Southern Fried Chicas

The story behind the book: Hair, Sugar Packets and Homones

I got the idea for His for the Taking when I was at a Keith Urban concert in London. I don’t actually like Keith Urban’s music all that much. I went, I will admit it, purely to look at his hair.

Hair can only hold your attention for so long, though, especially through very long guitar solos; my mind started to wander. I got a mental image, suddenly, of a man in outdoor clothing pitching a tent. The unusual bit was that he was pitching a tent in the middle of an expensive upper west side Manhattan apartment.

I even knew who he was: Nick Giroux, the brother of the heroine of my first Halrlequin/Mills & Boon book, Featured Attraction. He was a park ranger and he liked rescuing animals and helping hopeless cases. I knew he was there because he was looking for his father, because I’d written in Featured Attraction that Nick’s father had abandoned his family when Nick was ten. I had no idea where his father was, of course. I suspected he wasn’t in the apartment. I also had no idea whose apartment it was, though I suspected it was Nick’s heroine’s.

I tried out all sorts of heroines for Nick. Mostly, because of the apartment, I thought they would be rich, probably beautiful, sophisticated city-girls. I played with one after another, and none of them seemed to work. But I had to keep the apartment. It was so real in my imagination.

Then my friend lent me the first series of Battlestar Galactica, which I was immediately hooked on, especially because of Starbuck, played by Katee Sackhoff. I couldn’t stop watching her. She was tough, she was competent, she made self-destructive decisions, she was vulnerable, she was even more boyish than one of the boys, and yet wholly feminine. What if I took someone like her, a woman in a man’s world, someone who had so much to give, wanted so much to love, and yet couldn’t let herself because she had to keep up the tough facade?

So I had Zoe. A New York city cab driver. And, I decided because I wanted her to be fit and strong, an aerobics instructor. Obviously she couldn’t own this apartment, either…so who did? Why was she there? And where was Nick’s father, anyway?

One question led to another and so of course I trapped my friend in a car with me on a long journey and made her listen to all my questions and ideas, and then rejected all of her suggestions and came up with my own. I do this a lot. I really do feel sorry for my friends sometimes.

Even after I had those mysteries solved, I still had some problems. Writing for Harlequin/Mills & Boon, I’d always concentrated on emotional conflict rather than plot. I’d never handled a mystery before, or a quest story. I didn’t know how to structure it. My big question was, did I wrap up the mystery before or after I wrapped up the romance? If I did it before, wouldn’t it get annoyingly in the way? If I did it afterwards, wouldn’t it seem like an anticlimax? I remember getting another friend drunk and making her listen to all of this, while I drew diagrams with sugar packets and candle holders on the table.

And what the hell was I going to do with the pigeon who turned up on page 69?

Then, of course, I got pregnant. I reached the first sex scene, set in an orange hotel room in a place called The Lobster Trap, when I was about eleven weeks pregnant, and I discovered that it is nearly impossible to write sex when all you want to do is throw up. I wrestled with that damn scene for days until I decided to give up and leave it for later; I just wrote down the emotions and the barest plan of the scene and went on to the next scene.

A couple of weeks later, I got to my second trimester, you know, the sexy trimester, and I went back to the scene and wrote and wrote and wrote, aided by the best hormone high I have ever had.

Anyway, despite all my angst and puking, Keith Urban’s hair must have done something right, because His for the Taking (under its original title, Driving Him Wild) was shortlisted for the Romantic Novelists’ Association’s 2008 Romance Prize, for the year’s best category romances. It’s out now in print and ebook in North America, as a Harlequin Presents in the Nights of Passion collection.

Links:

My website

http://www.julie-cohen.com

Excerpt of DHW/HFTT:

http://www.julie-cohen.com/books/driving-him-wild/

Buy book on: Amazon.com

Buy book/ebook: on eHarlequin