as small as a world and as large as alone, ljcohen: These are two of my books. FUTURE...

7:48pm May 7, 2014

These are two of my books.

FUTURE TENSE is available currently, and features a main character who is a teen about to age out of foster care, in an inner city neighborhood, with an African-American foster family. The girl who is at the center of his story is Latina.

17 year-old Matt Garrison sees the future. When he has a vision of himself hurting a girl he barely knows, he’s willing to do whatever it takes to avoid their shared, violent fate. But where can a kid in foster care go to escape from himself?

DERELICT is a month away from its release date (June 2, 2014) It’s a Science Fiction/Space opera. The main character is a female, gay, teen computer programmer. The ensemble cast is extremely diverse and multi-racial.

When Rosalen Maldonado tinkers with the derelict space ship, she doesn’t count on waking its damaged AI or having 3 stowaways on board. If the 4 teens can’t figure out how to work together, they’ll die together, victims of a computer that doesn’t realize the war ended decades before its accidental crew were even born.

First and foremost, I think they are good stories. I didn’t set out to tick off any boxes on some diversity form for authors. In each case, I had an idea for a novel and created the world around the story to be authentic to the story.For FUTURE TENSE, it didn’t make sense to me that I didn’t see any contemporary fantasy stories set in a foster care and inner city environment.

In creating DERELICT, which takes place in the space-faring future, it made no sense to me that a space station would not be racially diverse. Blame a misspent youth watching the original Star Trek, but I still have this optimistic view of the future.

And in choosing not to center either story around a primary romance narrative, but instead to show teens figuring out problems and learning to trust, first themselves, and then others, I suppose I was writing for myself as a young person, looking for role models and heroes who were defined by more than who (and if) they were dating.For that, I blame A Wrinkle in Time.

You can find links to purchase venues for any of my work on my website: http://www.ljcohen.net/novels.html

Because my work is out of step with the mainstream, my agent was unable to sell either book to publishers, so I created my own imprint to publish them. That means there is no big marketing push behind my work, and little chance it will show up on bookstores and libraries.

You can find my books on Amazon, B&N, iTunes, etc. I can also sell signed copies of the paperback directly. And ff you know of a library (public or school) that would like a copy, I would be happy to offer a library discount and free shipping.