New release is in pre-order and other news

Cover art by Chris Howard

The long awaited (at least by me!) sequel to LITANY FOR A BROKEN WORLD is here! EVERY SKY A STRANGER is book 2 of Entangled Realities, a metaphysical science fiction trilogy set in worlds scattered throughout the multiverse where memory can't be trusted and reality itself is being manipulated for political gain.

The ebook is available now for preorder at every major online retailer, and directly from me through Gumroad -  links on my website. The print edition will be released when the ebook is published on 9/29/26. 

Praise for Every Sky a Stranger:

"A vivid, extraordinary novel. Cohen masterfully depicts a full-bodied cast of characters navigating a chaotic multiverse that strips certainty, revealing who they are and what they're willing to sacrifice to save it. Brava!"

—THERESE WALSH, author of The Moon Sisters and founder of Writer Unboxed

 

"… hold on. Beyond logic. Beyond sense. If there is a single future where hope wins, fight for it."

When an EMT with PTSD falls through a portal into an alternate version of Boston, three friends from different realities in the multiverse, each of whom owe him a debt, attempt a rescue before conflicting memories of a life he never led destroy his mind. But Traveling through the world walls is unpredictable and the three – a doctor, a truthscryer, and the daughter of Travelers - become separated, each ending up where they least wish to be, powerless to aid their companion.

The doctor contends with an alternate timeline where her drinking jeopardizes her medical license, the truthscryer faces a life of rejection and despair because of his gift of seeing, and the young girl is trapped at the secret agency which engineered her father's death. All become enmeshed in a struggle within that agency which risks destabilizing the fragile fabric of reality and isolating the lost travelers far from home. If they are to survive, they must hold faith in one another across all time and space.  

In other news...

 The audiobook for LITANY FOR A BROKEN WORLD will be released shortly! Stay tuned for links to where it will be available!

And even more news 

I'm healed enough from my tree pruning injury and subsequent hand surgery in July to be back on the potters wheel, back to knitting, and almost back to my regular speed touch typing. Let my experience be a cautionary tale—never ever rush when using power tools. I was extremely lucky and should have a full recovery.  

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2015: Looking Back, Looking Forward, Ever Grateful

Perpetual Calendar, photo by Plenty.R, used under CC license

I have done these year end posts going back to 2007 ( 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014) and as ever, the consistent theme is change. From last year's post, my main goal was:

  

 ". . . to stay open to new possibilities and new opportunities as they arise."

Well, I'm pretty sure I've managed to meet that goal. And along the way, I've done a ton of work writing, publishing, and networking, despite a year that was also full of personal struggles and loss. But that is what makes up a life. And despite grief, setbacks, and disappointments, I know that I am extremely fortunate.

I both love and am loved. I have the support from family, friends, and readers to continue to do this writing thing that challenges and fulfills me. Stories and characters continue to surprise and delight me. 

It's easy to lose perspective in the day to day slog of survival, which is one of the reasons I do these round up posts. 

So here's what I accomplished in 2015:

• In January of 2015, I published TIME AND TITHE, the sequel to 2012’s Fae Fantasy, The Between.
• Between Fall of 2014 and early Winter 2015, I drafted and revised ITHAKA RISING, book 2 in my Halcyone Space SF series.
• ITHAKA RISING was published in July of 2015.
• Bill Burrows recorded and co-produced audiobooks for both DERELICT and ITHAKA RISING.
• I wrote (and completed) the first draft of DREADNOUGHT AND SHUTTLE, book 3 of Halcyone Space.
• Between this blog and others, produced close to 100 original posts, wrote dozens of poems, and a few short stories.

While the release of ITHAKA RISING didn't match up to the amazing and surprising success of DERELICT, I'm confident in my process. And I'm confident in the quality of the book. It will find its audience. I will continue the series through at least another book or three. It seems like the further in to the universe I get, the bigger it becomes and the more story I uncover.

What's on tap for me in 2016?

• DREADNOUGHT AND SHUTTLE will be published Summer of 2016 (Here's a peek at the blurb!)

• After Ro Maldonado, a reckless young computer programmer, resurrects the damaged AI on a long dormant freighter, she and the accidental crew of Halcyone grapple with explosive secrets they exposed from a war that officially ended decades ago.
  
  Now, charged with protecting the location of Ithaka, the heart of the resistance, Ro and her friends must learn to lead double lives within the Commonwealth. But their plans to hide in plain sight disintegrate when an old enemy returns and threatens revenge. As they track him down, each course they plot endangers the life of his hostage and threatens to reveal Ithaka, brand them traitors, and reignite a war that could destroy them all.

•  I'm also working on a short story that takes place during the war 40 years before the events in the Halcyone Space books. It will be in STARBOUND, an upcoming anthology. 

• Draft book 4 in the Halcyone Space series
• And finally, for something completely different. . . I'll be working on a new kind of story in a new kind of way. Author (and friend) Rick Wayne and I will be collaborating on a SF/thriller: Vito Nonce - A man who cannot be remembered is sent to kill the woman who cannot forget. I am ridiculously excited about this project. Getting to work with Rick is an amazing opportunity. I love his writing and can't wait to get going!

To you, who have taken this journey with me, I offer my thanks and my gratitude. Writing stories for readers to enjoy is an enormous privilege. Beyond the sales numbers and the Amazon rankings, and the frustrations of signal boosting and struggle to reach an audience, is the sheer joy of seeing a reader engage with and be moved by something I've created.

That moment of connection is magic. It's what drives me to keep going during the solitary times where I'm staring at a blinking cursor, not knowing how to find the next words.

Thank you. If you have read a book of mine and enjoyed it, if you have reviewed it, or recommended it to a friend, or sent me an email, or signed up for my newsletter, or added a word of quiet encouragement, I am grateful.

My promise to you is this:  I will keep writing and keep creating worlds for you to lose yourself in. Or maybe to find yourself. If I can do that, I will be content.

Wishing you all the best for 2016.

#SFWApro

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Audiobook Giveaway!

Win one of 5 copies of DERELICT's audiobook - valued at $24.95,
no purchase necessary. 10+ hours of audio entertainment!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

You can enter more than once, depending on the entry you choose. Click on the relevant way to enter, follow the prompts. Rafflecopter will do the rest. Giveaway 'live' between now and June 21st. If you have any questions, please ask them in the comments below. Good luck!  
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The Anxiety of Art

Not this art. This is simply spectacular.
Cover art for ITHAKA RISING by Chris Howard

There is a cycle to the creative process. It probably differs for different kinds of artists, but mine goes something like this:

• New idea : Oooh, shiny, this is so exciting. I feel like I'm filled with champagne bubbles.
• First road block :  Ugh. This is hard. Why did I choose this idea? This isn't working. 
• Regroup : Okay. This may work. Focus on getting words down for the draft. Nothing has to be perfect.
• Second road block : Ugh. This is hard. Why did I choose this idea? This isn't working.
• Regroup, redux : Okay. Let's try this. This may work better. Focus on getting words down for the draft. Nothing has to be perfect.
• Third road block . . . 

By now, I think you get the idea. We continue on like this for quite some time, until . . .

• Finished draft : I never, ever want to look at this sucker again. It's terrible. It's a hot mess. I'm never going to make sense of it.
• Seek feedback (cue terror and self loathing) : I'm so sick of this project, I can't look at it objectively. Please tell me if there's anything worth salvaging here.
• Assess feedback : Oh god, I should throw my computer out the window and never write again. . . . Oh, wait, there are some good comments in here. I can work with this. Yeah. I can totally work with this.
• Revise, revise, revise : repeat feedback stage as needed.
• Decide you are done : If I change another word, I'm only going to make it worse. It's as good as I am capable of at this moment. 

This is when you choose to send it out to the world.  This could be querying an agent, submitting for publication, or readying for self publishing and sending it to the editor, but the bottom line is, you let it go.

And that's when the anxiety hits me full force. I KNOW I've done everything I could possibly do with the work. I'm just afraid it won't be enough. Or even if it is 'enough' (a mythical standard, anyway), it'll just languish and be ignored.

The thing is, I know this. I know it's a cycle. I've been through it numerous times. And I still get caught up in it. EVERY FREAKING TIME.

Now it's gotten me good - I have two projects that will get released into the wilds nearly at the same time: The audiobook for DERELICT and the print and eBook of its sequel ITHAKA RISING.

I'll just be here in my blanket fort quietly freaking out.

#SFWApro
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"I never look back darling. . . "

So, I've been looking back. But it's because I have to. DERELICT is being produced as an audiobook and as part of that process, I need to listen to each chapter and compare it to what is written. I'm checking for missing words, incorrect pronunciations, anything that is not clear. It's inevitable that with 90,000 words to read, there will be errors, just as there are inevitable typos in the written version.

I'm now about 2/3 of the way through the audiobook files.

It's weird listening to someone else read and interpret your story. It's especially weird if you're not a person who tends to listen to audiobooks or doesn't enjoy being read to.

I'm mostly over that discomfort. Part of that is how much I love listening to Bill Burrow's lovely and resonant voice.

The hard part is actually listening to the story and resisting the urge to make changes to it. I started drafting DERELICT in the summer of 2012. I finished it 6 months later. It went through four revision rounds over the following year and a half, to a completed final book that was published in June of 2014.

It was a good story. A solid story. It was ready for publication. And it was the best I could create at the time.

However, between the time I drafted DERELICT and now, I wrote two other novels and revised a third. With each book I write, I learn to be a better writer. That is the nature of artistic work: you change, you grow, you improve.

It is extremely hard not to want to go back and re-write DERELICT. But that way lies madness. I will change obvious typos, but nothing beyond that. I know other writers feel differently, but I believe to make significant changes in what should be a fixed work is unfair to its past readers.

So I work to channel my inner 'Edna' "I never look back, darling, it detracts from the now."

There are small things I would have handled differently in DERELICT if I knew then what I know now - primarily because at the time, I hadn't been planning to write a series. (Note to self: next time, keep better world building notes. Your future-you will thank you for it.) Some things I would change because my ear is now 'tuned' more precisely and there are sentence structures I would smooth out here and there. Other things I would do differently, planning ahead for an audiobook version.

All I can do is take this knowledge and apply it to the next book and the next one after that.

DERELICT is still a good story. I'm proud of it. I can even listen to it without wincing. Many, many readers were moved by it. And soon, it will be an audiobook. Which is very, very cool.

And in a few months, ITHAKA RISING will be its companion. From where I stand now, the sequel is a stronger book. I hope than when I look back in another year or so, I'll wish I could make changes to that one, too.

Because that will mean I'm continuing to grow as a writer.

From the reader's perspective, what do you think of the ability for the author to change a story 'on the fly' as it were?

If you are a writer, would you do so? 

#SFWApro
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The 'Just Right' of choosing an audiobook narrator

Illustration from "The Story of the Three Bears" by Leonard Leslie Brooke (archive.org)
[Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

In the year since DERELICT was published, I've had readers ask me if and when there would be an audiobook version. And I've made polite and non-committal noises about it for a bunch of reasons.

First, because audiobooks aren't really on my radar. I don't listen to them. And second, because I've always hated being read to - even from the time I was a little kid. I think I've listened to exactly one audiobook and that was probably 10 years ago when we were on a family road trip and we got one from the library on about a zillion cassette tapes. 

I'm not sure why I don't like being read to. I do love listening to baseball games on the radio, and when I was young, my dad and I used to listen to radio mystery theater together all the time. But the thought of listening to an entire novel always seemed unpleasant.

But when a friend of mine mentioned that her commute was over an hour each way and that the only thing that saved her sanity driving was audiobooks, I realized that I was letting my own likes and dislikes get in the way of someone else's enjoyment.

So I wandered over to http://www.acx.com/, Amazon's audiobook creation exchange marketplace, and decided to give it a go. The set up was quite simple, since I'm already registered with Amazon KDP and am the rights holder to all my novels.

I know enough about audiobooks/podcasting to know that it's a lot of work. Aside from the basic equipment needed to record, there's work that goes into post production and I wasn't up to learn how to do it. At least not now, when I have several publication projects on my plate. Because of that, I was happy to sign on for a royalty share option. Yes, Amazon takes the lion's share of the proceeds (60%, in this case), and the rights holder then splits the remainder 50/50 with the audiobook producer, but 20% of something is better than 0% of nothing. And there's the very real possibility that having an audiobook will open me up to a new audience for all my books.

Once I entered DERELICT in the system (including a short excerpt from the book for auditions), ACX opened it up to voice actors/producers who then provide the rights holder with a short sample recording. Within a few days, I had almost 10 auditions to listen to.

This was the hard part for me. Since I don't listen to audiobooks, I wasn't sure I'd know what I even wanted in a narrator. So I plugged in my headphones and listened.

It was really weird to hear my story being read to me.

Like super weird.

Some of the voices were overly dramatic, like I was hearing a movie trailer voice over. I knew that was 'too big'.

Some of the voices were too distant, as if they were narrating a documentary. That felt 'too small.'

And then I heard Bill Burrows. He was just right. It didn't feel strange at all to hear him tell my story. It actually felt utterly natural, as if I'd written it for him to voice.

I'm not sure I could tell you why it felt like such a good fit, but I can tell you that when I was listening, I was able to dive into the story and forget that I was being read to. Even forget these were my words. Bill seemed to inhabit the story and gave just the right separation in style and emphasis to the narration versus the dialogue and between each character's voice.

There is a huge element of personal preference in the choosing of a narrator. It's not an exact science and like Goldilocks, I was able to find a just right. 

With Bill's permission, I am sharing the first 15 minutes from the audiobook for DERELICT, currently in production. The audiobook will be available sometime in the early summer. Please feel free to sign up for my occasional newsletter (link on the right sidebar) for notifications.

I hope you enjoy it! (And here's a link to it on the soundcloud site if the embedded audio doesn't work: https://soundcloud.com/ljcohen/derelict-chapter-1 )



#SFWApro
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