2023 International Firebird Book Awards First in Urban Fantasy

2023 Pinnacle Book Awards Best Book in Fantasy

2023 Global Book Awards Bronze in Fantasy

2023 Global Book Awards Finalist in Vampire Books

2023 Hollywood Book Festival First Runner-Up

The alien romance you just downloaded because someone reviewed it as hot, hot, hot? That might’ve been me. The next MI6 Bond, James Bond? Also me. The YA fantasy that readers say they could read again and again? Could be me.

That’s because I’m a ghost. A ghostwriter, specifically.

My dual roles of ghostwriter or author didn’t happen side-by-side or all at once, either. After my dad and I stumped across several college campuses and I chose Southern Methodist University’s school of journalism, I split the difference between athletic training as my day job and writing contributing articles as a mere side hustle for many years.

My first book was published when I was 42, and I was drilling down on my fifth novel when I stumbled upon ghosting and editing. At the time, I was participating in an Austin writers’ guild, and as I understood it then, a ghostwriter by definition was a person who wrote for hire in the name of another. I’d read for example about heirs of Louis L’Amour, V. C. Andrews, and Ernest Hemingway having published these authors’ works posthumously—and while some were unpublished originals, others were ghostwritten in their writing styles.

As I was soon to discover, I usually ghost for clients who don’t have time to write, struggle with English as a second language, or just can’t get their ideas organized.

So, my day job over the past 10 years became this service to help others, which I soon realized I was cut out for all along. I especially like working with first-time indie authors as a one-stop shop—helping them write, package, and get quality books on the market.

I kid you not, while I say I enjoy ghostwriting, it comes with its own unique challenges. I think every ghostwriter or editor needs a core group of listeners with which they share anonymous bytes—readerly wise friends and fellow trenchers—especially concerning the check-and-balance syndrome in this business. I know very few clients who crave having their work or their ideas picked apart, for example. I also have regular Friday lunches with one of my proofreaders for reviewing such formidable woes. The development of healthy critique tactics and good market knowledge are the life and breath of any ghostwriter. This growth process takes time, experience, and an equivalent number of hard knocks.

If you hang out your shingle and sign on to work, the days go by quickly. After just a few years freelancing with Upwork and James Innes Group, I’d already checked in on a variety of projects with clients across the globe. From novellas to novel series and screenplays to the stage, I’d written a metric shit-ton of material. I’d ghosted self-help, how-to, inspirational, spiritual, blog, technical, academic, plus resume and LinkedIn profile enhancements. Genres I’d worked on included YA, children’s, adult fantasy, stories based upon or inspired by true events, memoirs, paranormal, sci-fi, and romance—as well as thriller, horror, and action adventure.

Fast-forward to 2020. By that point I’d written so much, I’d developed a bit of a jaundiced attitude toward story fare. What made a story worth telling? We’d just gone through a pandemic, and I’d lost both parents within two years of each other. I took some time off to process and hadn’t written for 14 months. I did have a running list of story ideas and aha moments I’d jotted down when I was in the thick of finishing said work on something else for everybody else. I posed the question to my very intuitive writer, friend, and listener, Lois DiMari. Which story do you think is worth me writing–as myself? She chose Falling Stars, and I had a good feeling about it too.

I’d studied vampire lore since grade school and had ghosted three books about vampires. These books were far more graphic and dystopian in nature, set during a future world war happening largely in bombed-out military zones and reconstituted American territories. The vampires in these stories I ghosted were more feral in nature, their behavior governed by clan hierarchy and trying to find their next meal under martial law.

For Falling Stars, I wanted to reintroduce the romantic vampire—what some say is the original vampire story in Greek myth, a love affair between a young Italian adventurer, Ambrogio, and a Delphi temple maiden, Selene. I also decided to cast Viscount Claudius Fallon in this story as a sick dhampyre, or a vampire-human hybrid. He does crave red meat, but his major issue isn’t a desire for blood so much; it’s surviving his own congenital leukemia.

The nine-year-old boy in this story, Tommy Lucas, believes that Fallon, an urban legend, is still alive and well in his hometown. Tommy has his own dilemma (an incurable blood cancer called paroxysmal nocturnal hemoglobinuria, or PNH), which he believes is similar enough to Fallon’s own disease process to confirm he’s a vampire, too.

Tommy’s fantasy is not entirely unfounded. Some of the first “natural” vampires may have been carriers of porphyria, an inherited disease more common among Eastern European nobility in the Middle Ages. Much like PNH, victims of porphyria were sun sensitive. They excreted blood in their urine and were often sickened by eating sulfur-rich spices like garlic. Physicians in medieval times regularly recommended that porphyria patients drink animals’ blood to raise their heme levels, as well. And in severe cases, facial sunburns caused skin to recede from their gums, exposing their teeth. Tommy is therefore convinced he’s a sick vampire too.

Falling Stars was a story idea hanging out on my bucket list for a long time, one I wasn’t sure I’d circle back around to—because in the dark moments of 2020, I wasn’t sure I’d ever pick up a pencil again—for myself, or anybody else.

Grieving can be an elaborately strange process, and for me—even more odd. One day a switch simply clicked back on, and I started writing again. I’d originally outlined Falling Stars as a screenplay treatment and pitched it at the Maui Writers’ Convention in 2001 to Alison Rosenzweig, one of the producers of Windtalkers. I put it away with all the other pitches that weren’t greenlighted at the time and pulled it out in 2021. I figured 20 years was long enough to sort some things out.

Now I tell all my clients, if a story idea suits up and shows up, it’s there for a reason—to trust that. Yours is next.

1.      What inspired you to write this book?
When I was ten, I had a friend, a boy in my third-grade class, who was an avid fan of the TV cult classic Dark Shadows. He hurried home every day after school to watch it. This was in the daytime soap’s heyday after Canadian actor Jonathan Frid joined the show and its ratings went through the roof.

This little boy, my classmate, could pass for a vampire himself—the complete package with the dark hair and eyes, the long cuspids—and his ability to act the part. He had a flashy cape too, not just any old cheap one, with which he regularly entertained our classroom performing Barnabas Collins impersonations. I was curious about Dark Shadows, but my parents censored that one for me at the time because they thought the show would frighten me. And they were probably right.

Years later I revisited the memory, this little boy’s whole live action role-playing in third grade, really before LARPing was a thing. He did it because he loved the TV show, and his theatrics were fun-and-games when school got boring. But it posed a question to me: what if a young boy roleplayed a vampire for a much more serious reason, and where would that take him?

2.      What exactly is it about and who is it written for?

In this story, nine-year-old Tommy Lucas needs a bone marrow transplant to survive. But he’s a very imaginative little boy and he’s convinced his disease is a curse on his bloodline, that he’s a vampire. His mother’s an oncologist, but Tommy insists that only magic can cure him—or the same synthetic blood substitute developed for urban legend (and vampire) Viscount Claudius Fallon.

Fallon comes from a ruling class of vampires in Cardiff and is said to have traveled to Eureka Springs, Arkansas seeking a cure for his own leukemia during WWII. Tommy’s stoked when he discovers a five-part series about Fallon in an online pulp fiction magazine called Philly’s Argosy and believes the information from this story will help him locate Claudius Fallon.

His quest leads him to befriend a local artist in Eureka Springs named Callan Masters, who struggles with his growing affection for Tommy’s mom, June—for Masters is Fallon, cured in 1939 at the Baker Cure-for-Cancer Hospital there. Since Fallon a.k.a. Masters is dedicated to living off-grid and keeping his identity a secret, he must decide whether he’ll take the risk in helping Tommy or falling in love with June.

He’s also survived over half a century on a blood substitute, is committed to living as a human, and he fears being studied or outcast. Because of Fallon’s own illness, his bite was never capable of turning anyone—or so he thinks.

I think my editor, Bill Grabowski, lays out the target readership for Falling Stars very poignantly:

“Falling Stars is an exceptional novel. The storytelling and its emotional momentum are enthralling. Having had personal experience with cancer and its profound horrors, I can only add that I’m convinced readers will connect with Tommy and June—with all its sharply drawn characters—and find the light pulsing in what might seem infinite darkness. Falling Stars is a magical feast, and it moved me deeply. I see the book appealing not only to Anne Rice readers, but also historical fiction buffs. The narrative approach adds pleasing depth to the story, and charges it with realism.”

3.      What do you hope readers will get out of reading your book?

I’d say a deeper exploration of our own biological mortality and insights from generational redundancy. On the road trip across America in this story, Lt. Gaye tells Claudius Fallon about the 1939 New York World’s Fair, specifically the Trylon-Perisphere attraction, and its feature cinematic experience, Dawn of a New Day. Out of recovering industrial capitalism in a world that had yet to see the Second World War or even nuclear deployment—and in a country that had only recently developed escalators and RCA amphitheater sound—environmental engineers were already demonstrating a model world of symbiotic regions. We displayed some incredible human ingenuity for making the world a better place even way back in 1939. If that utopia had truly taken off, we would’ve begun making huge inroads against global warming then. But a world war was brewing, and collective trust had been flattened by hard times.

Claudius Fallon was one of the last children to leave Cardiff before Hitler invaded Poland. Soon after his arrival in the States, Gaye introduces Fallon to several examples of American isolationism, a country distracted by its own financial recovery from the Great Depression. We were quick to manufacture munitions to aid the skirmishes while delaying our own entrance into “Europe’s War.” Such still is the struggle with any hostilities “over there,” until it’s not.

As Claudius lives on in the story, he observes a recurrent personal pain in each consecutive generation. I’d like readers to explore why this pain keeps happening. 

4.      How did you decide on your book’s title and cover design?
Titles usually come rather intuitively to me, although I expect from a marketing standpoint, there’s always room for improvement. In truth, the term “falling star” is inaccurate, and the story explores just that—truths and untruths—echoing in the prologue a quote often attributed to Pontius Pilate: What is truth? Since we live in a world of deepfakes, I think it’s reasonable to accept that we all lie to ourselves some of the time, and that lies are usually borne from insecurities or perceptions that are skewed. Even our best science can redact its previous conclusions. At the time of this writing it is generally accepted that we are essentially composed of stardust, and that if anything fell, we fell here. So, here we lie for a period of time until the atmosphere carries us elsewhere, because we are in essence falling stardust. And the reality of aging comes to many of us, even our seemingly more permanent icons and celebrities; they fall as well. Falling stars also bring to mind the stark juxtaposition of these gaseous giants to the average size of our daily dilemmas. Our missteps are infinitesimal compared to the mind-boggling size of our universe.
 

The cover! OMG. I’d already fully developed and vetted six cover ideas through my beta readers, reaching for something beyond the old stock-photo standbys—when my then-to-be publicist stepped into the game. This is not a YA book, so capes and fangs—symbols generally unique to vampires—just wouldn’t do. I scrolled through hundreds of stock photos, just about to give up, when—hey, that one looks like a nighttime residential street scene in Eureka Springs, yep.

The photographer had done one helluva job setting it up, too—eyes disproportionately large peering through the trees. That could be Claudius Fallon living his off-grid, low-key life, uh-huh. Although I usually design my own covers, I worked with an Australian graphic illustrator on this one to enhance the street scene using his own artwork and pulp vibes.

5.      What advice or words of wisdom do you have for fellow writers – other than run!?

I think if you have a compulsion to create something, it comes into your heart for a reason. The idea suited up, showed up, and knocked at your door. Don’t ignore it, and for Pete’s sake, don’t shoot it! The bigger picture of why any of us are here also involves this idea that keeps on knocking at your heart’s door. Yes, we are a book-glutted, information-glutted society, but this idea came to you.

Now, the hard part—it’s your responsibility as a writer to share that idea—your story—to the best of your ability. That’s where it’s important to continue to trust that this idea came to you for a reason, to see you through the process. Now more than ever, we have legitimate, reasonably priced resources to ensure your book is of professional quality. Part of that professionalism is concise communication—the tic and tac of getting the grammar right, for example. Then there’s the heart stuff. For people to listen to your heart, your book needs to speak to their hearts. If you’re not ready to publish your idea in book form just yet, blog it. I’ve blogged to a book before, and it works really well.

Once your book is published, do not ever question the value of marketing and publicity. Books don’t grow legs and jump off the shelves to find readers. Without an effective marketing campaign, the people who might be inclined to read your book will never know it’s out there.

6.      What trends in the book world do you see -- and where do you think the book publishing industry is heading?

I think we’re in somewhat of a humpty-dumpty with the book industry today. Before POD, AI, and other online technology took off, publishing options were far more limited. Traditional publishers were the gatekeepers. Vanity publishers and offset printers were the wildcards, the other options for writers who didn’t want to keep sending out SASEs. With the advent of the Internet and all the other available options today, the lines have blurred. As new online author tools have joined the pile-on, many indie books can stand on the wall alongside the big boys, and the writing talent is truly there. Many don’t, however. Bestseller has a totally different meaning than it did twenty-five years ago. I doubt the global market will ever truly support all the books being published every single day—and in truth, it never did. I’ve always felt that our personal freedoms stand on diverse voices and differences of opinion—and we certainly have them now.

7.      Were there experiences in your personal life or career that came in handy when writing this book? 

As a freelance ghostwriter and editor, I constantly encounter new creative ideas and writing styles. I guess you could say ghostwriting pulls me out of my own mental trenches and habits. After I’d ghostwritten a number of books and screenplays, I took some time off after my parents’ deaths and thought about the direction I was headed. I had six books of my own in a variety of genres. Did I want to start a seventh one? I’d written so much by that point; I’d developed a bit of a jaundiced attitude toward story fare. What makes a story worth telling? I had a list of story ideas and posed the same question to a very intuitive writer and friend, Lois DiMari. Which one do you think is worth it? She chose Falling Stars, and I had a good feeling about it too.

8.      How would you describe your writing style? Which writers or books is your writing similar to?

As a ghostwriter I’m a bit of a chameleon, an admirer of many voices and styles. I’ve been told I write like Richard Bach in my children’s book, Hootie. Dionysius the Areopagite in Simeon. Stephen King in Seven Shorts. Of all the styles I most admire and hope to emulate, however—I would say it’s an amalgam of Annie Dillard and M. Scott Peck.

9.      What challenges did you overcome in the writing of this book?

I’d written a few op-ed and inspirational pieces about people recovering from or succumbing to cancer, but I wasn’t sure I could pull off a story where the arch-nemesis was cancer and cancer treatment. I also knew I couldn’t exclude the courage, humor, and insight I’d observed in those very same people. I outlined the story after my maternal grandmother passed away from melanoma and pitched it as a screenplay treatment at the Maui Writers’ Convention in 2001 to Alison Rosenzweig, one of the producers of Windtalkers. She didn’t go for it, and I put the story away with all the other pitches that weren’t greenlighted at the time.

My father lost a five-year battle with multiple myeloma in 2018, and Mom, adrift without him, died during the pandemic. I didn’t write for a year. In 2021, I pulled the project out of the closet, but with the intention of writing it as a novel. The original screenplay version had a YA or PG feel to it because I put the major focus on Tommy Lucas. In a novel, though, I had more room to weave in some incredible Eureka Springs’ and WWII history, as well as the whole Claudius Fallon persona, this vampire-human hybrid who struggles with his own disease process, how he integrates a successful art gallery in the middle of a tourist destination without being discovered. I also realized I was the wrong person writing this in the wrong way in 2001.

10.   If people can buy or read one book this week or month, why should it be yours?

I’ll always come to this kind of question with some trepidation because I’ve worked on so many types of books and stories and encountered so much material as a ghostwriter. It always comes back to why this one? I’d say it’s because I set out to write Falling Stars to encapsulate several universal life themes, ones that will hopefully compel readers to think and even reconsider how those came to be. 

Julie Rogers is the author of seven books, including Seven Shorts; Letters: Sidereal Insight for a 21st Century Mystic; Hootie; and Simeon: A Greater Reality. Her muse for Falling Stars began in childhood, followed by harsh realities of terminal illness and the discovery of a magical place called Eureka Springs. Julie’s articles and award-winning stories are featured in self-help, inspirational and fiction publications like Coping with Cancer, Daily Meditation, and the annual anthology Writes of Passage: Every Woman has a Story! The 1999 Writer’s Digest Writing Competition Grand Prize winner for her horror short story, “House Call,” Julie also freelances as a ghostwriter and an editor for Edioak in New York. For more info, please check out: https://www.julierogersbooks.com