Julie-Lessman-2-1

Julie, describe yourself for our visitors.

I’ll give you a hint: When I was little, my brothers and sisters used to call me “Walking Nervous Breakdown.” Okay, so I’m a bit wired … there’s no harm in that, is there? I mean I do everything fast (except interviews!). I walk fast, I talk fast and I eat fast,a natural byproduct of being # 12 in a family of 13. Imagine 15 people at a Last Supper-style formica table with long red vinyl benches on either side. Like a school of sharks waiting for meat to hit the water. If you didn’t grab for the grub, chances are there wouldn’t be anything left. Can you say “plague of locusts”? To this day, buffets put a twitch in my eye because I feel like the food will run out.

And, yes, I am dramatic … okay, “melo”-dramatic, but in my opinion that makes for a good storyteller. I like drama and passion! LOTS of it! Especially in my reading material, which is why my books are not sweet, easy reads. But the flip side is that ALL that PASSION and ENERGY are also channeled into my love affair with God, which is a very good thing!
How do you find time to connect with God?

Great question! Because you HAVE to connect with God if you are going to write for Him! And trust me, I don’t want to take one step without God by my side. In the past (before my book was published), my routine was peach oatmeal and coffee while I answered e-mails, then treadmill/worship music time, followed by Bible-reading and prayer.

Not so much anymore. Because of the release of my first book and the demands of promotion (interviews, blogs, e-mails plus busy season at my day job), I felt convicted to NOT turn on my computer until I’d had my God time. Kind of a time-tithe, if you will. So now I eat oatmeal while reading my Bible, pray and THEN turn the computer on. Nix the treadmill (grin). MUCH, MUCH better!

Who are your favorite authors? Favorite books?

Some of my favorites are Francine Rivers’ Redeeming Love and her Mark of the Lion series,both awesome! I absolutely love Liz Curtis Higgs’ Scottish trilogy, Fair is the Rose, Thorn in My Heart and Whence Comes a Prince, as well as Kathleen Morgan’s These Highland Hills series and Daughter of Joy. And Kristin Heitzmann’s Diamond of the Rockies series is another favorite.

Newer authors that I particularly like are Tamara Alexander, Deeanne Gist and … tada … my “Seeker” sisters, Mary Connealy, Janet Dean, Deb Giusti, Sandra Leesmith, Camy Tang, Missy Tippens and Cheryl Wyatt. The Seekers are a group of 15 contest winners who butted heads in contests SO much that we decided to form our own group for contest junkies,http://seekerville.blogspot.com/. All of these women are award-winning writers, the best of the best. When we started our group two years ago, two of the 15 were newly contracted. Now, half are published/contracted, and I am quite certain the other half are close behind.

Tell us about your journey to publication.

Lessman_final-cover-2 Well, a publishing journey begins with a book, and A Passion Most Pure actually began after I’d read Gone With the Wind at the age of twelve. That novel so impacted me that I immediately began writing my own romance novel,a 150-page, single-spaced ms. entitled When Tomorrow Comes, which, by the way, is now a Janette Oke title! I used to read my story to my little sister, Katie, and she loved it. But then adolescence hit, and I soon abandoned paper romance for the real thing as a teenager.

Fast forward almost forty years later,I was sitting in a beauty parlor reading a Newsweek magazine July 16, 2001 cover article about Christian entertainment. It said Christian books, movies and music were on the threshold of exploding. My heart jumped, and something in my spirit said, “It’s time to finish your book.” Now, I have to be honest with you,up until that moment, I had never seriously considered writing a book. But the pull was so strong, that I started writing A Passion Most Pure one month later, finally selling it to Revell 4-1/2 years and 42 rejections later.

Tell us about your current book.

Well, I think the jacket blurb does it best, so here it is:

She’s found the love of her life. Unfortunately, he loves her sister …

As World War I rages across the Atlantic in 1916, a smaller war is brewing in Boston. Faith O’Connor finds herself drawn to an Irish rogue who is anything but right for her. Collin McGuire is brash, cocky, and from the wrong side of the tracks, not to mention forbidden by her father. And then there’s the small matter that he is secretly courting her younger sister. But when Collin’s affections suddenly shift her way, it threatens to tear Faith’s proper Boston family apart.

How did you come up with ideas for this book?

Well, initially, it was Margaret Mitchell and that white-hot attraction she gave Rhett for Scarlett that gave me ideas! J To me, then and now, there is nothing more intriguing than a man who wants a woman on his terms but can’t have her on any terms but hers. In the case of A Passion Most Pure, we have a bad-boy hero angry at God who is drawn to a heroine who will settle for nothing less than a relationship with God in the middle. From there, it was just a matter of borrowing from my own past (playing 2nd fiddle to an older sister who was prettier and more voluptuous than me), and the ideas took flight. I do have to give credit to Donald Maas’s Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook, however, because that book was responsible for helping me to come up with components that deepened the plot, like Faith having polio as a child and her twin sister dying in an actual polio epidemic in 1907 Boston.

What’s next for you?

Well, Book 2 of the Daughters of Boston series comes out in September 2008, and it is Charity’s story, the sister who puts her faith in her beauty rather than in God. It is a story of redemption and faith rising from the ashes of temptation, desire and shame.

Book 3, working title A Passion Denied, will be released in February 2009 and introduces us to the third sister in the family, Beth (Lizzie), a shy, gentle bookworm bent on fairytale romance. Lizzie has to learn (like I did as a child) that true romance,the kind that really satisfies,comes from following God’s precepts, not the world’s.

Then I had hoped to write a fourth book in the “Daughters of Boston” series since there are four daughters in the O’Connor family. The youngest, Katie, is a pistol who comes of age in the Roaring Twenties, but I haven’t sold it yet as publishers prefer only 3-book series, so I’m not sure what’s going to happen there. But I would definitely like to do more series. I love writing about families in depth, exploring the emotional highs and lows of a large family. Mmm … as one of 13 kids, I wonder why! J).

Where can visitors find you online?

Visitors can find me at www.julielessman.com or at The Seekers group blog at http://seekerville.blogspot.com/. In the next few months, I plan to have a newsletter that will be e-mailed to anyone who signs up on my Web site. It will keep readers updated on the progress of my books and their release dates, plus all the fun things that go on such as title selection, promotion and cover design (YOWZA, wait till you get a glimpse of the male cover model for Book 2,guaranteed to make this book sprout wings and fly off the shelves! :) ).

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