The Art of Halcyone Space

Original art by Chris Howard

About a month ago, I revealed an earlier draft of this cover art for A STAR IN THE VOID for subscribers of my newsletter. Now, I'm sharing it widely in advance of the June 2018 publishing date of the novel.

Chris Howard has created original art for all 5 of the Halcyone Space novels.

Finally I can display all of these amazing covers together and talk about how each of the images captures the heart and soul of the novel it graces.

Derelict

While all of the stories center around an ensemble cast, each story has a single character whose arc stands out to me as primary. In DERELICT, that character was Rosalen Maldonado. At the start of the story, Ro is isolated. As a result of being moved from post to post by her emotionally abusive father, she doesn't have the emotional skills or experience in trusting other people.

The plot revolves around a derelict space ship and its damaged AI, but the story revolves around Ro learning to trust herself and trust others.

I love the way Chris depicts Ro as dwarfed by the cosmos, yet looking up and out as if hoping for a better future.

Ithaka Rising

This is Barre Durbin. The story of ITHAKA RISING is the story of brothers, loyalty, and sacrifice. Children of the space station's physicians, Barre and his little brother Jem have always been under pressure to excel. But ever since Jem outstripped him academically, Barre has felt like a failure. His relationship is particularly strained with his mother who can't  appreciate Barre's musical genius.

The main storyline borrows from the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Barre, like Orpheus, relies on his musical skills to enter the Underworld and rescue a loved one. 

I love the look of quiet determination on Barre's face in Chris's image. 

Dreadnought and Shuttle

Devorah Martingale Morningstar (Dev, and she would be the first to mention how ridiculous her name is) enters the world of Halcyone Space in DREADNOUGHT AND SHUTTLE. She is a character who emerged as simply a minor player but after her first scene, I bent to the wisdom of my subconscious and let her be who she needed to be for the story. 

She is a materials science student at the University Micah Rotherwood escapes to. She gets abducted in his stead and taken aboard a stolen ship by her captor. But she is far from a powerless pawn and uses her knowledge and skills to sabotage the ship. 

Chris created her with an intensity that matches her character. The image conveys her strength, capability, and focus.

Parallax

In the 4th novel, PARALLAX, the cover features Emmaline Gutierrez. In all the other covers, the character shown is a viewpoint character. While we never see Gutierrez's point of view, she is a major mover of the story and we see her interacting with almost all the other viewpoint characters. 

She is an old soldier whose loyalties are put to the test in this story. In a very real way, she is the last soldier standing from a conflict that she had already sacrificed body and soul to forty years earlier. 

While she appears a bit younger than I see her, Chris nailed her expression, her body language, and her prosthetic arm. There is both amazing strength and vulnerability here. She may be my favorite non-viewpoint character in the series.

A Star in the Void

For the 5th and final book in the Halcyone Space series, A STAR IN THE VOID, I asked Chris to use Ada May as the cover character.

While she is only a viewpoint character for a brief epilogue in book 4, she is the character around whom the entire narrative of 5 novels centers around. She was there at the start of the hostilities over 40 years prior. It was her genius that created the first true AIs that made space travel possible. She created the hidden world of Ithaka and its quiet rebellion against the Commonwealth. And her actions at the end of book 4 are the catalyst for the entire plot of book 5.

One of the strengths of Chris's work is that he understands that the power of a cover comes not from depicting a specific scene, but from bringing forth the heart of the story. It should be no surprise that his is a writer in addition to an artist. 

Here he depicts Ada's loneliness along with her determination. The title refers to many elements in the story: what it looks like to an observer when a ship takes a wormhole jump, the character Dev Morningstar putting herself at risk in the void for the sake of her companions, the hope Ada holds to for change, among others. 

Taken together, these five striking images have helped me tell five individual stories as well as a sixth overarching narrative that spans the entire series. Chris has made magic here and I am grateful for his talent, vision, and time.  

If these images and my commentary have piqued your interest, the first four books of the series are available at all online retailers. Links can be found: http://www.ljcohen.net 

Book 5 is forthcoming in June 2018.

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Happy Book Birthday

I have done everything I can to give PARALLAX its best chance for success. The rest is not up to me.

So I have a book coming out tomorrow. It's a solid book. I'm proud of it. Now it's out of my hands & will have to find its readers. 1/

— LJ Cohen (@lisajanicecohen) June 6, 2017

Last night on twitter, I posted a bit about this - how by the time a book is out, it no longer belongs to the author. And let me tell you, that lack of control is terrifying.

Think about it: For the time it takes to draft a novel, the author is the Supreme Being On High. We create worlds out of our imaginations. We literally put words into our characters' mouths and thoughts into their heads.

So forgive me if I find this phase of the process enormously nerve-wracking. 

I wrestle with the hope that PARALLAX will find its readership and be a big success along with the dread that it might not earn out its production expenses. Realistically, I understand that later books in a series never sell as many as the initial books. I just hope I'm in that sweet spot where it will sell enough to keep the series going and perhaps reignite interest in the first books.

There are some wonderful opportunities on the horizon including a partnership with the folks who brought you HerStoryArc in their new F-BOM (Feminist Book of the Month) project.  I'm very excited at the prospect of bringing the Halcyone Space books to a new readership.

But, still I worry. It's the natural habitat of the writer. I'll be anxious about PARALLAX for some time to come, through it's first few weeks of sales, its first reviews. I'll worry that someone doesn't like it. Then I'll worry that no one's talking about it.

While I hate to say this part of it hasn't gotten any easier for me, despite the fact that PARALLAX is my 7th published novel, at least I'm in familiar territory. And that means I can acknowledge the intense emotions and keep moving forward.

I'm already immersed in a new world with new characters on a new project. That's the only antidote I've found to writer's anxiety.

And while I have your attention, let me remind you that PARALLAX is book 4 of Halcyone Space and all 4 books are available widely, wherever ebooks are sold. They are also available in trade paperback editions. You can find links to all purchase venues at www.ljcohen.net.

The novels of Halcyone Space

DERELICT (Halcyone Space, book 1): A group of teens stranded on a sentient spaceship must work together or risk being killed when the ship's AI wakes believing it's still fighting the war that damaged it decades ago.

ITHAKA RISING (Halcyone Space, book 2): A young computer genius struggling to function with a grievous head injury is willing to risk his life to get a black market neural implant, but what he finds is a planet that shouldn't exist and a rebellion that threatens the stability of the Commonwealth.

DREADNOUGHT AND SHUTTLE (Halcyone Space, book 3): When a materials science student gets kidnapped, she's drawn into a conflict between the young crew of a sentient spaceship, a weapons smuggling ring, and a Commonwealth-wide conspiracy and must escape before her usefulness as a hostage expires.

PARALLAX (Halcyone Space, book 4): Halcyone's crew is drawn into a conspiracy threatening to reignite a galactic war when they discover the hidden power brokers who have been quietly manipulating the Commonwealth for decades.

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Confused thoughts on representation

We all live at the intersections of multiple identities. Most of mine happen to be privileged or relatively so in our society. Some are not. Some vary, depending on context. It's confusing, messy, like all things pertaining to people.

Some of my identities include (in no particular order and certainly not an exhaustive list):  white, cis-female, heterosexual, Jewish, American, feminist, neuro-atypical, and writer.

I include writer here because it's not just what I do, it's interwoven with the way I process the world. If I want to understand how I think about something, I write.

This post is an attempt to work my way through an enormously important issue that pertains both to myself as a writer, but also as any of my identities; that of representation in fiction.

Once upon a time, a white, cis-het, female writer wrote a space opera series. 

That series contains an ensemble cast of a half-dozen principal characters, each of whom gets 'screen time' as a point of view (POV) character. Unless that cast consists of clones of some version of the writer, that means said writer is creating characters outside of her own direct experience. Not only are there male characters in the cast, but also characters from non-white backgrounds. There are also characters who are not heterosexual.

The writer did not create this cast as an exercise of filling out some kind of diversity bingo sheet. She grew up on the original Star Trek (albeit in syndication) and imprinted on the message (albeit somewhat flawed in the show) that the future was for everyone. And when she grew up, those were the kind of stories she wanted to tell.

Speaking for one, not for all

So, it's pretty obvious that writer is me. And in crafting the series and its characters, I worked hard to balance honoring the (not) diverse (enough), (not) inclusive (enough)  world I live in with my vision/hope of a future that is more so. I was aware the identities that bring me privilege also put me at risk for drowning out writers with less. I was also aware it was not my place to speak for someone else's experience, especially when someone from an identity different than mine could speak with their own voice. And yet, I also knew that creating a future with a cast of characters who were all cis-het and white would be erasing the reality of the majority of people on the planet.

 Imagination can only take you so far

I chose to create a cast of individuals who came from different backgrounds and who lived at the intersections of their own specific identities. Each of these characters are uniquely themselves. They represent, not a race or a creed or a belief system in any way, but a richness of individualities.  They are each, based in part, on pieces of people I know who are themselves living at the intersections of many identities. I also draw on personal history and experience of simultaneously being privileged for some of my identities and disadvantaged in others. 

But you're not . . .

Fill in the blank: gay, Black, Latino, Japanese, etc. There are characters in the Halcyone Space book who have those as part of their identities. By far, the most criticism I get is why I chose to make Ro (Rosalen Maldonado) and Nomi (Konomi Nakamura) gay. I have been accused of "ruining" my space opera with some sort of homosexual agenda. Never mind that their relationship is primarily a deep emotional one, with little overt physicality. (The novels are SF, not SF/Romance.)

My answer is something along the lines of 'because you're still asking the question.' I live in a world where I joyfully attended the wedding of my sister-in-law and her wife. Where my dear friends Alan and Paul used to tease me that I was their token 'breeder' friend. Where my son carries the name of my husband's former boss and mentor, who passed away while I was pregnant and whose family had disowned him for coming out.

Because when I introduced Nomi to the story, she was everything Ro needed, but didn't know it yet. Because I couldn't imagine a future where love between two women would be anything to remark about. They are simply two people who care for one another. That is neither revolutionary nor particularly worthy of praise.

And yet, and yet, and yet. . .

I'm somewhat dismayed that it has become something to notice - that there is a gay couple in a space opera series.

This is a screen shot from this afternoon. DERELICT is the 2nd highest selling book in the LGBT SF category on Amazon. When I took this screen shot ITHAKA RISING was 7 and DREADNOUGHT AND SHUTTLE 8. (It also made the hot new release category.)

On one level, I'm thrilled. I've worked hard on these novels. They are good stories.

On one level, I'm dismayed. First, that the bar is so damned low that a series with 2 woman in love as a very tangential part of the plot is enough to have the books rank this well in the subcategory. Second, that 3 of my books are in the top 10 of this list and I very well may be drowning out the voices of queer writers of SF in the process.

I don't know if I am or not. I do know I never marketed these books as LGBT SF. And yet, here they are. I can't pull them from the category and I wouldn't want to. I do know that I am proud of each of my characters and their individuality.

And I will continue to do my best to honor that little girl who grew up to believe that the future was for everyone.

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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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Write the Next Book

Anyone have a defibrillator?

Expectations. They can be brutal and tricky beasts. As much as we (okay, I) work hard to stay in the moment, it's damned difficult not to give in to disappointment when things don't immediately work out the way you had hoped.

The launch of ITHAKA RISING, book 2 in my Halcyone Space series, has been one of those events where I feel both elated and depressed. Elated because the book is in the world, is selling, and is garnering excellent reviews and recommendations from readers and writers I trust.

"Usually I can point out one or two reasons why a novel wows me, too, but this one was just cover to cover awesome. Expect great characters, who actually grow and change and have to deal with new problems; a nail-biter of a plot, that manages to be both twisting and absorbing at the same time, settings that expand to take us to new and scary-thrilling places in this universe, and the kind of SF adventure you probably haven't read in a very, very long time (if at all.)"
     --Lynn Viehl (AKA Paperback writer)

 "space opera with a brain and a heart."  -- Mike Reeves-McMillan (Netgalley reviewer)

 So why depressed? Because compared with the launch of book 1 (DERELICT), ITHAKA RISING is flatlined. (Comparisons - they are evil.) It's hard to know why a book breaks out; certainly I didn't do anything significantly differently for each of these two novels, and, in fact, I believe ITHAKA RISING to be a better story. And I'm this strange mix of hopeful and confident that it will find its readership, even if that journey is slower than it was for the prior book.

It would be easy to let my discouragement get the better of me - and, yes, I have done my share of moping with my fellow writers (expectations - it's hard not to have them) - but I know I have no control of what happens after a book is released into the world. Sure, you can tinker with price, run ads, do an internet/social media blitz, but I'm not convinced those things will be the secret sauce that gets a book noticed.

As. Nathan Lowell, a writer friend/mentor keeps reminding me, your best advertisement is to write the next book.

So, I'm writing the next book. Book 3 in the Halcyone Space series has a working title: DREADNAUGHT AND SHUTTLE, and is the interlocking 'cat and mouse' stories of Micah vs the drug cartels and Ro & company vs the Commonwealth. I'm about 10% into the story and finding my writing groove again.

And there are other novels in the pipeline, including a joint project with a writer I respect the hell out of (waves to Rick Wayne!), and a revise/resubmit of a fantasy title to a medium-sized publisher.

While huge sales numbers and stratospheric rankings are the stuff that author's dreams are made of, what I'm really focused on is creating enough of a back list that selling in modest numbers will allow me to make a basic living as a writer. This is an expectation that I know is within my reach.

I also know I have the discipline and the focus to get there. ITHAKA RISING represents my 5th published novel, but in reality, the other three are low sellers - primarily because they don't appeal widely to an eBook buying readership. I don't regret writing and releasing them and it is my hope that they will also find their right readers in time, however, my functioning backlist currently consists of two novels: The Halcyone Space books. That is not sufficient to be self-sustaining.


In the next two years, I plan to add three additional novels to that pool. And I have no plans to stop writing anytime soon.

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Sightings in the Wild

I've been busy, here and there, hither and yon. Which is to say, there are four guest posts of mine out there on the great wide web from the past few weeks.

Why is a raven like a writing desk? Guest post for fellow word-smith, Julianne Douglas, writer of historical fiction, on how my poetry informs my fiction.  (From my intro to the post:)

Having been a poet for a far longer time than I have been a writer of fiction, I maintain that poetry - or at least the tools of poetry - underlies all effective writing. Not only that, but in writing speculative fiction, those tools can enhance world building and reader immersion in fundamental and crucial ways.

The poetic tools I'm going to focus on are specificity, musicality, and comparisons. All three can heighten the reading experience of your novel, especially novels of speculative fiction.

Interview on Addicted to Words, by crit partner and YA writer, Candie Campbell.

In which I answer questions about my favorite characters, books (mine and others), and show off some of my pottery.

My post on The Scriptors blog, Ithaka Rising: By the numbers, where I detail the sales/earnings in the first few weeks of my newest release. 

And, last, but not least, a long and detailed post for Susan Spann's blog, Spann of Time on the tasks involved in being a writer-publisher. Susan is both a writer (her Shinobi Mystery series is EXCELLENT) and an intellectual property lawyer, who runs the excellent twitter chat #publaw. (From my intro to the post:)

. . . I have just published my 5^th novel. One of my books has sold nearly 10,000 copies and spent much of last summer on the Amazon best seller lists. So am I a breakout success? That entirely depends on what you consider a success.

By the ‘can you support your family on your art’ metric, no. But very few writers can reach that high bar. I measure my success on a very different metric: Have I learned to put out a product that is indistinguishable from what you would find from any small or large publisher? Yes. Do those books sell in the open marketplace? Yes. Do those books get favorably compared to traditionally published books in similar genres? Yes.

Plenty of news and views of yours truly, along with some (I hope) useful information about the world of indie-publishing and the writing life. 

#SFWApro

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The Subjectivity of Reviews, redux

image from Open Clip art, in the public domain

First: some caveats/ground rules. Please, no nasty comments directed at the reviewers. In fact, no arguing with reviewers at all. If you wish to express solidarity by sharing some of the 'best' negative reviews sent your way, you can excerpt them or link to them in a comment. Attacking a reviewer on behalf of an author you enjoy is also neither useful or appropriate.

I never, ever engage with reviewers, except on rare occasions to thank them for their time (and only when they are book bloggers/reviewers I have reached out to, rather than readers who review on Amazon, etc.) I don't think I need to explain why arguing/badmouthing a reviewer over a negative review is wrong.

But that doesn't mean we can't talk about reviews and use examples of both positive and negative ones to illustrate the incredible subjectivity of opinion.

I've talked about this before: Reviews are opinions. And as such, they aren't inherently 'right' or 'wrong'. They are a reader's reactions and experience. There may be times where the creator is bemused by the reviewer in that they see something that was not actually in the piece being assessed. That, too, is subjectivity at play.

I wanted to illustrate this with two recent reviews I received for ITHAKA RISING. One was a glowing, five-star review from a book blogger who has read and enjoyed other books of mine. One was a critical two-star review from a book reviewer who obtained the book via NetGalley.

What fascinated me was the different experiences of the two reviewers around the same issues: characters who are competent and gifted in several skill areas.

Barre lives, breathes, thinks and communicates in music. He is genuinely gifted, but unappreciated by his career military physician parents, although respected by his younger brother, Jem the resourceful coding genius. Jem exceeds Halcyone Captain Ro Maldonado’s coding talents by light years, which is saying something.

vs:

Jem is speshul. [sic] He’s a brilliant and caring kid that behaves better than his parents whom you just want to hug while ruffling his hair. . . .  The characters of Ro and Barre are also brilliant and super speshul. [sic] They can hack any system, fix any ship and find a hidden planet that the Commonwealth with all their military might, have not found in 40 years,…. in a day. Riiiiiiight.

And this, in looking at characterization:

Featuring a feisty lesbian heroine, a multicultural cast spanning three generations and a search and rescue mission involving a handicapped pre-teen, a wounded woman warrior with a prosthetic limb and a crone coding goddess, Ithaka Rising delivers diversity in spades.

vs:

The characters just fell flat. Developing all the characters that wear their emotions on their sleeves does not create depth nor does it balance the character in opposition to their brilliant genius personas.

Of course, one of these reviews was a huge ego booster, the other, not so much. But beyond that, they are both valid commentary. My only reaction to the more critical of the two reviews is my own personal aversion to snark. It's far easier for me to take in feedback when it's presented free from the emotional overtones, but even that is just a personal thing. The reviewer is not writing the review for the author, but for other readers.


I recently had a conversation at Readercon about the book turned mini-series JONATHAN STRANGE AND MR. NORRELL. I pretty much hated it. Couldn't read past the third chapter. I found it overwritten, pretentious, and poorly paced. My lunch companion had loved it, and was enjoying the TV adaptation. We did not try to convince the other how 'wrong' they were. We did not devolve into calling one another stupid poopy heads. We simply laughed and kept talking.

Of course, there is a difference between a critical review and a personal attack. And I have received reviews that bordered on the latter (sidebar: I don't consider this one to be in that category). I still don't believe in engaging over an ad hominum attack. Why not? Because I actually think that kind of obvious nastiness is pretty evident to readers of reviews and reflects more poorly on the reviewer than the item reviewed.

And finally, even one's favorite, most beloved, award-strewn book will garner one- and two-star reviews. I'd be wary and concerned if my work had none. What that would tell me is I hadn't reached a wide enough audience.

If you are a book blogger/reviewer, ITHAKA RISING is available to request via Net Galley through the end of August.

It is also available in all eBook formats as well as in trade paperback. Purchase venues can be found here.

#SFWApro
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Interviews, Giveaways & Readercon, Oh My

Busy as a bee. . .
Photo by atramos, used under CC license

I've been here and there on the internet for the past few weeks, including a Q&A with Lynn Viehl (where I answer the question: If you could step into a time machine and visit any SF universe (including your own), what would you choose as your destination, and why?) and a guest post on Julianne Douglas' blog on the connections between writing poetry and writing speculative fiction. Julianne is running a giveaway of an eBook and signed paperback copy of ITHAKA RISING, so head over there and leave a comment for your chance to win.

To pique your interest, here is the opening to my guest post on using poetry tools in fiction:
 

Why is a raven like a writing desk?

. . . or how is writing poetry related to writing science fiction?

According to Lewis Carroll, there actually isn't a true answer to his nonsensical riddle from Alice in Wonderland, but I do have an answer to my question.

Having been a poet for a far longer time than I have been a writer of fiction, I maintain that poetry - or at least the tools of poetry - underlies all effective writing. Not only that, but in writing speculative fiction, those tools can enhance world building and reader immersion in fundamental and crucial ways.

The poetic tools I'm going to focus on are specificity, musicality, and comparisons. All three can heighten the reading experience of your novel, especially novels of speculative fiction.

If you're active on GoodReads, DERELICT (Halcyone Space, book 1) was chosen for one of July's group read picks on the Space Opera group! I have an author interview posted there and will be participating in reader Q&A.

This Thursday is the start of Readercon, where I'm going to be taking part in panels, reading, and signing. If you're in the Boston area, it's a great con, full of thought-provoking panels and great discussions about all things SF/F/H.

Here's my Readercon schedule: (You can also find me at the Broad Universe table in the dealer's room.)

Thursday July 09

9:00 PM    EM    Reading: Lisa Cohen. LJ Cohen. Lisa Cohen reads From ITHAKA RISING

Friday July 10

3:00 PM    IN    How to Read Poetry. Kythryne Aisling, Michael Cisco, LJ Cohen, C.S.E. Cooney, Samuel Delany, Elaine Isaak. Those who have never read poetry for pleasure often aren't sure how or where to start; even a short poem can look arcane and daunting. This workshop will explain how to get the most out of poetry on the page, from humorous doggerel to more complex works.

6:00 PM    E    Autographs. LJ Cohen, A. J. Odasso.

Saturday July 11

9:00 AM    G    Zombies as a Crisis of the Ecosystem: A Holistic Perspective. John Benson, Gwendolyn Clare, LJ Cohen, Meriah Crawford, Catt Kingsgrave. Zombie plagues, like all pandemics, are ecosystem crises. What aspects of the human ecosystem make it possible for such a plague to spread? (Long distance air travel, say, or science fiction conventions.) What would its effects be on agriculture, infrastructure, labor availability, public health (aside from the plague itself), telecommunications, and other elements of human civilization? Where most disaster novels zoom in on the struggles of a few people to survive such a crisis, we will zoom out and consider large-scale, long-term questions.

 

3:00 PM    G    Beautiful and Terrible as the Morn: Celebrating Spec Fic's Older Women. Beth Bernobich, LJ Cohen, Kelley Eskridge, Eileen Gunn, Diane Weinstein. In a 2014 blog post, Kari Sperring wrote, "Most women who are now over about 40 have been told their whole lives to be good, to keep their heads down, to keep on working away quietly and to wait their turn. And now, within sff, at the point when their male contemporaries are celebrated, these same women are being told, No, it's too late for you, you don't matter enough; that space is needed. Get out of the way." Judith Tarr concurred in a post on Book View Café, saying, "Our culture makes a cult of youth.... But males as they age manage to stay visible, and even manage to keep matinee-idol status—and if they’re writers, they become literary lions. Females simply drop off the radar." Women over 40 have been shaping the genre since its beginning, as readers, writers, editors, agents, publishers, artists, critics, and more. This panel will celebrate the past, recent, and forthcoming work of older women, and help to put it back on everyone's radar.

Sunday July 12

9:00 AM    F    Wish Fulfillment for Happy Adults. John Benson, LJ Cohen, Betsy Mitchell, Sheila Williams, Ann Tonsor Zeddies. Wish fulfillment for teenagers and wish fulfillment for adults with happy stable lives are necessarily going to be different. Speculative stories are great for navigating the trickiness of coming-of-age, but there's precious little for those who are already of age and have started to prioritize comfort over adventure. Female readers in particular often turn to romance novels for stories about familes and love and kindness, and to mysteries for stories about grown women with agency and purpose. Can speculative fiction draw in those readers by fulfilling different sorts of wishes?

#SFWApro

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Happy Book Birthday ITHAKA RISING!

Cover art copyright 2015, Chris Howard

Happy Book Birthday to ITHAKA RISING!

One year ago, DERELICT burst into the world, fueled by incredible luck and timing, and hit the best seller lists on Amazon. What started with a junked spaceship and a computer programmer driven to escape her abusive father continues in ITHAKA RISING, book 2 of Halcyone Space:

A derelict ship and a splintered crew are not the rewards Ro had hoped for when she helped disrupt her father's plans to start a war with smuggled weapons. But with the responsibilities of full Commonwealth citizenship and limited resources, she is forced to take her father's place working as an engineer on Daedalus station while she and Barre try to repair their damaged freighter, Halcyone. Barre's brother, Jem, is struggling with the disabling effects of his head injury, unable to read or code. His only hope is to obtain a neural implant, but the specialists determine he is too young and his brain damage too extensive.

When Jem disappears, his trail dead ends at the black market. Ro and Barre race to locate Jem before he sells his future, risking his mind for an illegal neural implant. But they're not the only ones looking for "The Underworld" and its rogue planet, Ithaka. What they find endangers more than just the three of them and forces them to confront a very different truth about the war they believed was ancient history.

I would be pretending a degree of cool and calm I really don't have if I said I wasn't concerned about the book release. All my writerly insecurities have come out to play, in force. They try to tell me that DERELICT was a fluke. That ITHAKA RISING can't possibly enjoy the same success. That I was foolish to believe I had any sort of traction in the marketplace. That I'm a poser and a fraud and an asteroid will strike our house and velociraptors will eat my dogs.

Catastrophize much?

Imposter syndrome, I am in you.

The thing is, this happens every single time I put a project out into the world. It probably will always be the case. The blessing/curse of being an artist is that intense sensitivity to both the highs and lows of the creative life.

A book release is both at the same time: the high of seeing a project through from the wisp of an idea to a complete reality. The low of the fear that this intense work no longer is under your control. When I look back through the past year of creating ITHAKA RISING, I can honestly say I am proud of the work I put in. And I am honored to be sharing these characters and their story with you.

 

Jem shut his eyes tight, hoping the meds would ease the symptoms. Passengers were encouraged to fixate on a still point in the distance during a jump. The display screens helped by projecting a simple vista with parallel lines, like a forest, or monorail tracks. Something that gave a geometric reference helped the strange wobbly feeling that jumpers experienced from being slightly out of temporal phase. But Jem knew that trying to stare straight ahead would only make things worse for him.

It was like he was jumping all the time, his body at war with the signals from his brain and his eyes and ears. The times he had jumped since his injury were miserable. He braced himself. The ship spiraled into the wormhole. Colors swam across his eyelids. A star-scape sparkled through his mind. His vertigo surged and he lost all sense of his own boundaries. Jem knew that it was impossible for his body to actually turn inside out, but that’s what it felt like. Nothing held. There was no up or down, no stable gravity. His thoughts fractured into a thousand glass shards.

The memory of his latest consult replayed like a vid with a sync glitch between visual and audio tracks. After his parents had left the room, Jem asked the question that had been burning in him for weeks. The doctor’s mouth moved and then her answer hung in the air, the sound cycling in frequency from low to high, from slow to fast. “I’m afraid you’re far too young. And even if you weren’t, the damage may be too great for your brain to integrate the implant. I’m sorry.”

Sorry.

Soooooorrrrrrrrrrryyyyyy.

Sor.

Ry.

The word melted. The colors behind Jem’s eyes flared brighter and brighter, melding to a white that seared his vision.

Pain blossomed in the space the colors left behind.

After what seemed like an eternity, his body coalesced back onto the cushioned berth. The all-clear sounded.

One jump down. Two to go.

ITHAKA RISING is available in all eBook formats and as a trade paperback and can be purchased at all major online retail outlets.

Amazon
KOBO
iBooks
Google Play
(BN forthcoming)
Paperback (Amazon)

Signed paperbacks are available. Please contact me via email. (lisa@ljcohen.net)

#SFWApro
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This is how I begin

And the winners of the giveaway for the foldable white board ("RGFT" is what it's called!) are ET Anthony, JS Rowe (who had to leave her comment on the G+ thread b/c blogger was acting up), and Charley Sumner. Congrats! When you have a chance, email me: lisa at ljcohen dot net with your snail mail addresses so I can send out your prize!

Brainstorming from ITHAKA RISING

Someone today asked me about my writing process. So I thought I'd go through some of what I do and how I do it. The caveat here is that this is not THE way. It's just ONE way.

And it's not the only process I use. But it's basically the one I've used for my last several novels.

It starts with my version of the old board game Clue. Only, instead of Miss Scarlet in the Drawing Room with a Candlestick, I have a character in a situation with a problem.

In a short story, that will be all that I need to get the piece moving, and more than enough. For a novel, especially one with a sweeping story and multiple points of view, I may have this basic premise worked out for each character.

For ITHAKA RISING we had:

• Jem, who needs a neural implant, but who can't get one because he's too young and the risks of putting one in a head injured patient are too great.

• Ro, stuck back on Daedalus without resources, and a ship with a broken jump drive she can't fix.

• Barre, playing second fiddle (see what I did there? LOL) to Ro, struggling to figure out what he does next, now that he's a full citizen and estranged from his family. 

Nomi and Micah were part of the story, as well, but they didn't have clearly defined roles and problems when I was doing the initial brainstorming.

The next step was to figure out what drove the story and how all three of these characters' issues would intersect and complicate one another. 

So I had Jem run away and contact the black market to obtain an illegal neural. Barre (his brother) is desperate to find Jem, and the ship Barre and Ro operate is broken.

Now, all of those are internal conflicts, and I had a larger, overarching story to tell about the political situation in the Commonwealth and how unresolved events from the war 40 years ago complicate the present day. So in my brainstorming, I tied the problems with the ship's jump drive to an old spacer's tale about a missing planet. And I started sketching out some of the history of the Commonwealth and the initial diaspora from Earth that set up colonies, tightly controlled by Earth's multinationals. Then I created a conflict that was essentially the Revolutionary War, except that in this war, the colonies lost.

Once I had those basics, it was a matter of tying the macro story to the micro, and getting Ro, Nomi, Barre, Jem, and Micah tangled up in still-simmering 40-year-old conflicts.


From that, I start to put together a draft of what will be the back cover blurb. Yes, it seems completely backwards, but having a 10,000 foot view of the story keeps me on track.

When Jem Durbin disappears, his trail dead ends at the black market. Ro Maldonado and Jem's brother, Barre, race to fix their derelict ship, desperate to locate Jem before he sells his future, risking his mind for an illegal neural implant. But they're not the only ones looking for "The Underworld" and its rogue planet, Ithaka. What they find endangers more than just the three of them and forces them to confront a very different truth about the war they believed was ancient history.

Some of the mechanics of how I use the portable/foldable whiteboard pictured in the image above:

I create a column for each main character and enter their starting place and their main goal On the back, are columns for world building and history. Every time I had an idea that intersected with the story somehow, I jotted it down on a relevant spot on the board.

I don't formally outline before I start writing. But I do think of the story broadly in quartiles. Having a starting place and an initial problem(s) gives me my opening scenes and the first 25% of the story. From there, I do very broad brush outlining and write additional scenes to connect the dots. While I may not know all the way points in a plot, I do know the basic shape of the ending, and by continually assessing what's missing between where I happen to be and the end allows me to fill in the gaps.

Make no mistake, this is not a simple process. There were places where I backtrack, places where I wanted to throw my laptop out the window and ragequit the story. I did find that having the whiteboard as a touchstone and a brainstorming device kept me on track. And bonus points because it's portable.

 

When I bought these, I bought a bunch of them and I have several in my office. If you'd like a chance at having one of these foldable white boards, leave a comment either about your writing process or a question about my process. On Friday, June 26, midnight EST I'll pick three random winners and announce it on Saturday, in honor of the official release of ITHAKA RISING. Giveaway is open to anyone. 

#SFWApro
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The Curse of Sensitivity

I have often said that what makes an artist (and by artist, I mean in the broadest sense: writers, musicians, painters--creators of any kind) is that artists notice.

Perhaps those of us who are driven to create are born with our senses tuned up a little higher than is typical. And since it is those senses that help us navigate and mediate our world, it also means that we tend to experience and feel deeply in ways that often make day to day life more difficult.

I know that my mother used to tell me I was "too sensitive," and she meant it as a criticism. (Ironic, because she was a painter in her younger years.) For the most part, I have learned to manage and channel that sensitivity into my creative life. Fortunately for you, a lot of that (in the form of raw emotions on the page and fragments of poetry) remains closed up in paper journals and notebooks. Some has made it to this blog. Still other emotions have been mined and processed to emerge as elements in stories and novels.

Writing has been my salvation throughout my life, and especially over the past several years where the power of words has sustained me through our house fire, family crises, and the illness and death of loved ones. Why words? The flippant answer is because I can't draw, paint, dance, act, or play music to save my life. I can say that words have definitely done so.

My father passed away a little over a week ago. I am in a deeply quiet place. I am (slowly) doing what needs to be done in my life, but somewhat on autopilot. I'm grocery shopping, cooking, paying bills and organizing paperwork, readying a book for publication. But aside from the basics, I have barely accomplished anything and have certainly not written much, aside from his eulogy.

I can feel the words piling up in my head, but when I sit with pen to paper, I am mute. 

I know what I'd tell a friend, a loved one:

Be gentle with yourself. Loss takes its own time. There is no schedule for grief. 

Hell, I have told others those exact words. And yet, I cannot hear them for myself.

My father was extremely proud of me. While he wasn't much of a fiction reader, and certainly not a reader of any SF&F work, he none-the-less told everyone in his apartment complex about his daughter the writer. When we were there for his memorial service, I lost count of the number of his friends who told me how much he bragged to them about me.

When I was visiting with him in early May, I set up my laptop in his hospital room and worked on edits when he slept. When he was awake, he asked me about my process, marveling at the ability to actually write page after page after page of a complete story. So in a way, he is there on every page.

That book was ITHAKA RISING and I've dedicated it to him. It would have amused him and moved him. And yet, as hard as I worked on the novel, and as much as I am invested in this insanity of living a creative life, I am emotionally spent. I should be writing guest blogs, and promoting, and soliciting reviews, and setting the book up for pre-orders.

Instead, I am quiet. The to-do list lengthens. I cry at odd times when I am alone. I pick up the phone, intending to talk to my father, before it hits me again that he's gone.

I know it doesn't work this way, but there are moments I wish there was an off switch for this sensitivity. Or at least a volume control. But this is how I am constructed. I feel deeply and intensely and sometimes those feelings paralyze me.

I've also lived through grief before. I know there will come a time when the words will emerge again, when I can direct the sensitivity toward creating art.

But for now, there is silence and an unfilled space in my soul.




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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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A Tale of Two Images

First of all, I'm off blogging this week at The Scriptors, the website of an Indie Collective I'm proud to be part of. My current blog post answers the question "Hey Lisa, what's with all the dragonflies?"

From the longer post called "The Way of the Dragonfly: Surviving as an Artist":

"So we have a perfect storm: challenging work, unpredictable production, and minimal remuneration. Any artist who plans to succeed needs to find the inner resources to not only withstand that storm, but to embrace its challenge."

 And then there's this second image, one that showed up in an email when I was down for the count with a nasty virus and did more for my mood than motrin, sleep, and copious amounts of tea.

Original art, copyright Chris Howard, 2015

This is the concept art for ITHAKA RISING's cover and I couldn't be more pleased. The guy depicted on the cover is Barre, a musician and reluctant crew member on the forty year old derelict freighter, Halcyone.

ITHAKA RISING is the sequel to DERELICT and will be published late June/early July 2015.

A derelict ship and a splintered crew are not the rewards Ro had hoped for when she helped disrupt her father's plans to start a war with smuggled weapons. But with the responsibilities of full Commonwealth citizenship and limited resources, she is forced to take her father's place working as an engineer on Daedalus station while she and Barre try to repair the damaged freighter, Halcyone. Barre's brother, Jem, is struggling with the disabling effects of his head injury, unable to work with his beloved computers and code.

When Jem disappears, his trail dead ends at the black market. Ro and Barre are desperate to find Jem before he sells his future, risking his mind for an illegal neural implant. But they're not the only ones looking for "The Underworld" and its rogue planet, Ithaka. What they find endangers more than just the three of them and forces them to confront a very different truth about the war they believed was ancient history.

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