Once in a Blue Muse

Fear and Loathing in Publisher-land

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Cohen) — Thu, 24 Sep 2026 14:09:04 +0000

Wraparound cover art for EVERY SKY A STRANGER by the talented Chris Howard

Every Sky a Stranger is my 10th novel. So I've been around the block a bit with being my own publisher. To the tune of 10 novels, 2 anthologies, and 1 short story collection. That's 13 ebooks and 12 paperbacks. (The short story collection is ebook only). That doesn't count the numerous books I've helped other writers format for publication.

So when I tell you I know how to do this, I know how to do this. Including formatting for paperback editions to both Amazon kdp and IngramSpark.

Over 2 weeks ago, I uploaded a revised cover file for the paperback edition of Every Sky, as the first iteration didn't go far enough into the bleed area. No problem. Amazon's timeframe to review is within 72 hours. Over a week went by and the files were still locked "in review".

The Support Runaround

On Sept 21st I initiated a support chat. It got escalated (whatever that really means). I received no reply to my request for updates over the next several days.

On Sept 23rd, I requested a call back & actually spoke to someone. They had no idea why the book was still in review. (Remember - I've done this for 9 other novels & 2 anthologies, PLUS the cover & interior was approved at IngramSpark, so I know it's not a problem with the files.)

Apparently my earlier support chat was closed because the team it was sent to didn't know how to fix the problem. Not that they told me or anything.

So this agent created a new ticket with a new case number.

According to Amazon, I'm supposed to update to the final files by 9/25 for a 9/29 pub date.

Guess how confident I am that this will get fixed?

Shouting into the Void

So, overnight I received an email that the cover image needed to be extended past the bleed lines.

Great, right? Specific information.

Except it's the *same* email I got over 2 weeks ago after which we made those changes & reuploaded the cover that got stuck in review for 2 weeks.

The same cover that was accepted/approved at IngramSpark.

Then I went to my kdp back end to see the paperback was magically out of review and ready to publish. Yay? However they needed to push the publication date further out. Because of their delay. Not optimal.

I did a second support call to figure out which it was: yes I could publish/no the cover isn't okay.

Hey, it's Schrödinger's paperback.

Support guy said the ticket is still being worked on and that I can't publish until I hear back.

Okay... But if the book is out of review, the ticket is moot. Right?

Apparently not. And according to the support person, either I'll have to publish in October or I'll be able to have the book live for 9/29.

Definitely Schrödinger's paperback.

Just for kicks and giggles, I went to the KDP message center where there is a helpful transcript of my support call. And it's status is RESOLVED.

Um. No?

Amount of faith I have in Amazon kdp? ZERO PERCENT.

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When did we lose the spark?

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Cohen) — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 15:54:19 +0000

2 hands holding sparklers some long ago New Year's Eve

When I was a very young child, my Great Uncle Davie brought me an old manual typewriter. He was always stopping by the house with trinkets and pockets full of candy - usually a dutch candy called hopjes. He was a dear old man and I thought he was quite magical.

The typewriter was an LC Smith and Corona and it delighted me for a number of reasons, not the least of which was LC are my initials. And I also think some part of me knew he saw me - even at the young age of 6 or 7 - as a writer.

I loved banging away at that typewriter. The keys were purely mechanical. I have no idea where he found it, but it wasn't in the best of shape and the keys often jammed. But that didn't matter to me. I wrote little stories on it that felt real to me because they were typed. No childish scrawl for my masterpieces!

All through my primary schooling and into high school, I wrote poems and stories. I even included one of my short stories with my college application and it gave me a get-out-of-jail-free pass for Freshman Composition.

Yeah. I thought I was all that in those days. (Until I had to write my first college paper, but that's another story for another time.) Mostly I wrote for the sheer pleasure of wordcraft. Fitting the right words together felt much as I imagine a master woodworker feels using pegs to join wood smoothly and perfectly without glue or hardware. It didn't matter what other people thought of my writing because it pleased me.

Then somewhere over the next few years in college, something changed. I became insecure and uncertain. Part of that was being exposed to a universe of writing I had not even known existed. Suddenly my juvenile work felt, well, juvenile. And I didn't have the life experience or the knowledge of craft to take my writing further. Nor did I have the discipline back then. (Again, another story.)

I didn't stop writing, but I did stop sharing my work.

In my senior year of college, a friend pestered me to submit to the Dean's Prize in Creative Literature. I put him off for weeks until at the deadline, I submitted a sheaf of poetry. And I only did so because I knew I wouldn't win and that it didn't matter because I would be graduating and no one would know my work was worthless.

So. One of my poems won. And there was a monetary prize. It was such a confusing moment. What was more true? When I loved what I created? When I understood it wasn't more than immature ramblings? When some outside arbiter deemed it worthy?

Where is the balance between joy in creativity and its assigned value? How do we navigate those waters?

When my now adult children were in elementary school, I volunteered to run poetry workshops for several different grades between 2nd and 5th. I always loved to be a guest in the classroom. (Teachers are amazing humans. Truly.) My experience was interesting and educational in ways not at all related to the poetry workshop activities I facilitated.

Children in the 2nd grade have a huge variability in their ability to read and manage language. What they may lack in skills, they make up for in utter enthusiasm. They enjoy wordplay and rhythm and rhyme. Working with 2nd graders was both fun and also exhausting.

3rd grade was the sweet spot. Children in the 3rd grade have a basic facility with language and (most importantly) still come to wordplay with joy and spark. When we shared the work they wrote, each student was proud of what they had created and celebrated what their classmates had written. Never did a 3rd grader approach me with a poem to ask if I liked it, or if it was good. They liked it and that was all that mattered.

In working with 4th and 5th graders, my experience was very different. The students approached the exercises as if they were a test. Every single one of them would approach me for consultation and ask if I liked it. If they had done it right. Was it good. And that was heartbreaking. Gone was the spark and the joy and the play.

If there is a single critical skill in creating, it is playfulness. And when we cede our power to an external judge, we lose it.

So how do we keep that spark into adulthood? What about those of us who choose to write for publication? We live in a society where the ultimate arbiter of worthiness is attention - and most often the attention of the dollar. But even in art forms that earn little money, going 'viral' is the ultimate goal. As if what we create is unimportant unless it is noticed. It's a weird variant of the "prosperity doctrine" where if you are successful, it's because you deserved to be successful. If your work doesn't achieve notice, well, it wasn't good enough.

There's that external valuation metric again.

If we wind the clock back to childhood, I see that young girl typing with her index fingers on a large mechanical typewriter, her fingertips blackened with ink from the ribbon that often needed to be unjammed from the keys. She was joyful. She lived for the process of making something from nothing. It was enough to create. What other people thought didn't matter.

I just published my 10th novel. 10 novels in 14 years. 6 year-old-me sitting at that typewriter would have shrugged and kept typing. She knew she was going to grow up to be a writer. She didn't think about reviews and sales and rankings and mentions. She had stories to tell and told them.

I need to remind myself of who I was. And who I can still be.

Subscribe to BlueMusings and receive my short story collection, STRANGER WORLDS THAN THESE, as my gift.

New release is in pre-order and other news

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Cohen) — Wed, 16 Sep 2026 21:15:09 +0000

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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What would your Focus be?

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Cohen) — Tue, 19 May 2026 14:34:48 +0000

Several stitch markers I use in my knitting and crochet

In the world of Entangled Realities, there are those who can move between worlds of the multiverse. These Travelers are taught to use a small item, called a focus, to keep them grounded so they don't lose themselves in transit.

One of my characters - Reina - is a young girl who is the daughter of two Travelers. When she faces her first journey, she needs to choose an item for her focus and remembers her father asking her what represents home.

She chooses a beach stone. It has special significance to her past, as revealed in the story.

I wondered what I would choose. What represents home to me? I've lived in many places across my 62 years on the planet. I've moved through many phases of my life, each with different identities: child, student, wife, professional, mother, writer, farmer, crafter. Which of these is "home". Not in a literal place, but in a sense of core being. What small item could I carry that would always lead me back to myself?

Reina's parents both choose their wedding rings as their focus. While my spouse is definitely home base for me, I don't wear a wedding ring. We both have them, but life as a farmer and a potter is not conducive to wearing jewelry of any kind.

A pottery tool was under consideration, but that is just part of who I am. Same thing for a fancy pen to symbolize my life as a writer. But I don't typically write with a pen and a computer would be too awkward to carry.

Then I glanced at my knitting project bag and the box of stitch markers.

Perfect.

They are small, light, easy to connect to a piece of clothing. And while they do the literal work of keeping me on track in a knitting or crochet pattern, they represent something more. Of holding my place in the fabric of the world. Marking where I am and giving me the sense of where I need to go.

Plus - and amusingly - they seem to shift in and out of phase, getting lost in the multiverse of the sofa cushions and randomly getting found again.

So that's my focus sorted out. Stitch markers. Something that wouldn't be noticed or commented on. Something that has personal and metaphorical meaning. Something to anchor me to myself in the swirling confusion of the multiverse.

How about you? What's your focus?

Subscribe to BlueMusings and receive my short story collection, STRANGER WORLDS THAN THESE, as my gift.

Why Poplar is the Best Dog and A Kickstarter Update

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Cohen) — Thu, 07 May 2026 14:08:00 +0000

As of Day 1 of the campaign!

I didn't set out to write a story with a telepathic dog. In fact, I didn't plan on any dog at all. But when I was working on the early drafts of what would become LITANY FOR A BROKEN WORLD, Poplar showed up.

Yes, characters do appear like that. A gift from the subconscious that any writer worth her salt doesn't turn away. So Poplar stayed. Even as the story morphed and changed. Even as other characters got cut and never returned to the manuscript.

And when I look at the story, she is its heart and soul.

I'd like to say I created Poplar as an amalgamation of all the dogs I've owned throughout my adult life, but I think she really created herself out of my memories and relationships with our canine companions.

Let me introduce you to them.

Maxwell Smart

I didn't grow up with pets of any kind. The night before my wedding in 1988, my sister asked if she could bring over our gift as 'it was fragile' and she didn't want to risk bringing it the wedding.

Sure, we said, come on over.

And she walked in with a 12 week old puppy. A Lhasa Apso aka a white ball of fluff.

Maxwell Smart Dog, age 6 with our first born kiddo, circa 1994

Unfortunately, all our photos of Max as a puppy are somewhere in photo albums in a storage unit. He was a clown of a dog and set himself as the protector and best friend of our son pretty much from the start.

Max was a great first dog to have. He was patient and gentle and playful. Would hop in any car ready for adventure. Max was also something of a Houdini and found many ways to escape our fenced in yard to ride shotgun for the day with our town's animal control officer.

Tigger

Tigger with her favorite thing in the world: A tennis ball

Max lived to be almost 17! When he passed in December of 2004, we weren't going to look for another dog for a little while. It was winter. I had 2 young children to care for. But my youngest (8 at the time) held me to my promise that we would look for a dog once there was no longer snow on the ground.

In March of 2005, Tigger found us. When we got her records from the dog rescue, we discovered she'd been born the day Max died. The kids ever after believed that Max sent her to us so we could stop being sad.

Tigger was a hound/lab mix and one of the most responsive dogs I've known. She loved to learn tricks and when she was old enough, she and I passed the tests to become a therapy dog team. We spent many years visiting hospitals, nursing homes, and adolescent psychiatry facilities. She was a natural. Always knew the exact person who needed her love.

Dustin

I swear, this photo was not staged.

When our kids got older and busier, it was clear that Tigger needed a canine friend. So we adopted Dustin. Then we found out that he was part Jack Russel Terrier. AKA terror.

Terriers are a special breed of intense. And Dustin had a lot of trauma from being a feral stray. But Tigger loved him. He became her puppy and she civilized him. Dustin was definitely a challenge, but over time, he became a very sweet cuddler, albeit a menace to other dogs.

Mya

Mya cosplaying a babushka

Sadly, Tigger died of cancer when she was 10 and we quickly realized Dustin needed a companion. So we adopted Mya - a border collie mix who had been shot as a puppy and only had 1 eye. She was very much my dog. Extremely sweet with people. Unpredictably fear aggressive with other dogs. Though she and Dustin were definitely pack.

Dustin and Mya made the transition with us to empty nesting and our move to the farm where we live now. In fact, when I came out here in 2020 at the beginning of covid (while my spouse stayed in Boston, treating ICU patients), they were my loyal companions.

Gigi

1 year of Gigi

Mya got lymphoma in 2024 and after 6 months of chemotherapy, died in early 2025. Dustin - probably well in his teen years by then (we were never really certain how old he was) - died of heart failure about 6 weeks later. We were heartbroken, but definitely not ready for another dog.

Until Gigi found us. A lovely mix of shepherd and hound, Gigi is a lot like Tigger was in terms of her emotional intelligence, responsiveness, and gentleness. Unlike Mya and Dustin, Gigi is exceptionally well mannered with other dogs and knows how to alter her play style to suit her companion. She's also the first dog I've ever had who naturally retrieves a ball and drops it at my feet on command. So these are all my good dogs.

And Poplar? Well, she has a little bit of all of them in her. I am indebted to each dog we've shared our lives with for helping me bring Poplar to the page with clarity and honesty. Along with a nose for cheese.

As for the Kickstarter, you can help bring more Poplar to the world with your support! Now that we've reached the initial funding goal, anything raised beyond this will go toward the audiobooks of book 2 and 3 in the trilogy, all with Poplar being the best good dog on the page.

Subscribe to BlueMusings and receive my short story collection, STRANGER WORLDS THAN THESE, as my gift.

Being Vulnerable

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Cohen) — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 14:11:00 +0000

I did the thing.

I put together a kickstarter campaign to help fund the audiobook production of LITANY FOR A BROKEN WORLD.

Can I tell you how much I struggled just to consider doing this? How hard it is for me to ask for friends, readers, and strangers to pledge money to my project? It was difficult enough to write my story (as KS defines it) and be clear on what I needed and to put together rewards for backers that would be something interesting and unique that I could offer. The hardest part? The video.

Kickstarter encourages creators to add a short video to their campaign. Fine, I thought, I'll do a slide deck. But best practice seems to be for the creator to talk directly to potential backers.

AARGH.

I'm a writer. And a neurospicy one at that. I work in a little room, at my computer, alone (maybe Gigi curled up at my feet), usually dressed in torn jeans and flannel and with major bed head. Being seen is uncomfortable.

So I split the difference - created a few slides to introduce my video, did the voice over, added about 90 seconds of me talking about the project and myself.

Total time to put together and record that roughly 2 minute video? Four days. Four full days. Maybe 40 hours of work and at least 20 takes. Video is *hard*. Kudos to creators who work in that medium. I know I couldn't.

After getting really wonderful feedback on the campaign and making some important changes, I sent it off to the powers that be at Kickstarter for approval.

If they give me the green light, I'll set the campaign to officially begin by mid May.

Stay tuned! If you'd like updates, please consider subscribing to my email newsletter Bluemusings.

Subscribe to BlueMusings and receive my short story collection, STRANGER WORLDS THAN THESE, as my gift.

And done

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Cohen) — Tue, 07 Apr 2026 04:41:00 +0000

Screenshot of the chapter and scene info. The overarching reminder for me as I was writing the story is that everyone is where they need to be, not necessarily where they want to be.

I completed the manuscript for EVERY SKY A STRANGER this week.

Here are some metrics:

Total words: 82,000

Number of POV characters: 9

Chapters: 17

Scenes: 53

Writing progress:

18,000 words between January 2024 and December 2024

I had recently finished LITANY FOR A BROKEN WORLD and was preparing for its February 2025 release. After working on book 1 for close to six years, I was worried that I would have the same problem with book 2. I spent a lot of time reviewing my half-baked notes early in 2024. While I had had a plan for where book 2 was going to begin, once I got into the first few chapters, I realized the story wasn't really moving forward. I had all these characters standing around waiting for stage direction. Not good. I quickly shifted the entire plot plan (such as I had) and made life harder for my characters. Much better.

34,000 words between January 2025 and December 2025

I made steady progress through the story's middle in 2025, though I knew it would need to be stronger. And until fall of 2025 when I attended the Writer Unboxed Unconference in New Mexico, I wasn't sure how I was going to fix it. I took dozens of pages of notes that week and in the margins, I had this note to myself: Each major character needs to have a "trolley problem" moment. Once I figured this out (and it took me until the end of 2025), I was able to see the entire structure of the story, as well as the overarching structure for all three books of the series.

30,000 words between January 2026 and March 2026

This is where my fingers flew over the keyboard, but it wasn't without work. In early 2026, I was working up to the book's climax when I stumbled and didn't know how to proceed. So I assembled each of the major plot threads separately as if they were their own books and read through them one at a time. (I do not recommend working with a complex structure like this. It was the only way to tell the story, but it tested me as a writer.) This allowed me to see where the writing needed to be smoothed or expanded or changed and set me up to create a cohesive whole.

In the final month of writing, I drafted the entire last 25% of the story.

At this point, the first half is at least on its 3rd revision. The middle at 2nd revision and the last 25% has been revised once. This is typical for my process. By the time I get to the last sections of the book, my writing is much bolder and more confident. Those last few chapters typically need the least amount of revision.

I've sent it out to a handful of trusted readers - trusted in that I can trust them to be honest with me to help the story be its best before it goes off to the editor.

The metrics only tell part of the process. More importantly is how I feel about this story. And how I feel having finished it.

I am quite pleased with the shape of it. The characters - despite how well I know them, despite the fact that I created them - still have the power to surprise me. Their voices have become distinct in my mind and on the page. I found an ending that is both surprising and inevitable (and, I hope, satisfying). Certainly it sets up the starting place and conflicts for book 3.

Sitting here, I feel as if my brain has been hollowed out. For the past 2 years or so, I've been living with this story and these characters in my mind. This was especially true in those last writing months. And now that it's finished, the sense of their company is gone. I know they haven't gone far and they will return when I start drafting the final book in the trilogy, but for now I feel empty.

EVERY SKY A STRANGER will be my 10th published novel. I'd like to say the process gets easier with each book, but that's not really true. Each book is a universe of difficult in its own way. Honestly? I welcome that. It means I'm stretching and growing with every piece I write.

Each story changes me. And that alone is reason to write.

Subscribe to BlueMusings and receive my short story collection, STRANGER WORLDS THAN THESE, as my gift.

"Despite Everything, Create"

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Cohen) — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 23:41:00 +0000

Button a gift from ZZ Claybourne

Being a writer, I meet a lot of other writers in the virtual confines of social media. Others, I meet on the rare occasions we gather in meat space. One of the writers I met physically before we connected virtually is ZZ Claybourne, AKA Zig Zag, AKA C.E. Young, C. Young, Clarence Young, and Thor MF Jones.

He was wearing the most amazing and lush purple great coat and had a fabulous presence and smile. Of course I had to talk to him and buy a copy of the book he was debuting at the time THE BROTHERS JETSTREAM: LEVIATHAN. (which I absolutely loved!)

I enjoyed the hell out of meeting him and have gone on to enjoy the hell out of all his subsequent books.

But that is not the point of this blogpost.

The button in the photo above is from Clarence and I have looked at it every day since he gifted it to me.

The one thing in this life that belongs to me is my creative imagination. For me, that looks like a few different things: but mainly knitting and crochet, ceramics, and writing. And what the pin's motto means shifts depending on the context.

One day, it may mean create the hell out of things, no matter who is watching/reading/participating. One day it may mean create your weird-ass corner of the world so you have something that belongs only to you, where you can dance badly and joyfully. Another day it means create your big old fuck you to the universe.

I'm crawling toward the finish line for the sequel to LITANY FOR A BROKEN WORLD. Some days it's a handful of words at a time. 'Cause if you don't know, creating is hard. And when the world is showing its cruelest face, it's even harder.

Sometimes, the thing you're trying to create is like a mean old bass on a line, refusing to be reeled in.

And sometimes it's both.

That's where I've been lately. Stunned nearly mute by the cruelty our species is capable of. And struggling with a story that is just plain difficult.

So at the beginning of the week, I deleted some social media apps from my phone and programmed in a hard limit of 30 minutes a day for others. What I noticed, almost immediately, was my head was full of story instead of dread or static.

I was able to sit with the characters when the writing felt hard instead of looking for an easy dopamine hit.

It feels a lot like magic when the words find their path to the page and snick together in just the right way.

This is me creating. Despite anything. Despite everything.

Come join me. Let's dance.

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One Year Ago and Today: Why Bother Writing?

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Cohen) — Thu, 12 Feb 2026 02:28:00 +0000

Happy 1 year book birthday to Litany

I was starting to make a packing list for this upcoming weekend's Boskone science fiction and fantasy convention in Boston when I realized it's been one full year since LITANY FOR A BROKEN WORLD was released.

Getting the manuscript from idea to finished novel was a long journey - over six years, in fact. While staying with a project that long can be frustrating, I don't regret the time and effort that went into its creation. Working on this book was, at times, so difficult I tried to abandon it. At other moments, the joy of telling these characters' stories was intoxicating. Ultimately, it challenged me to grow as a writer in ways I had not anticipated.

The story, itself, shifted and morphed in ways I hadn't planned. My initial notes have almost nothing in common with the completed story. They way I see it, this is not a bug, but a feature of the creative process.

This week, the writing internet was rife with critiques and hot takes about AI generated novels. (There was a story in the NYT business section about a romance writer using LLM/Generative AI to write whole novels in under an hour.) My feeling about LLM/generative AI is clear: No. Absolutely not.

As in no, I won't use it. Not in any part of my writing process. I won't reiterate all the ways the tech is energy and water wasting, the way it has been trained on stolen work (my own included), the way it cannot be trusted to output correct and factual information to queries, and many many more arguments you probably have already read hundreds of times.

Could I use LLM/Generative AI tools to write hundreds of novels in the time it took me to complete LITANY? Probably. Aside from any discussion of quality (a loaded word, and one nearly impossible to define), I can honestly say that no LLM could have produced a book as layered and complex as LITANY FOR A BROKEN WORLD.

Why not? Because this wasn't a story that could have emerged from prompts. Even the questions I grappled with didn't start to become clear until after I had written, deleted, and rewritten the beginning of the story nearly a half dozen times. They continued to deepen and expand all through the drafting process. I literally had to write the book before I could have crafted a prompt to capture even the smallest part of it.

No sophisticated mad-libs program could have found a short cut to that destination.

My main reason for writing is to discover the heart of a story. Sure, having my work sell, win awards, be read, be appreciated and enjoyed is all great, but none of that is possible or even of interest to me without the journey.

And if that journey takes longer than I planned? Well, that's where the journey gets fascinating. That's where all the best adventures and stories come from.

If you are looking for a very human tale, filled with emotion and hope, with earnest characters coping with loss and searching for connection, please give LITANY a try. I have always written the books I needed to read. Perhaps you need this story too.

Subscribe to BlueMusings and receive my short story collection, STRANGER WORLDS THAN THESE, as my gift.

"They may think it's a movement"

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Cohen) — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 16:25:00 +0000

The first MTI cap fresh off the needles

Like so many of us, I have been watching - bearing witness - to ordinary citizens being subjected to brutality by their own government. Unlike so many times in history, this isn't happening in some far away country while we sit on our sofas in front our our televisions wallowing in smug satisfaction over our democracy. No. This is our crisis. This is our country falling into ruin before our eyes.

I live in a "blue" state - I put that in quotes because I think that classification of blue vs red states is a false dichotomy. Yes, our nation is fractured, but it's not so easy to delineate where those fault lines are. And it's certainly not purely geography.

And while there have been incidents of ICE disappearing people here in Massachusetts, we have not seen the militarization of our state by swarms of masked armed and booted thugs like Minnesota and Illinois and Oregon and Washington, DC and so many more have.

I feel powerless against this. What can one person do against an impending avalanche except stand there and wait to be swept away?

So, I write letters and leave messages for my elected officials. I donate to mutual aid, activist, and charitable organizations in places that need it most. I have invested my time, energy, and money into my small community because the old hippie saying "think globally, act locally" is still true. Still critically important.

It doesn't feel like enough.

I'm a 62 year old woman recovering from major surgery. I can't put my body on the line in a protest - at least for now. There are stand outs in many of the little communities near me that I have participated in and will go again. Being around even a small group of people who believe as I do that no one is illegal and constitutional rights are granted to all is energizing. These small gathering aren't going to make ICE leave Minneapolis, but they add to the chorus of voices all over the US saying this isn't right. And that's important.

This week, protest has looked like a lot of red yarn on knitting needles and crochet hooks. I attend a weekly knitting group made up of mostly other post-menopausal ladies with white hair. We are just ordinary women. Making items for our loved ones and ourselves. We bring in our works in progress to ooh and ahh over. I am working on mastering cables. Another woman, toe up socks knitted two at a time, Still another, stranded colorwork.

We are setting aside those projects and making the "Melt the Ice" red protest hat.

Does it matter?

I think it does. I think seeing a handful of woman walking around town wearing tasseled peaked red hats is a symbol. And when each of those women make several more hats (I'm on number 3) and more and more people walk around wearing them? Well, in the immortal words of Arlo Guthrie from 'Alice's Restaurant' well, "they may think it's a movement."

I understand why there are some criticizing this as merely performative. But for one thing, the pattern has been purchased by thousands and thousands of yarn artists with all the proceeds going to support immigrants in Minnesota. (You can buy the pattern here.) That's not nothing. Several hundred thousand dollars and going strong. But mostly, here's what I think: We need to show who we are and what we believe. Staying silent in the face of evil is evil. And if one person stops me and asks, "hey, what's with all the red hats," maybe that's a chance to divert the avalanche.

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Radical Empathy; Fierce Kindness

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Cohen) — Sun, 25 Jan 2026 20:07:00 +0000

Gigi - our dog who, like Aloka, brings peace to our hearts

The contrast between my internal life and the external world is stark. Painful. It's not as if I don't know what's happening in places like Minneapolis and all the other cities where innocent people are being terrorized by uniformed thugs. It's not as if I don't write my elected officials, make calls, go to local rallies, provide money to mutual aide. It's not as if I don't witness, horrified, as executions are taking place on our streets and we are being lied to at a scale that feels apocalyptic.

I live in a tiny, rural town on 50+ acres of woodlands. It is a place of profound quiet. The chatter of birdsong and rushing water. The wind through trees. The call of coyotes. On clear nights, the stars are intensely bright.

It's hard to reconcile that peace with the horror. How can both of those things exist at the same time in the same world? And yet, it has always been so. That is the terrible irony of being human - that we are capable of such beauty and such cruelty.

During the same weeks as Renee Good and Alex Pretti were murdered, I have been following the journey of a group of Buddhist monks as they walk from Texas to Washington DC spreading a message of peace. One of the aspects of their walk that has captured my heart is the story of Aloka, the Peace Dog. Aloka was a stray dog in India that began to travel with the monks, adopting them as his charge. The photos of him and the Monks caring for him illustrates some of the best of humanity. There is power in the simplicity of caring.

I weep for Renee and Alex. For their loved ones. Their friends. The lives they touched. She was a poet. He was an ICU nurse. Decent people trying to make the world around them a better place. Their passion and caring didn't protect them. It makes me want to rage in fury at the unfairness of it all. It makes me afraid.

I have two sons who are kind and lovely people. The type of people like Renee and Alex. They, too, have spoken out against fascism. They, too, have been to protests. I could see either of them doing what Renee or Alex had done - witnessing and protecting because it is the right thing to do.

Doing the right thing will not save us.

Empathy and kindness are not shields against bullets.

And yet.

Without radical empathy, without fierce kindness, we have no humanity.

I don't want anyone's child or partner or parent or friend in harm's way.

Doing the right thing will not save us.

And yet.

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"What is Essential is Invisible to the Eye"

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Cohen) — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 22:50:00 +0000

“What is Essential is Invisible to the Eye”*

Lisa Janice Cohen
January 14, 2026

The road curves. It leans into hillsides shaped

by the ghosts of trees long since felled to make

way for hardscrabble pastures, stone walls, dour

farmers who believed in progress until the day

it flattened them beneath its broad wheels. Houses

ground to rubble and sticks, moving the dead

expedient. Only the living left to complain.

In the end, we are the ones owned by geography.

What grows is changed by sunlight and soil

until we rarely recognize ourselves outside

of the places we were first planted. We are all

interlopers here. Even those who count lineage

through faded headstones and common names.

I am still new enough to be struck silent by the ice

coated glitter of a bare maple. A white birch

glows against the leaden sky and I want to weep

with the futility of explaining why

you should care about a single ordinary tree

when the world contains forest after forest.

It would be easy to blame the first miner

who carved coal from a seam deep in the earth.

Or the first roustabout who drove a drill

through the ground for oil. But we have always

been remaking the world, deciding this mountain,

this lake, this town means little in our abundance.

Trading our futures for gold as if joy and sorrow

both were fungible assets. The sky spits

rain and snow, unable to decide the season.

I return to the road, now cut through a farm

on the valley floor. Horses in winter coats

graze, incurious about the ribbon that divides

their pasture. None of the beauty that undoes me

is ancient or original. Everywhere, everything

is built on loss. Not far from here, a farmer

discovered a single elm sapling growing

straight and true toward the sun, splitting

the rotted stump of what we were certain

had already died. Maybe the universe

isn’t finished with us yet. I choose to believe

this is a promise, not a threat.

* Title is a quote from The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

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Nurturing Creativity: looking ahead to 2026

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Cohen) — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 15:23:00 +0000

You are not obligated to complete the work of perfecting the world, but neither are you free to abandon it.
—Rabbi Tarfon, Pirkei Avot

“…give us the vision to see that the world is now too dangerous for anything but truth, too small for anything but love.”
—William Sloane Coffin, from Memorial Day: A Prayer*

When I look back on my creative life in 2025, I am so very proud of this book. Over 6 years in the drafting, revising (and revising), editing, and production. This was the book that almost broke me as a writer. The story that wouldn't let me abandon it, no matter how many times I tried to walk away.

It's a different kind of story than I had written before - still in the realm of speculative fiction (it is a multiverse story, after all), but it's set in the real world of current day Boston, primarily in a makeshift homeless encampment. Not the usual fare of science fiction or fantasy.

I honestly believe it's the best thing I've ever written. And while it was hard to write, and I promised myself the next project I tackled would be lighter and have fewer points of view and storylines, I realized the story arc wasn't complete. So I'm back in this complex world and 2/3 through the sequel. The provisional title is EVERY SKY A STRANGER and my timeline is to have it published by summer of 2026.

The landscape is hard for writers now. Especially for ones like me who are indie published. I would love to see this story find a wider readership. If you've enjoyed any of my work, please give this one a try. If you've read it, please leave a review and recommend it to a friend. If you have a book blog and would like a free ebook copy for review, let me know.

And not only is the business of writing difficult, but the landscape of creativity is as well. There are some artists who are able to use their creativity as a way to push through the chaos of the world. And there were times in my life when I could use my hyperfocus to write, despite (to spite?) the difficulties I encountered. For me, that led to massive burnout which was another reason LITANY took so long to write.

I am learning how to be kinder to myself, to nurture my creativity rather than see it as something to be consumed. If that means the writing will be slower and more deliberate, I will accept that. Because the alternative is to quench the spark that ignites my stories.

I have to quiet the inner voices of fear that try to convince me if I don't publish more and faster, my work will be irrelevant, neglected, unread. First of all, I write because it's how I navigate and comprehend the world. Second, (here comes my snarky self) who am I to believe I'm owed an audience? That's ego talking. (Yes, yes, I know I spent the first part of this post complaining about a lack of readership. I'm human. I embrace my contradictions.) And third, (something I know and have to remind myself of over and over) there are seasons of plenty and seasons of lying fallow. This is as true in growing a garden as it is in living a creative life.

My intention going forward is to practice compassion and patience, both for myself and in my community and live according to the principals in the quotes that begin this post.

May 2026 bring creativity, light, and joy to you.

*These quotes are the epigraphs that begin LITANY FOR A BROKEN WORLD.

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December, Then and Now

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Cohen) — Mon, 22 Dec 2025 18:28:00 +0000

The new and improved bionic me with a pixie hairdo.

15 years ago, on December 1st, it was a cold and blustery early morning when we were woken by the scream of smoke detectors. All of us - my spouse, me, our 2 children, the international teacher staying with us from China, and our dog all escaped the burning house. The dog without her leash, the rest of us barefoot and in pajamas.

We were lucky. We were all unhurt. We were together. What we lost were things that could be replaced, or let go as unimportant. We were supported by friends, family, and community and were able to rebuild and return to our home ten months later.

The beginning of December has become a time of reflection for me ever since. A time to take stock of what is and isn't important. To embrace life, to appreciate blessings, to be grateful for the love that surrounds me.

This year, the beginning of December brought another challenge. This time, on December 2nd. That morning - exactly 21 days ago - I underwent extensive surgery to take the pressure off my spinal cord at two levels in my neck. Over the past year or so, I'd been slowly losing strength and sensation in my hands and arms as well as noticing balance problems in walking. Over the last few months before the operation, I'd been awakened nearly every night with severe cramps in the muscles of my lower legs, feet, and toes.

Because of my background as a physical therapist, I knew these were serious signs. And it still took me longer than it should have to get the work up and surgical consult I needed.

While I consider myself a fairly active healthy person, I have had more surgeries than the average bear and I had pretty much decided I'd been cut open enough thank you very much. While I no longer had all my factory installed parts, I figured I'd be able to keep the rest.

But when your surgeon sighs after looking at your imaging studies, gets inadvertently kicked when testing your reflexes, apologizes for needing to do a complex operation, and cautions you that 1/3 of patients get better and 2/3 just don't get worse, well, you realize you don't really have a choice.

The Good

I am in the very lucky 1/3. Pretty much immediately post surgery, I had improvement in strength and sensation and balance. Critically, I'm getting back the subtle proprioception - that sensation that tells you where your joints are in space without needing to look at them. This means that things like touch typing, knitting, crochet, and ceramics are all going to be easier and better. I can stand on one foot with my eyes closed and not lose my balance. And I haven't been woken up with leg/foot/toe cramps since the surgery. All of this tells me my spinal cord is a lot happier.

I am also extremely grateful for the support I've gotten from friends, family, and community. We've had a fridge full of meals and gifts of cookies, teas, and other goodies. And my BFF spent a week visiting from NYC keeping me distracted and ensuring I took care of myself.

The Bad

My impatience. I struggle with letting others help me. I get frustrated when I can't just bounce back and do everything I want to do. It's not like the surgeon didn't council me that this was going to be a healing process measured in months, not days. My inner cranky-pus says it's been almost 3 weeks. Why aren't I all better yet??

The Ugly

Honestly? Other than the lumpy scar down the back of my neck, there really isn't any. And that will likely heal in time. I've even embraced my new pixie haircut - a necessity since they had to clip all the hair halfway up the back of my head for the surgery.

Two Decembers, 15 years apart

Two very different experiences, tied together by having to face my fears. I vividly remember how aggressively I coped in the aftermath of the fire. How I kept the terror hidden from everyone in my life because I was afraid if I let it out, I wouldn't be able to support my spouse and my kids. I never cried in front of them. But when I was alone in the car, parked somewhere, I would fall apart. People's kindness nearly undid me. And I buried myself in the work of cataloging what we'd lost and acted as the liaison to the general contractor for the firm rebuilding our home. It took a lot of therapy to come to terms with how vulnerable the fire and its aftermath made me.

I wish I could say that 15 years later, I have learned to be open with my fear, but I'm not sure I've made all that much progress. I know my spouse saw how freaked out I was ahead of the surgery, but he let me keep the fiction that everything was going to be all right, damn it. A day before, I wrote him a letter on my computer. Cleaned up most of the cluttered icons on its desktop, and left it in the middle of the screen for him with his name on it. It was a worst case scenario letter. And the first thing I did when I could sit up comfortably enough post surgery to work on the laptop was to file it in my journal. Maybe some day, I will share it with him. But honestly, I don't think I ever even want to read it again. Writing it was hard enough.

Even if the only person I completely expressed my vulnerability with was me, that is growth and change, right?

Now I've confessed it here. To everyone. And if I'm being fully transparent, it's in everything I've ever written. All my poems, all my blogposts, all my fiction.

So who am I fooling, really, other than myself?

Certainly not you, dear reader. As ever, I appreciate that you let me ramble, both here and in my stories. And I promise to continue to work on being open, vulnerable, earnest, and truthful. Even if it's hard. Even if my impulse is to wave it all away and tell you I'm fine.

What I am is healing.

What I am is a work in progress.

What I am is grateful.

And all of that is enough.

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Another One and a Headscratcher

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Cohen) — Thu, 28 Aug 2025 03:53:00 +0000

Since I wrote my last post on the absolute deluge of spammy, scammy AI generated book marketing emails, I continue to get them. Every single day. Multiple emails a day. But this one takes the cake.

First of all, there's no salutation. Just a "Hi".

Second, it's about a book I've never heard of. I didn't write Champagne at Seven! Nor did I have anything to do with its publication.

Third, I don't write "binge-worthy women's fiction."

And finally, I have no idea who Olivia Wyatt is.

Why on earth did this get sent to me?

Whatever these spammers paid for this AI email generator, they definitely overpaid.

-----------------------------------------

It's hard enough being a creative person in a mostly indifferent world. This kind of predatory crap is infuriating.

I'd hate to see any writer get conned into spending precious money chasing empty promises.

Be careful out there, people.

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Anatomy of a Scam

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Cohen) — Thu, 24 Jul 2025 01:34:00 +0000

One of two similar emails I received from the same scammer 1 day apart.

Several times a week, I get solicitations from email marketers, book bloggers, and other writing service industry people wanting my money in return for some promised promotional outcome.

Most of the time, I delete them out of hand. They are nearly always generic, clearly mail merge letters. Sometimes they will have something that tries to be personal, but that's rare.

This one was the rarest of the rare: it references the title and themes of my most recent novel. My curiosity led me to first search the internet for the company and the person. A combination of "Book Niche Alliance" and "Rachel Key" found nothing. Which got me even more curious.

So I fired up a private browser and copied/pasted the website link. That's where things got interesting. This is from their testimonials page.

If this company is good enough for John Grisham and David Baldacci, it's good enough for me...right?

Why on earth would a spammer use such well known author names/photos for such generic praise? But that wasn't my first clue. No, the first clue was a wix address. And the wix banner still over the home page.

The URL - with a ".wixsite.com" address and the banner says amateur.

Then I looked at the so-called staff looking for Rachel. And here she is...


She looks like a lovely person. Too bad she's a model in a corporate headshot gallery

Perhaps Rachel is one of a set of triplets who dress identically, because I found her in a reverse image search in a lot of other places.

How much do you want to bet none of the team members are real?

But here's the thing: the pitch was personalized and relevant to my book. The why is easy to understand - who doesn't want to be flattered by someone who seemingly read and loved your novel?

The how is a little harder. My 2 theories are:

Someone posted a review with this information in it or
(and worse/more creepy) the book was fed into a LLM and this was its summation.

The first email had this subject heading and content:

A multiverse story with emotional depth — let’s help it travel further

"We recently discovered Entangled Realities and were struck by its beautifully layered exploration of the multiverse. But what truly stayed with us was its emotional heartbeat the way it speaks to grief, displacement, and healing with such care and resonance."

From the second email, screenshotted at the top of the post:

"I recently came across your novel Litany for a Broken World while browsing visionary and metaphysical sci-fi in the Kindle Store, and I was immediately drawn to your layered, emotionally intelligent premise. A young girl lost in the multiverse, a grief-stricken doctor, a lonely seer and the convergence of their brokenness across dimensions this is the kind of story that not only entertains, but resonates on a deeply human level."

So, would I have liked this to be a real human being so deeply moved by my book? Yes. Absolutely. And indeed, I have had readers tell me how meaningful and powerful they found it. Perhaps as it wends its way into the world, others will be profoundly moved by the story. But it will have to manage without the help of the equally fictional Book Niche Alliance.

Have you received a similarly weirdly personalized pitch? Let me know!

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Five Years Ago Today

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Cohen) — Thu, 13 Mar 2025 00:22:00 +0000

Struggling green, March 2020

Five years ago this week, when a handful of cases of a new virus was making the news, my husband insisted that I pack up what I needed and take the dogs out to our farm in Central Massachusetts for an indefinite stay. I had to head out there from Boston anyway for a meeting, but I had fully intended to return home after one overnight.

That was the start of lockdown for Covid-19.

My husband - a physician - spent much of 2020 and beyond as part of a specialized team putting central lines in ICU patients hospitalized with covid. He was adamant that I not come home.

Remember, this was long before we knew that PPE would be effective in limiting transmission of Covid. Long before we understood that Covid was airborne. Certainly long before any vaccine or any kind of treatment. We lived apart for the longest stretch of time since we had been married in 1988 because he did not want to risk me being exposed to the virus.

I spent many weeks in this liminal space where the days were all the same, worried about my husband. Worried about my adult children and extended family. Isolated.

In some very profound ways that I am still not able to fully articulate, I am not the same person I was five years plus 1 day ago.

My sense of how fragile life is has sharpened. Perhaps I worry more, but I also revel in the small marvels of my world: A green shoot pushing through thawing ground, the cacophony of birds clustering at the feeders, the full moon shining through the cupola in our house, the peepers chorus in the woods, even a surprise spring snowfall.

I take more time, both for myself and others. Ironic, as I know I have fewer years left in my life than I have already lived, but not feeling pressured by ambition suddenly stretches out the minutes and the hours.

I am more patient that I once was. Is that a natural consequence of aging? I am now 61, not 'old' (whatever that means), though certainly not young. And contrary to popular wisdom, I have gotten more liberal as I've aged. More certain than ever that what will make society thrive is ensuring everyone has the basics as a matter of course: housing, medical care, education, healthy food, clean water, leisure time.

In my naivete, I had believed that the world's brush with Covid would force us to see that we survive together or not at all. That my neighbor's health and well-being directly effect mine. That hoarding - wealth, knowledge, power - makes us less secure, less well-off. That we would learn to both offer and accept help with grace.

The world we inhabit five years on is not that world.

It would be natural, easy even, to despair.

But there is no future in despair and I am at my core, too stubborn to give into it. This quote, by a Jewish sage (Rabbi Tarfon) has always been a source of hope and comfort. I've even used it as one of two epigraphs in my latest novel.

"Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world's grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly, now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it"

("Pirkei Avot" 2:16).

I will hold onto what living through 2020 taught me. I can't heal the world's grief, but I can continue to walk this path with gratitude, with compassion, with hope.

I will continue to write my strange, earnest novels, believing that the right readers will find them.

I will continue to make knitted and crocheted things for my loved ones, imbuing every garment with caring and love.

I will continue to make pottery and find joy in playing with clay.

I will continue to tend our fruit trees and plant for next autumn's harvest, sharing the bounty with our community.

None of these acts will change the world, but they will nourish and enrich me and those around me.

And if you are reading these words, I wish for you to find what strengthens and feeds you for the work to come.

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Feeling at loose ends

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Cohen) — Tue, 18 Feb 2025 19:56:00 +0000

The author, cosplaying confidence at the Boskone Book Release Party

I'm home from Boskone.

Litany For A Broken World is officially out and will take on a life of its own. There will be people who are moved by it. There will be people who don't enjoy it. And some will actively dislike it. That is the case for every piece of art, literature, music, and craft in existence.

My job as a creator is to let go of what I have made and move on to the next thing. If only this was easy.

I am feeling uncertain and restless. To be a creator is to know the curse of dissatisfaction - the more you work in your chosen space, the sharper your critical facilities get and the harder you are on your own output.

The positive aspect of this is it drives you to get better; to avoid complacency. The negative? You get so mired in self-doubt and self-loathing you are sure the work is worse than worthless.

I have been in this place before. I will most assuredly be there again. That is the dubious blessing of having completed the cycle of creative work more than once: it teaches you that it is a cycle.

What I am feeling now isn't what I will feel forever. If I allow myself to name these emotions and accept them as part of the process, it's easier for me to keep moving forward.

Today, I added 500 words to book 2 of Entangled Realities. Are they good words? I have no idea. But I showed up to do some work. A little bit of writing and some quick research. It took me several hours to even get that far. I kept working even though I felt like a fraud, or worse, a poser - a writer wanna-be.

This is my lizard-brain getting mired in fear.

This is my autonomic nervous system pushing me to fight, flee, or freeze.

But there are other options.

I can take those emotions and use them as fuel.

May you find your creative rocket-fuel today and in the days that follow.

Subscribe to BlueMusings and receive my short story collection, STRANGER WORLDS THAN THESE, as my gift.

Dealing with Vulnerability

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Cohen) — Thu, 13 Feb 2025 15:22:00 +0000

The author in her preferred state

So, I have a book out this week.

Which means I've been talking and writing and otherwise interacting with a whole lot of people in support of the release. And it's exhausting. Not just because I am -- like so many of my fellow authors -- an introvert, but because being noticed means I make myself vulnerable.

I had been prepared for the energy cost of the intense social interactions of back to back appearances: Arisia, a group reading in Brooklyn, Boskone. I had not counted on the deep fear that has come along for the ride.

Those that know me would never describe me as fearful. I've spent my life advocating and speaking out for what I believe in. If I were to pick a single word to represent my personality, it would probably be determined. (A more polite way to say stubborn, ornery, unyielding...just ask my spouse and my children.)

But fearful?

Yeah.

Give me a cause to rally around, and I am all in. Put a bully in front of me? I'm all "you shall not pass". But have me stand up and promote myself? My work? I'd rather face that Balrog.

Tomorrow, I will be traveling to Boskone in Boston and celebrating the release of LITANY FOR A BROKEN WORLD with my science fiction/fantasy community. I will need to cosplay a confident, functional adult author. All the while, my insides will be squirming and I will have to work to keep my hands from flailing around in distress. (One of the reasons I'm usually knitting at cons.)

If I didn't care so passionately about this story, it would be easy. And while I know I am not my book and my book is not me, it is still the deepest expression of my innermost self. So, in a way, it represents me. It's important to me and as an artist, I believe the work can't reach its true potential until it's experienced by the reader.

Truly, most creators I know are -- like me -- balls of anxiety wrapped in a human suit. So if you encounter me at Boskone, please be gentle. Approach as if you were nearing a feral kitten because I will be torn between wanting to flee to hide under a table and needing to be (metaphorically) petted.

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Where to Find Me: Book release edition

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Cohen) — Mon, 27 Jan 2025 20:28:00 +0000


Photo of me with one of my fellow readers, Donald Maass at Brooklyn Booze and Books	.

Two weeks from today, LITANY FOR A BROKEN WORLD will be released. (!!!!!) It's been a long road from original idea to finished novel and it doesn't quite feel real to me yet.

The work of being an author isn't only in writing the book. It also includes doing what you can to help it find its readership. But authors are notoriously shy creatures (many of us, anyway) and self-promotion is a terrifying process.

So we do what we can, hoping that the readings, the interviews, the cover art reveal, the convention panel appearances all conspire to pique a reader's curiosity.

To that end, I was a guest participant at Arisia in Boston last weekend, then took a train to NYC Tuesday morning to participate in a group reading at Barrow's Intense tasting room in Industry City in Brooklyn. The reading was to celebrate an anthology series (Of Gods and Globes) that the readers had contributed to. I had the opportunity to show off the ARC of Litany (yay!) and read a short story from volume 1 of the anthology series that I hadn't ever read aloud to an audience before. ("Perpetual Silence").

It's a story I wrote B-C (Before Covid) and one that I haven't really looked at in quite some time. I was happy to see that it held up and for 20 minutes, I was able to capture the attention of everyone in the room. (It's a powerful story. I'm so glad Past-LJ wrote it.)

I was recently a guest on Max Bowen's CityWide Bytes YouTube interviews. You can watch the short video here, where we talk about Litany and its influences.

An early review of Litany is up here, as well.

If you're going to be at Boskone this February, I'll be reading from Litany during the Broad Universe Rapid-fire Reading and participating in the Boskone Book Release party, where you can snag a copy/get your copy signed.

As a reminder, ebook pre-orders are live and print orders will be open on release day (Feb 10). If you are considering buying the book, pre-orders are really helpful for a book's visibility. If buying the book isn't in your budget, spreading the word about it and marking it as 'want to read' on Goodreads can be the boost a book needs to get noticed.

Many thanks!

Subscribe to BlueMusings and receive my short story collection, STRANGER WORLDS THAN THESE, as my gift.

Litany For A Broken World

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Cohen) — Sun, 05 Jan 2025 19:22:00 +0000

Cover* for Litany For A Broken World

After six years of work ...

After 3 (or maybe 4) false starts where I discarded 20,000 words and began again ...

After multiple crises of faith in my ability to write ...

After the help and encouragement of my family, writing friends, and communities ...

After a writing residency at the Eagle Hill School ...

After a computer meltdown and repair ...

I give you Litany For A Broken World.

A modern adult reworking of/homage to The Wizard of Oz that takes place in a Boston homeless encampment.

A young girl's disastrous first foray through the multiverse cleaves her from her family and abandons her in a homeless encampment, adrift in a world and a body not her own.

A doctor struggling with grief volunteers for the annual Boston homeless census and is confronted by the impossible and her deeply buried childhood trauma.

A lonely, disaffected seer rejected by those he seeks to help is drawn from his home by a desperate call across the world walls.

When the three strangers, each broken in some way, are drawn together in a conflict between those with the ability to travel the multiverse and the organization seeking to exploit them, they must risk everything that matters to heal the fractured places in themselves and throughout reality.

Coming February 10, 2025

Pre-orders are now live for the ebook version. (Available at all retailers). Print is forthcoming.

______________

This is the book that nearly broke me as a writer. One that wouldn't let me go once the characters took hold in my subconscious.

As frustrating as my slow writing process was over the past 6 years, I don't regret the work this book required to reach the finish line. It was an ambitious story. 6 years ago, I didn't have the skills to do it justice. None of what I wrote and discarded was ultimately wasted, even as it wasn't used in the novel. Those words, those attempts, were all part of what I needed to level up in my writing ability.

And isn't leveling up critical to the creative process? I'm not in competition with any other author or book out there in the world. I'm here to work harder and write better than my past self. To grow as a creator. To fail better in the immortal words of Samuel Beckett.

I hope I have failed better with Litany. And I will continue to work and stretch as I complete book 2 in the Entangled Realities series, Every Sky A Stranger. I'm currently just shy of the 25% mark in drafting and making good progress.

_______________

If you are a reviewer/book blogger and would like a complimentary ebook copy to review, please email me: lisa@ljcohen.net

*Cover art created by the lovely and talented Chris Howard

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What gets in the way

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Cohen) — Wed, 25 Sep 2024 15:55:00 +0000

Mya, soaking up the sun

There was a time when I was able to write 1000 words a day/5000 words a week on whatever project I was working on. I did this for years, writing a novel a year from 2004 until 2016 or thereabouts.

Somewhere, after writing and publishing A STAR IN THE VOID, the 5th and final of the Halcyone Space novels, I hit a wall. I started projects, ground to a halt, abandoned them. Every day, I would dutifully sit at my laptop, stare at a blank page, and then click away to facebook or twitter and fritter away hours. When I look back at that time, I can see that there were a number of things at play. The political landscape was such that I felt I had to be hyper-vigilant at all times just to feel any sort of control over my life. I know it doesn't make sense - immersing myself in the constant churn of news only increased my anxiety, which is not conducive to creativity.

And then covid hit. My physician spouse sent me away to our farm in Central Massachusetts while he stayed in Boston on the front lines of treating ICU patients. I was isolated and depressed. Desperately worried about my spouse's health, physical and mental. Also not conducive to creativity.

I know a lot of my writer friends were able to channel their anxiety into their work. I was not one of them.

What I did instead was a lot of yarn work - knitting and crocheting baby blankets to donate to a hospital - while watching a lot of television. When I did write, it was mainly poetry. I had an idea for a novel, but it seemed I was only able to write myself into dead ends. Several years worth of them. I think I discarded at least as many words as I kept for what became LITANY FOR A BROKEN WORLD.

Ultimately, with the help of my writing community and several zoom sessions a week of co-writing, I was able to finish the draft of LITANY after more than 5 years of struggling. That manuscript is in the hands of my editor now and I'm working on the sequel.

I'm almost ashamed to say that I'm only working on it once a week. I have a scheduled zoom write-in with Broad Universe on Tuesday mornings. When I write, the writing is going well - I have a solid sense of the conflicts in the story and a hazy view of the ending. But writing 500-1000 words a week is less than optimal. Not only because drafting the novel is going to take a long time, but also because I lose momentum and have to backtrack every time I sit down to write.

I realize my hyperfocus on wordcount in the past may have generated a lot of writing, but it wasn't great for my mental health and life balance. Writing only once a week isn't great for my sense of identity as a writer or my goals. So I need to find a middle ground.

Part of finding that balance was getting away from social media and returning to somewhat regular blogging. Sitting down to create a blogpost is the equivalent of morning pages - it primes the pump for my other writing. I've also tentatively scheduled two additional writing times in my week. I'm hoping that as I find my discipline again, it will be self reinforcing.

But life does keep intruding. The political scene is still fraught. And on a personal note, one of my dogs has a developing and as yet undiagnosed medical problem. I'm a person with very porous emotional filters. It's part of who I am and if I could change it, I'm not sure I would. But it does make it difficult to set all the external worries aside and focus. (Which is what I did for years. Until I experienced burn-out.)

So now, I'm trying another path. Where I acknowledge the outside concerns instead of cutting myself off from them, using them as fuel/energy to do creative work.

Life and art are messy. I'm not sure there's any way around that.

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When Fandom meets Craft

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Cohen) — Sun, 22 Sep 2024 21:33:00 +0000

Finished and blocked!

While I learned to knit as a child, I didn't do much with it until I rediscovered the craft in my adult life. And thanks to youtube videos and the folks who run the Handknitting Association of Iceland, I learned how to make stranded colorwork yoke sweaters in the past year or so.

The first few sweaters I made, I followed specific patterns, but then found a wonderful book about the process of creating a stranded colorwork sweater by Tin Can Knits called Strange Brew.

I decided that I was going to make a bespoke sweater for myself with motifs from my favorite fandom: Doctor Who.

A trip to Webs Yarn and I found Debby Bliss Fine Donegal - the perfect fingering weight wool and cashmere blend in the exact color I wanted: TARDIS blue. (It wasn't called that, but it should have been!)

Then it was time to design the sweater and plan the motifs. First I did a sketch.

Initial concept sketch

I have a kindle scribe which I use for a lot of purposes. It was purchased primarily so I could edit my manuscripts on it, but it's also amazing for notating/adjusting knitting patterns (you can write on pdf's) and for sketching out concepts.

Motif design for the TARDIS

Motif design for K-9

Then it was time to do some math. (Or maths as my friends across the pond say.) After making a swatch and measuring gauge (yes, it's a pain. I hate doing it. But I did it anyway.), I chose the size M/L in sock yarn as the template in the Strange Brew pattern book. That meant I knew how many stitches I had to work with around the cuffs, the waist, and the yoke, so I could layout the motifs and know how many repeats I needed to do and how many stitches I needed to put between them.

For example, the question marks were 6 stitches wide by 11 stitches high.

I had 60 stitches around the wrist to work with. That meant 6 repeats of the motif, with 4 stitches between them. (making the motif 10 stitches wide including the background color stitches.) Sleeves incorporate increases, and the overall pattern called for increasing 2 stitches each 6th round, but there's definitely wiggle room, so I did the increases before and after the question mark motif rounds without any issue.

A tip for motifs: put in stitch markers all around to mark each repeat. For the question marks, that meant every 10th stitch. That way if you make a mistake, you catch it after a single motif instead of at the end of the round.

A second tip for motifs - set the 'beginning of round' to be at the back of a shoulder to hide any jog of the pattern. You may need to use some math to figure out where the first repeat starts so your design is centered the way you want it.

The entire project took me from initial design and starting on the sleeves in January of 2024 (if you saw me at Arisia or Boskone in Boston, you might have seen me working on it) to blocking the finished sweater in September of 2024. I did a few other smaller projects in between, so maybe 6 months of actual knitting time. That's actually not bad for a sock weight yarn and size 4 needles.

I may turn this into a cardigan at some point, so I laid out the motifs so there would be a clear line down the middle to steek, but for now, I'm happy with it and will be wearing it at Arisia.

I highly recommend getting the Strange Brew book if you have any interest at all in creating your own yoked stranded colorwork sweaters. The geek in me loves to know how things work, so it was definitely something I knew I wanted in my library. Or if you have a sweater pattern that you like the fit of, you can always just use it as the template and create your own fandom designs with a little math and patience.

Closeup of the motifs during blocking

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Harvest what you plant

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Cohen) — Wed, 21 Aug 2024 13:59:00 +0000

Some of what our garden has gifted us

There's a common expression 'you reap what you sow'. While technically, it's the same as the title of this post - Harvest what you plant - it's connotation is much darker. Almost threateningly so.

I've had enough of cautionary tales.

What I'm looking for now is something to reach for, not something to run away from.

I want more possibilities, not fewer.

We have a large garden here at StarField Farm. Multiple gardens, actually. We have the large plot at the bottom of the driveway, the recently established miniature orchard, a side garden, a terraced garden, and the kitchen garden. We grow all kinds of fruit and vegetables - I like to say from asparagus to zucchini (though we didn't plant any summer squash this year. We get enough from neighbors. And yes, folks here do leave bags of zucchini on front porches). Yesterday, I harvested about half of the 60+ potatoes we planted in early spring.

pinto potatoes from a freshly pulled vine

Yes, that's a lot of potatoes. And tomatoes. And beans. And kale. And peppers. And...

We planted all of this food during still chilly days last spring. You could say gardening is an act of faith and you wouldn't be wrong. So many things need to go exactly right to harvest a crop. The correct amount of sunshine, rain, warmth, nutrient rich soil. And even then, there are pests and animals who can decimate a garden before you get a single floret of broccoli.

This year, squirrels ate every last peach from three carefully tended trees. Hundreds and hundreds of peaches gone.

Here's the thing: when you plant something - a seed, a sapling, an idea - you don't know what will come of it. You hope that there will be juicy peaches in late August, but it's a long time between February pruning and peach pies. So much can happen, mostly out of our control.

But every year, we tend the garden. Feed the soil. Nurture the seedlings. Prune the trees.

Writing stories isn't all that different. It starts underground in the fertile subconscious. The words need to be tended, weeded, protected. Sometimes the garden of ideas is orderly, other times it grows wild like a pumpkin patch. Not every story makes it to harvest and some offer amazing bounty. If gardening is an act of faith, so is creativity.

My garden feeds and sustains my body.

My writing feeds and sustains my soul.

And that is a harvest worth working toward.

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What are we?

noreply@blogger.com (Lisa Cohen) — Mon, 05 Aug 2024 01:18:00 +0000

In a series of conversations with a friend staying with me at the farm, I had this realization about what it means to be human.

We are connection seekers. We spend our lives sending out these pings into the universe, fearing and hoping for an answer. Like little satellites trapped in orbit around our own loneliness. And because we are terrified of asking for what we need and not getting it, our signals are full of static.

We are meaning makers. Desperate for it all to have a purpose, to make some kind of sense. So every interaction gets re-litigated and scrutinized for hidden clues and subtext. We obsess over what we said, how we said it, how it was received. How exhausting it all feels. But it gives us a sense of control because otherwise, isn't everything random? Chaotic?

We are story tellers. We want there to be a narrative that gives us a sense of where we are on the journey. Beginning, middle, end. There's predictability to this kind of arc. So we superimpose it over what is otherwise just a muddle of days and events.

These three essential human needs: connection, meaning, and story are what drive us to create. What is a piece of art, a song, a poem, a novel if not a way to transmit the core of who we are to someone else. It is a way to say I am here. This is what I believe. This is who I am.

I'm not sure where I'm going with all of this, but it's what bubbled up to the surface of my mind this evening.

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