Where to find me - virtually (part 1)

Like Dev (seen in the cover art above) I am busy at work, but while she is attempting to sabotage a spaceship, I'm talking about DREADNOUGHT AND SHUTTLE and various and sundry details about writing and science fiction.

Over the course of June, I'll be guest posting in blogs all over the 'net. Please visit my gracious hosts and leave a comment while you're there.

Mary Robinette Kowal, Hugo-award winning writer, puppeteer, and all around lovely human,  featured me on "My Favorite Bit", where I got to talk about why I loved writing Dev's character.

And here's not one, but TWO interviews with me, both published yesterday:

• Damion Trassler's blog 

Damian is a playwright and a writer and has written a very funny, self-deprecating piece about how not to cosplay.  

• Amy Beth Inverness's blog

Amy Beth is a SF writer and fellow Broad Universe broad. She is the writer of The Cities of Luna stories, that she describes as "Stories about people, not blowing up spaceships."

Last but not least, today I'm talking about balancing characters and points of view on Samantha Dunaway Bryant's blog. Samantha writes about menopausal super heroes. I thoroughly enjoyed "Going Through The Change" and am looking forward to reading "Change of Life."

(And definitely check out the guest posts - some include giveaways of one of my novels - winner's choice.)


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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?

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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. 

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