Julie Koca doesn’t traffic in cliches of the “throbbing manhood” sort. Her first book, a contemporary romance called Just the Sexiest Man Alive—published this month by Berkley Books under her nom de plume “Julie James”—features no brooding Fabios, no heaving bosoms, no goofy anatomic euphemisms. (In fact the pedestrian penis shows up on the second page.) Still, as she’s learned in her transition from attorney to screenwriter to novelist, there’s no escaping stereotypes entirely.

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Now 33, Koca began her first film script five years ago, when she was a trial lawyer in the Chicago office of Sidley Austin. It wasn’t career dissatisfaction that sparked her efforts; on the contrary, she loved her job. She just wanted to write out an idea for a romantic comedy that she’d been carrying around in her head for a while—the story of a gorgeous, sharp-tongued lawyer whose boss forces her to help a womanizing but good-at-heart movie star prepare for a role. Her courtroom-honed ear for language, she hoped, would help her re-create the saucy verbal sparks of the vintage battle-of-the-sexes movies she loved, like His Girl Friday and The Philadelphia Story.

With two optioned screenplays under her belt and support from her husband, also a lawyer, Koca quit Sidley Austin in 2005 to write full-time. (While she was at it, she had a baby—their son was born in 2007.) She’s since had three more scripts optioned, though so far all of her options have expired without the works making it to the big screen. Still, the experience has served Koca well. When her agent suggested in 2003 that she turn The Andrews Project into a novel, she used her new firsthand knowledge of the Hollywood scene to help her rewrite it as Just the Sexiest Man Alive. In an echo of Koca’s screenplay, the heroine, unimpressed with the hero’s celebrity, spurns his attentions even as she secretly yearns for him. And of course he finds himself inexorably drawn to the only woman who’s ever turned him down. As Koca is fond of saying, “High jinks ensue.”

Just the Sexiest Man AliveJulie JamesBerkley Sensation, $7.99

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