Julie Simmons has a Bachelor of Arts in English and Bachelor of Education degrees from Memorial University. She currently resides in Kamloops, British Columbia, Canada with her husband of 31 years, Rodney. Her passions in life (besides her husband, of course) include musical theatre, Disney, and Christmas.
She's the host of On the Marquee, a musical theatre themed radio show, since 2017, which is now syndicated in Canada. She also teaches classes in musical theatre to adult learners.
Julie has been legally blind since birth and is a peer support volunteer with the Canadian National Institute for the Blind (CNIB). That's How You Know is her first novel, published December 1, 2023.
If you could be friends with one character in your debut novel, who would it be?
My heroine, Tori. Tori has a lot of my own qualities, and I always say that I gave her all
my screwups and anxieties. Like me, she has extreme performance anxiety, which she
battles every time she performs. She has major body image issues and struggles with self-love. Writing her was very therapeutic for me. In helping her work through her issues, I helped myself with my own.
What is your favorite food?
Without a doubt, Indian. I could eat it every day.
What’s your biggest fear?
Death and dying. Terminal illness. Losing my husband.
What’s your favorite genre?
Generally, romance, but I don’t like to categorize myself as a reader into a specific
genre. What’s most important to me is well-developed characters and a great story. My
favorite authors are Jodi Picoult, Danielle Steel, Jackie Collins. W. Bruce Cameron (I
love his dog books), Karen Schaler (I love her Christmas romances), and Debbie
Macomber.
What’s one piece of advice you wish you’d known when you first started writing?
Marketing yourself is hard and so is selling books. I guess I did already know that, but
it’s been reinforced big-time since I published my book.
Was there anything else you wanted to be, besides a writer, when you were a kid?
Besides my dream of being a famous singer, I wanted to work in radio. Then in 2017, I
began hosting a show on our local campus/community radio station and it’s the joy of
my life. It’s now syndicated in Canada. It’s called On the Marquee, and is all about my passion in life, musical theatre.
What’s the biggest plot twist you never saw coming? (In any form of media)
Jodi Picoult’s book Leaving Time. Total mindfuck. That stuck with me for a long time.
Also, the Butterfly Effect, not the theatrical version but the Director’s Cut on the DVD.
What’s your favorite show to binge watch?
Red Dwarf. It’s a British comedy. It’s like Star Trek meets Monty Python.
What would you tell your younger self not to care about?
What other people think of me. Sometime in my forties, I stopped caring about what
other people thought about my life and the things that interest me. It’s very liberating. I
think we all want people to “get” us, but you realize at a certain age that if they don’t get
it, oh well.
What is something that you’ve learned and grown from over the last year?
Your family and friends, the people closest to you, will not necessarily be your audience. It has been a little disappointing to me that some of the people that I thought would be my biggest supporters really have not been. The other side of that coin, though, is that sometimes the people who do come out as your biggest cheerleaders are not the ones you expected.
For me, it’s been people who only know me casually, or friends I haven’t seen since high school or university. It’s important to find your audience and go to the places they congregate. You’ll realize that your closest family/friends aren’t your supporters, but you’ll find strangers out there who are.
What is your loftiest goal you’d like to reach as a writer?
To be a bestselling author.
Do you have any words/tropes you won’t write in your genre?
Yes, and I know I’m weird about this, but I won’t write about widows/widowers moving
on and finding love again. I can’t wrap my head around how people can be with
someone else after losing the love of their lives.
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All the best,
Kara
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