about this blog

We know what all of you are thinking...this is an odd pairing for a Young Adult co-authorship, which you are probably willing to accept, but how in the world did you guys meet and what made you decide to write a book together?


Julie’s side of the story: The first time I “met” Mark was in May of 2011 when my editor sent me profiles on both male and female models for the cover of my debut novel, Tempest. Mark was the best fit to portray Jackson. It wasn’t until just after the book released in January 2012 that I discovered my editor had been harboring a big secret...he was facebook friends with the boy known only as “Model Jackson” to me. I decided that I also needed to be facebook friends with Mark so I sent him a request and waited a very long five minutes for him to accept it. At which time I emailed a few close friends and family members to brag about being friends with Model Jackson.

Somehow, through facebook messaging who convinced me to read a business related book and I was like, “uh...non-fiction...I don’t think I can do that.” But I decided to read The Tipping Point anyway and it turned out to be really good. When it came time for the Vortex cover shoot, I got word that Mark would be portraying Jackson again and even though I wasn’t supposed to tell anyone that, I messaged him and told him.

I also mentioned my desire to write an issue type book or something in the realm of realistic fiction, but I needed to wait until an idea hit me that I could write authentically as an expert on the topic. I said, “for example, it would be like you writing a fictional book set in the modeling world...I would read that book in a heartbeat knowing the author is in that world.” And he said, “Yeah, totally...I’ve always wanted to write some kind of modeling book. You’ll be the co-author, right?” Then I was like, “Sure...I’m in...so what’s it gonna be about?”

Mark’s Side Of The Story: The first time I heard about Julie Cross was when my agent called me and said I was going to be on the cover of a novel. She mentioned that it was going to be for a book called Tempest and I would be playing a character named Jackson that was a teenage kid who was a Time Traveler. Needless to say I was pumped being a big sci-fi fan. I was even more excited when I showed up to the shoot the whole studio was being taken up by a huge trampoline. I spent the whole shoot jumping and flipping up as high as I could and pretending I was reaching out to save someone. Towards the end of the shoot I met the Book Editor who actually lived in the same town where I went to college South Orange. Clearly we had a lot to talk about. 

Right after the book was released and I finally got my hands on a copy, I got a friend request from Julie Cross. I was a bit surprised and intrigued because I had read Tempest and now the author was contacting me. I told her how much I enjoyed the book and how strange it was how similar Jackson and I were. 

;">We were talking back and forth for a bit and realized that we had very similar book interests. Julie sent me a bunch of YA books and I gave her some suggestions for books I loved. After a week or two of back and forth opinion sharing Julie asked me to write a post on her blog talking about the modeling world. There was so much hype around the posts we decided that there was a huge interest in what goes on in the mysterious world of fashion. And the rest is history. 

The Purpose Of The Blog: (Answered by Julie) So, basically the process of co-authorship is one that I hadn’t really learned anything about and I always wondered how it works. Do the authors just send their parts to agents who pass it back and forth? Do they meet in a bar and say, hey, let’s write a book...then we only have half the work to do each and more time for drinking? Does one person write the first half and another writes the second half or do they alternate chapters? Or does one plot and the other writes? We still don’t know the answer to that questions because I imagine it’s a lot like trying to find similar writing processes amongst solo authors. No two are exactly alike.

So far, we’ve had dozens of various plots and plans and most of them have changed and me being the experienced writer, but knowing nothing about the modeling world, can’t just take off and crank out this novel like I’m used to doing. I’ve been learning as I go and Mark has been telling me things and learning thing too. We recently decided that our gchat sessions are too entertaining and informative to not share them with future readers (hopefully) should this book become a book and then become a sold book. So, we have decided to remove those normally super top secret barriers between an author’s work-in-progress and her (or them in our case) readers.

We promise not to spoil the book for you, but we’d like to invite you to follow us along with our characters, Alex and Eve, on this wild and somewhat random journey as we create our Young Adult novel currently titled, Halfway Perfect. Trust me when I say this, you don’t have to be a reader or a writer to enjoy this blog. We'll cover a wide variety of Pop Culture topics, all things Dance Moms, Stocking Caps, Dating, Music, Underwear, and many others I can’t think of now because they sort of happen on their own.