LJ Cohen

My apologies for the lateness of the May newsletter! The month definitely got away from me. And everytime I put 'write newsletter' on my to do list, it got supplanted (pun intended) by work at StarField Farm.

We 'bought the farm' (that always gives me a giggle) 5 1/2 years ago with the plan to gradually shift our lives from suburban Boston to this rural community in Central Massachusetts.

We're still in that process. Which means intense weekends spent preparing the garden plots for the season, watching the weather, and when it cooperates, PLANT!

We are basically creating a homestead farm - enough food to feed ourselves well for the season and enough to preserve (can/dehydrate/freeze/pickle/root cellar) & plenty to share.

In addition to the 3 large garden plots, with their assortment of vegetables (including perennial rhubarb & asparagus), we also have fruit trees: peach, plum, pear, apple, crabapple and berry bushes: huckleberry, blueberry, raspberry, thornless blackberry.

If you'd told me a decade or more ago that I would *willingly* be digging in the dirt & have a small farm, I would have laughed at the very thought. Me? A city girl?

Truth is definitely stranger than fiction and StarField Farm has become the home of my heart.

I'm making steady progress on the multiverse novel (Working title: A Shatter of Possibility). I'm definitely writing more slowly - even on good writing weeks - than I have in the past. I've had to make my peace with understanding that some stories just take longer than others.

As I pick my way across the climax scenes of the novel, I am starting to realize something about my process (I wrote about this in a recent blog post).

I have aphantasia. Which means I don't have a functioning mind's eye. While other writers talk about capturing in words the movie that plays in their head (??? a movie?? in your head??), I feel my characters and story from the inside out.

As I write, I experience the sensations - emotions and movement - that my characters experience. And working on highly charged scenes means that I experience all of the characters' adrenal overdrive.

It's no wonder I can only write a little at a time before needing to take a break.

I'm hopeful that I will finish the first draft by summer's end.