The Title of Julie

by Julie Coulter Bellon

I have an announcement.

*drum roll please*

The name of my new book that is being released in the spring has been handed down from the powers that be at Covenant. It will not be anything that I chose or suggested, (which is sort of sad for me because I have been able to name all of my novels so far and I had gotten attached to the one I’d given to this one, but oh well) and the new name will be:


DANGEROUS CONNECTIONS


Ta-da!

What do you think? Does it sound suspenseful? This is the book that takes place in France so I think it sort of reminds me of Dangerous Liaisons, but oh well. The book is about a French DGSE agent who comes upon information about an imminent terrorist attack, but before she can get the intel out, she is caught and imprisoned. Her brother comes to save her, he is shot and needs a doctor, and they meet up with, yep, you guessed it, Tyler Winthrop from my book All’s Fair. Tyler gets caught up in the international espionage and makes a few dangerous connections, so I guess that’s where the title is coming from. It’s growing on me. I heard that if you say the title a thousand times you’ll love it. I’m working on that. I’m sure I’ll love it once I see it on the cover. There’s something about the cover with the title that always makes it look good. (I hope I didn’t jinx it by saying that.)

So, in book production news, we’re moving right along. I’ve been working on the character guides and pronunciation guides for Dangerous Connections (it will be released in April I heard) and it’s always fun to go through your manuscript and write down every character that speaks in your novel and what you think their voice sounds like. It’s not easy to come up with descriptions after a while, especially if you have a large cast. You have strong voices, firm voices, powerful voices, whiny voices, pinched voices, stressed voices, etc. etc., but sometimes there are voices that are hard to describe. I think I need to start training myself to listen to voices and describing them. That will make this process easier, I think, and only scorch my brain when I try to do it, instead of fry it altogether.

Doing the pronunciation guides for me hasn’t been a picnic either because I have a lot of foreign language stuff in my books. The last book had a lot of Iraqi names and places in it, and to tell you the truth, I don’t have Iraqi dictionaries in my home, so I turned to the net. I learned a lot by doing that, actually, and can now pronounce a lot of words that make me sound smart at parties. The new book has a lot of French in it, and thankfully I already speak French so that wasn’t as hard (and a big thank you to my editor friend Meredith who is fluent in French and double checked all my stuff!) Making it something that a potentially non-French-speaking reader can pronounce was a bit dicey, but at least I knew what I was talking about this time and could make things clear. At least I think I did. We’ll see if the reader thinks so.

I’m really excited for the new book to come out and thrilled that it will be on CD as well. There is just something about listening to my book that gives me goosebumps. Hearing someone read the words that come from my imagination is an experience only matched by when I saw my book actually on a store shelf for the first time. It’s surreal, to be sure, and something to write in the journal.

So there you have it. Dangerous Connections. Think about it. Love it or hate it. But look for it in stores in April 2010.

Merci beaucoup.