Julie Cochrane, Author

The purpose of this blog is to showcase what I’m doing on the writing front and what I’m up to in general. This week I’ve been tossing around ideas for a new book about Ray Chen, my hero from the short story Transit Point, forthcoming in the Fantastic Schools Wars anthology.

In Ray Chen’s world, magic and the supernatural are real, but every mage is born as a mundane human. One in a thousand humans emerges as a mage, developing magical powers sometime between the ages of twenty and forty-something. Ray is a 28-year-old Navy SEAL who emerged as a mage six months ago and was immediately transferred to a joint service special operations platoon at the DoD magic school, where he is being trained to use his new abilities in combat.

In the Emergence universe, in 2079 magic, which had been secret, was revealed to the mundane world by the Chinese mages joining forces with the Chinese government to invade Taiwan. Ray Chen emerges six years later, when the war has settled in to a nasty grind of attrition on both sides. Most mages have not been trained in combat, so mages who have a military background are at a premium. As the senior NCO in his platoon, Ray has to forge his people, who mostly come from non-combat MOS’s like the motor pool and supply, into a skilled fighting force, and he has to do it right the hell now because his platoon, although in school, is subject to being deployed for “special” missions at any time.

The book has survived the conceptual and character generation stages and is now at the plotting stage. It promises to be a fun ride and I look forward to writing it.

I’ve also been busy with other types of writing, starting a Substack blog for political opinion and commentary, Julie’s Resistance. I have just ventured onto Bluesky. I can also be found on Facebook.

I’ve been reading a lot of Substack blogs and in general obsessing and distressing over politics, trying to find positive things to do about my concerns. So far my efforts have been to donate to several charities that support medical and public health research. If government isn’t going to do it under Trump it still needs to get done. Also I’ve been integrating into the Substack community. Check me out at Julie’s Resistance if you’ve got a minute and are of a mind: https://juliacochrane.substack.com/