reason, more stories germinated within my grey matter. I had not read books for decades – just wrote what fell off the pen. That happened to be kids’ stories. I began to get adventurous with these stories. I was accepted by the Children’s Literary Agency, Madison Avenue, New York! I thought I’d won the lottery!
I soon discovered it costs a lot to receive publisher rejections listed on for A4 pages! With the downturn in the economy in 2009, I got the flick from the agency, as did many others. By then I’d moved to Western Australia.
One day I went bushwalking and broke my leg – snapped a bone above the right ankle. Months later I ended up in Darwin having it pinned and plated. While there, I learned about Acashic. So one day, when I was laid up recovering, I bundled up ‘Roger and the Bum Bubble’ and e-mailed him to Acashic, thinking I’d never get a reply. Two nights later I got a call from Acashic with their offer to publish Roger!
That’s how Roger and his all-consuming Bum-Bubble were set free from my computer and introduced to the world. I thought I’d made the big time – that was it, sit back and watch the money roll in! Wrong! I could not have been further from the truth if I tried. I had no idea about the intricacies of publishing – a time consuming, expensive, sometimes demoralising process, involving many people.
Anyway, Roger needed to be attributed to someone, i.e. to have an author’s name on the book. I could choose a pseudonym or use my name. Because I created Roger and was unsure of his future, I chose to use my own name in a unique way that did not involve others. By that, I mean no surnames. If Roger sank, I did not want to take anyone down with me. So I used my Christian name and the first letter of my middle name. As far as I know, no one had done that before. Hence JulieA, but with a little x instead of a dot above the “I” for my family.
Now you know how JulieA was created.
~Julie 2024.