Welcome! Julie Hogan

Here's who I really am.

I'm from what used to be a small town in Northern San Diego County named Poway. (In case you want to know, you pronounce it just like this: POW-way). With housing tracts as far as the eye can see and TWO high schools (mercy me!) it's not a small town anymore. Anyway, who am I to complain? I'm the one that left that luscious little cocoon of countrified peacefulness to attend UCLA where, after years of halfhearted toil, I earned my BA in English. Don't get me wrong, though, I stayed busy, mostly by working in dead end jobs: arresting people as an undercover security agent at a major department store, walking thoroughbreds after their workouts at the Santa Anita and Hollywood Park racetracks, "secret shopping" unsuspecting workers at a discount shoe store chain, sweating it out in the blazing hot San Fernando Valley loading trucks as a Teamster for a shipping company and toiling for peanuts as an advertising lackey for a surfwear manufacturer.

But throughout the years - from teenhood to adulthood - the one thing that never changed was the books on the top of my TBR pile: romance novels. When I was a teenager, my mom brought home piles of Harlequin romances and I - ever the ambitious teen - would loll by the pool devouring one after another. In college, I'd tuck one inside my Shakespeare anthology or my copy of an Ibsen play and sit in the UCLA library, "studying". But alas, although I knew by the time I was seventeen I wanted to write my own, after college I wandered down a more traditional path.

Although writing was always my dream job, after college I took employment with someone who could begin paying me immediately and who could continue with that nifty trend each and every Friday: I worked in public relations and special events for a major department store. Mostly that meant dreaming up and organizing contests, planning store opening events (where my deep and unflagging disdain for clowns was born), organizing fashion shows, bridal events, Valentine's Day events, Easter events, Mother's Day events, Father's Day events, Fourth of July events - are you getting the picture? If you imagined a girl wearing uncomfortable pumps, an ugly suit and running full out on a hamster wheel, your imagination is right on target. A few years later, I escaped and ended up doing the internet thing as the national marketing director for the web end of an event ticketing company you've all paid a service fee to sometime or another. (Really, that company isn't as evil as everyone wants to believe it is, but I'll save that for another sermon.)

Then, a few fortuitous things happened.

1. I fell down stairs. I know that doesn't sound great, but it was. While I was on a business trip in NYC, I broke my ankle in three places, flew home, had some pretty gruesome surgery, was in a wheelchair for three months and in the midst of all this:

2. I married the man of my dreams. This was the best day of my life but the bad news is, I couldn't walk at my wedding. Couldn't even put one toe on the ground. So rather than hump down the aisle on crutches, my friends found a Cleopatra type chair for me and the groomsmen carried me down the aisle, deposited me at the altar, and when were done with our lightning fast vows, my gorgeous new husband carried me back up the aisle in his arms. It was a princess moment that every girl should connive to have for herself.

3. My commute grew by a factor of three. By the time I was ready to go back to work after my ankle had healed, my company had moved their offices to Pasadena. And that, my friends, stretched my Los Angeles commute to three hours each way. Enough said.

4. I enrolled in a UCLA Extension class called, "How to Write a Romance Novel." There I met my mentor, Barbara Ankrum, and four of the nicest, most committed romance writing buddies an aspiring author could have. We met in a critique group for years during which time I a) quit my commuter, job, b) finished two books, c) bought a house, d) got pregnant, and e) sold my book, Tangled Sheets, Tangled Lies, to Silhouette Desire!

That's it! That's the whole story. Oh, wait. A few more details: When I'm not writing, I love wasting time trolling Ebay, watching old movies, reading voraciously, camping, riding horses, traveling and hanging out with my fabulous husband, Jud. Right now, we live in a pretty cool Southern California beachpad with our favorite person in the world: our little boy, Liam, who arrived in early January, 2003.