LJ Cohen

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I was a big Farscape fan when the series originally premiered in 1999 and I was thrilled when it showed up on Amazon Prime. In starting my rewatch, I am amazed that this show was produced 20 years ago. Just on look and feel alone, the effects hold up. Partly that's because the aliens aren't CGI, but either makeup/prosthetics or Henson puppets. But that's not all that still works in this show.

The characters and the storylines are still fresh. In a lot of ways, Farscape subverted gender expectations in ways even shows produced now don't succeed as well at. The ensemble cast still delights me, 20 years later.

I'm a sucker for the unlikely allies trope, which was at the heart of my Halcyone Space series. 

Were you a Farscape fan, back in the day? Have you started watching it for the first time? Let me know what you think. And if you have a book/series/movie recommendation about a group of misfits thrown together to save the day, please share it with me!

I'm taking this summer to refill the creative well and plan on spending a great deal of it reading for pleasure, which is something that definitely gets backburnered when I'm in the thick of writing. After beating myself up six ways from Sunday for not completing a new novel this year, I've come to understand that there's a natural rhythm to creativity and that the fallow times are as important as the active working times. 

I know some of you found your way on my newsletter distribution list through a giveaway. Thank you for staying! I'm part of 2 different giveaways this month, one for DERELICT -- the 1st book in my Halcyone Space science fiction series. The other is for THE BETWEEN -- book 1 of the Changeling's Choice fantasy series. 

Each of these are a good entry point into my written work, and while the first is 'shelved' as Science Fiction and the second as 'Fantasy', I'm certain that readers will see more similarities than differences in the core themes of the work.

Spoiler Alert: Nearly all my work contains themes of found family, unlikely allies, and learning to trust.

And if you've already read both DERELICT and THE BETWEEN, there are other stories in each of these giveaways by other authors to discover. 

I know I usually recommend books in my favorite genres: science fiction, fantasy, magic realism, and thrillers. But this time, I'm recommending a non-fiction book that's been available for some time, but I only recently read.

It's KITCHEN CONFIDENTIAL by Anthony Bourdain.

I have been a fan of Bordain's work for some time and Parts Unknown - his part cooking, part political, part cultural deep dive show - was something my family enjoyed watching together. 

I have done some international traveling (and hope to do more), including to places most Western tourists don't typically get to, and have long understood that culture is very much carried in the food. 

He died just about a year ago and it was one of the few celebrity deaths that hit me in a personal way. I'm still not exactly sure why.

The book is a wild ride through the inner workings of restaurants, but is also along the way, a glimpse of a fragile, driven man utterly in love with the world of food.