Some lovely words

Over the past 5 months since I put THE BETWEEN up for sale, I've received some really gracious and lovely reviews, both from readers and from reviewers.

There really is no greater gift a writer can receive than to know her words have moved someone.

I entered into the world of direct publishing with my eyes wide open. I knew that without an established publisher and its marketing behind me, without an easy way to have my books distributed to bricks and mortar bookstores, I would have a difficult time selling the work on a large scale. Rather, I published this novel because I felt it deserved to find its readership, even if that audience would be a small one.

I've blogged before about how I feel as if this undertaking has been a success.

Today I want to share with you some of the incredible things readers and reviewers have said about their experience of THE BETWEEN. To my readers and reviewers, my deepest thanks and appreciation.

"This book is a comfort read, even to an adult like me, and is going on my shelf next to my copy of A Wrinkle in Time. Lydia, like Meg before her, is a strong protagonist even when she doesn't realize it, and is a great role model for girls of all ages." --Val Ford, reader and author

"I’m one who loves magic and a great world. Sprinkle in some mystery and a great story and I’m in. This book gave me all of that. The world created here in Faerie was one of political intrigue, darkness, all things magical, and one that was so well thought out that you will believe you are there." --Terry Simpson, book blogger & author

"In The Between, Cohen blends a strong and fiery female heroine, complex family relationships and ethereal fantasy world into a delightful read for teens and adults alike".--Becket Moorby, book blogger

"L.J. Cohen's classic-based magic system suits the world-building and the characters, makes sense and doesn't smother the story with a lot of unnecessary spell gunk. I think L.J.'s skill with using the magic elements (as well as handling the Shakespearean world-building) comes from her poet side. I kept seeing that lyrical influence throughout the story, too; from the rhythms of the dialogue and the action to the descriptive passages." --Lynn Viehl, author

"Overall this was the best self-published novel I’ve read so far, and better than some traditionally published novels. It was well written, well paced, and the characters, their decisions and motivations felt very believable." --Erin Searles, reader and writer


"A page-turner of a story that includes Fae and a protagonist that discovers that her reality is not what it seems. A great YA novel without romance! I wish there were more strong/smart female protagonists like Lydia out there for my girls and boy to read about."--Ann Velosa, reader and writer


"I read the whole book in one sitting. I haven't had a book capture my attention like this in a long time. I thought about what made this book so interesting, and I came to the conclusion that it was excellent writing, a strong lead character-Lydia, and the hope that she could somehow fix the problems in Faerie and be able to go home." --Christine, reader


"Ignoring the popular advice to avoid portal fantasy plots, Lisa J Cohen has crafted a beautiful story of a young girl discovering that sometimes what we want to do and what we need to do are very different things. And that the choices we face may not be as obvious as they seem.

This is the first time I've read any of Cohen's work and I was impressed. The characters are well rounded and plausible; the good guys are complex and the bad guys have enough depth to warrant your attention." --Angelique Jurd (The Kindle Book Review)

 "I started reading expecting light romance, maybe, or bad guys and good guys, maybe. But as I kept reading, the story became more and more intense, deeper and more intricate, until I found myself completely involved and couldn't stop reading until the book finished. I emerged changed." --Susan M. Risdal, reader


"Lydia is forced to make hard choices with very little in the way of reliable information, and she succeeds because she believes in herself. She trusts her heart and her instincts, and they serve her well. Like another heroine who is close to my own heart -- Buffy Summers -- Lydia exists to change an outworn paradigm." --Tracy Rowan, amazon top 500 reviewer


"Cohen's THE BETWEEN is a delightful, fast, spine-tingling read. It draws on the emotions the way the Fae draws on its courtiers power." --Janet B Taylor, reader and author


"Cohen is a master at crafting honest and strong characters."-- Kathy LaMee for TracyRiva.com (Tracy Riva Books and Reviews)

"The story built steadily to a big finish, with Lydia being forced to make an irrevocable choice that would alter her life forever, as well as the lives of both the Fae and the Mortals. The Between was an enjoyable read, one of the more original and well written stories that I've read in a while. It's definitely worth checking out for fans of YA literature." --J. Chambers, Amazon top 100 reviewer


"Her writing is so sharp that she makes these fantastical places and occurrences feel as though you've been living them all along, no back story required. A smart choice for lovers of YA fantasy who are looking for something truly unique." --Sal Dellinger, reader


"Clive and Lydia are more friends and allies than romantic partners, which is an unusual and interesting treatment of a male/female relationship in young adult (YA) fiction. I enjoyed the psychological journey of these two main protagonists every bit as much as the action and adventure of the plot." --Kate McMurry, Amazon top 500 reviewer

Out of step, out of sorts, out of season

"Nature Laughs Last" by Eva the Weaver, used with permission, cc license

I sometimes wonder if I would be better off living somewhere on the equator. As much as I love the change of seasons, having spent my whole life in the northeast, I struggle with the constant transitions. Change, endings, and beginnings are all difficult for me.

It seems as if the big seasonal shifts disorient me. (Not to mention the time changes twice a year. Yes, I know it's only an hour.) Now that it's summer and my sons are out of school, I have an additional transition from having predictable stretches of alone time to a more chaotic house with an anti-schedule.

My favorite time of the year is deep winter. It provides a stillness and peace that soothes my restlessness. If I were a bear, I would look forward to hibernation. Not that I want to pull the covers over my head and sleep the winter away, I just crave the simplicity.

Spring and summer are seasons that crawl under my skin. They are the wild profusion of an untended garden, gone to weed and seed. The itch in the exact center of my spine I can't reach to scratch.

I wonder if this summer feels so much more chaotic because we didn't have a proper winter to reset my internal clock. There are certain plants that will not thrive come summer because they weren't allowed to go dormant in the winter.

I am out of step with the season. Cranky and irritable, as if I had cabin fever, only in reverse. 

Don't mind me. I'll be fine once winter sets in again.

Strawberries!

Friday morning, I went to a local farm and picked 12 pounds of strawberries.

Don't ask me how many I ate in the process.

This is the story of how those berries went from this:

to this:

It's not nearly as difficult as you might think. You only need 3 ingredients and a bit of time:

• Strawberries (2 quart)
• Sugar (4 cups)
• Lemon juice (juice of 1 lemon)

(yield: approx 6 half pints of strawberry preserves)

 Wash and hull about 2 quarts/3 pounds of strawberries.

Depending on how chunky you want your preserves, you can either chop the berries or crush them. You'll end up with about 8 cups of chopped berries or 4 cups of crushed berries.

To the berries, add 4 cups of granulated sugar. (Yes, jam/preserves have a lot of sugar. That's what causes the solution to jell. If you use less sugar, you'll just have to cook the berries longer to concentrate the solution and you'll end up with the same concentration of berries to sugar.)

Mix the sugar and the berries well, cover and put in the fridge overnight.

In the morning, you will have sugary soup with berries. The sugar has drawn out much of the water from the fruit and formed essentially strawberry juice. This process is called macerating, and it works with all kinds of berries.

Pour out the berries and juice into a colander over a large pot to drain off the liquid.

Cook the liquid over medium heat (use a heat diffuser if you have one. You DO NOT want to scorch this lovely stuff!) until the jelling point is nearly reached. How can you figure that out?  Go here. Scroll down the page for photos of what proper jelling looks like when using the spoon test. It took mine about 30 minutes.

When your boiling syrup starts to look thick and glossy, and the drops are merging off the spoon, add the chopped/crushed berries into the pot, and continue cooking until the jelling point is reached. **

At that point, you can do a number of things.

• Can the contents (the whole waterbath thing with the jars and the lids)*, or
• Ladle the warm preserves into freezer containers, let cool, freeze

Voila. Small batch preserves. Done.



*If you choose to can--which will give you shelf stable jams that you can keep, eat, or share, depending on how generous you are. :)  You'll need to follow the directions here,  (and/or buy the Ball book) and start cleaning/sterilizing the jars, etc while the strawberry liquid is cooking down.

**Made this way, your preserves will be fairly soft set. And ETA it can take a few days for the preserves to set fully.

***ETA part II: Added 4 TB of balsamic vinegar to the pot before cooking down the juice. Magnificent! Really brings out the flavor of the berries and cuts down some of the sweetness.

. . . But I play one in the classroom

If baseball players can have home and away games, why not bloggers? :) Once a month, I have the opportunity to do an 'away' blogpost for the wonderful group blog "Black Ink, White Paper."  I hope you enjoy it.

We all wear a lot of hats in our lives. The newest hat I’ve squeezed on my head has writer written along the brim. While I’ve been writing novels for close to nine years now, it’s still a relatively new role for me, and it’s only been recently that I can comfortably answer ‘writer’ when someone asks me what I do for a living.

A few days ago, I had the opportunity to meet with a group of 6th grade students in our neighborhood middle school for a Q&A session about my young adult book, THE BETWEEN. Their English teacher had taught my now college-aged son and I’ve always held him in extremely high regard. Mr. D is an enthusiastic, creative, and wonderfully supportive teacher who helps his students discover their own love of literature and language. When he asked me if I would be willing to speak with his students, I jumped at the chance.

(Read more about my adventures as a visiting author in the classroom.)

Balancing Act

Photo by Thomas Hawk, used with attribution, cc license

Balance is something I think we all struggle with, whether we write or not.  The very fact that our time in this world is limited means we must make choices and prioritize.

When my children were younger and I had a busy physical therapy practice, and stories bouncing around my head, life felt less like I was juggling and more like I was spinning plates. (An analogy I first heard from one of my work supervisors.)  If you haven't seen plate spinning, it's a pretty amazing feat.

Photo by Lissalou66, used with attribution, cc license

Spinners get one plate to stay on the stick by spinning it fast enough. Then they will add additional plates on other sticks, giving each as much momentum as possible. The problem lies in keeping each plate from slowing down too much that they wobble and fall down.

That's what my life felt like.

I worked hard to keep all the plates spinning. Certain responsibilities needed more spin to stay in motion than others. I was so afraid to let any of the plates drop that I became more and more frantic, dancing between plates, giving each just enough of a push before running off to the next one.

It was exhausting and extremely stressful. And while I did keep most of the plates in motion, the cost was too high to be sustained.

I had to learn the very difficult lesson that I couldn't be all things to all people at the same time and maintain any kind of balance and sanity. It certainly got easier when my sons got older, but where I really saw a change in how crazed my life seemed was when I understood I needed to prioritize taking care of myself. And that meant making time to write.

Which  meant making choices. Since it is generally frowned upon to neglect one's kids or not show up to work, those sources of extra time were right out. Instead, I learned to write in the spaces between other life tasks. As long as I could carve out 15 minutes, I could use them to write. I carried a notebook everywhere I went and found plenty of opportunities to fill its pages. I gave up watching television to find other opportunities to write. And I realized that I didn't need to be perfect, that the world wouldn't end if I called for delivery pizza now and again.

Now that I'm writing full time and my kids are older teens, life is generally less pressured, though other
'plates' need to be spun.

I suspect there will never be a time in my life when I don't have to make choices and critically examine all the things I need and want to accomplish.

So how do you juggle/spin your plates?

Today’s post was inspired by the topic “Balancing writing with the rest of life”– June’s topic in the Merry-Go-Round Blog Tour — an ongoing tour where you, the reader, travel around the world from author’s blog to author’s blog.  Get to know nearly twenty other writers and find out their thoughts on finding, creating, and maintaining balance. 

Short Story! New Shiny Goodness!

Order before midnight tonight for your free ginsu knife. . .

Okay, not that. But for your reading pleasure, I've released a newly revised and polished original short SF story for subscribers to my occasional email newsletter, BlueMusings.

If you'd like to read "Diversity" and any of the previous stories, please sign up on the right hand sidebar, or you can go directly to the contact page on my website:.

A sneak peek of the story follows:

Diversity

LJ Cohen

Varna bit back the urge to click her tongue in distress as she studied her tall, barrel chested boss.  His voice, so well suited to vid broadcasts and important speeches to even more important people, felt far too large for her small cubicle. She struggled to keep her throat relaxed and her overvoice silent.

"Your participation is essentially a formality," he said, leaning over her desk and smiling. He had a charm that came across as both well-practiced and genuine, almost childlike. "You're not technically part of the diplomatic team and the actual negotiations will take place after the welcoming ceremony." Face to face the Ambassador's charisma felt like a blast of heat from a plasma furnace. "So, what do you think?" he asked.

She clasped her hands under the desk to keep from fidgeting. What did she think? Varna had worked at the Embassy long enough to know it didn't really matter what she thought. His direct presence here made her assignment to the mission merely seem like a request instead of genetic expediency.

What did she think? Varna clamped her teeth down. She thought this was a massive mistake. But you didn't just say that to Earth's most high ranking inter-planetary Ambassador. Hell, Ambassador Berwick probably spoke more of her grandparents' native Tuvlun than she did, and he didn't even have the right shaped palate. She didn't even realize she was tapping the tip of her tongue against the high arch of her mouth until the drum beat of her anxiety filled the room.

Subscribe to BlueMusings for the rest!