Julie Conrad’s seventh effort is available in the shops
Julie Conrad(Image: UGC)
After the pandemic helped a wannabe author get her first book over the line, now Julie Conrad has achieved another huge milestone.
She says that her latest novel being picked up by a publisher is like a dream coming true. To Everything There Is A Season is the seventh book penned by Julie, a former social worker from Altrincham who has now turned her hand to writing.
Her first effort, High Places, was a psychological thriller featuring an affair between an MP and his secretary and was self-published. She had first started writing it in the 1990s, inspired by the political events of the time, but only got round to finishing it after the pandemic allowed more space for such passion projects to be completed.
Now, a few years on, Julie’s latest book is the seventh she has completed, and the first to be available in the shops. It has been taken up by the publisher Collective Ink, and is again set in the 1990s.
It tells the story of three women whose lives, while seemingly on totally different paths, cross in the ‘most innocent way’, with plenty of twists and turns along the journey.
Julie said: “It gives you validation that your work’s good enough for, albeit a small publishing company, to put some money behind it and know they’ll get their money back. I’ve not been able to stop writing, really, since I’ve produced High Places.
“There’s an awful lot more exposure than just doing it myself, which is very limited, especially as I’m not very tech savvy. It has really opened up everything, and I feel very positive about it.”
Despite her former career giving her potential story lines, she says her work is pure fiction. Julie continued: “I was a social worker for many years, and I’ve met lots of people in dire straits, in unhappy relationships and married to toxic people. But I would still say, I don’t really draw on that. That’s just the psychology that I understand, and the sociology of everything. But it’s pure imagination.
“And so I just start developing the characters and then as I go along, I think ‘I’m not sure where it’s going’ and then I think, ‘oh, that would be a good idea’.”
Julie is signing copies of her new book at the Wilmslow Festival of Writing on Saturday, July 5 at The Guild for Lifelong Learning.