First Cup of Coffee - March 25, 2019

Talking about my weekend, some about my process and being a gardener. Also, how much I like Google Play music and the 2010 Robin Hood!

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SPEAKER_00 0:01

Good morning everyone. This is Jeffy Kennedy, and I'm here with my first cup of coffee. Still getting a little bit organized here. There we go. Most favorite red Starbucks cup. Although it's it's it's a neck-and-neck battle with that in the Star Trek Cup, because the Star Trek Cup is obviously super cool. Today is Monday, March 25th. I'm gonna go outside here. I don't have enough hands to do this. There we go. There we go. Come over here to this chair. David is loading up the car today because we are going to go to the lake. I'm still working on page proofs for Orchid Throne, so I'm just going to take them with me. We're going to go down to Santa Rosa, which is predicted to be very nice today. It's supposed to be in the mid-70s and not too much wind. Um it's been windy here. We have windy springs. It's part of being in the mountains, so it goes. I'm gonna adjust this mic a little bit. I get back in my pattern of carrying my coffee outside, right? We've got some finches nesting above in the portal here. Bunch of birdies in the juniper tree. Should be a nice day here, too, although the wind's supposed to pick up a little bit later. But this will be our first fishing excursion. We talked about going yesterday, but it was supposed to be really windy down at Santa Rosa, and we figured, well, that wasn't worth it. So I worked on page proofs pretty much all day yesterday. Hi, Isabella. She's out here with me. We're nice key. So it was uh yeah, a sunny weekend, which was nice, but um that wind was cold. I kept thinking it was gonna be nice enough to go outside and work in the yard, but it was a really um gusty, turbulent wind, and it was even in the walled secret garden, it was just not all that pleasant. And the gardening didn't need to get done, so I thought, eh, why am I doing this if it's not gonna be fun? So I stayed inside and I worked on those page proofs a lot. It basically involves just reading the whole book again on paper. Uh, however, because I turned in this book last July, um, and I'm like 40k into the second book. There are a lot of things I layered into that first book that I'm having to um recover, I think is a judicious term to use for that. Uh I need to um I've been making copious notes, and I need to make sure to weave those things in. It's uh it's part of the the pantser way, and I don't often use that word, I know, but um, you know, George R. Martin uses the analogy of gardening, where you plant a garden or plant the seeds and water them and nourish them and see what blossoms. Well, the thing is, is when you do that, and that's pretty much how I work too, you plant a lot of seeds. And sometimes you forget that, oh hey, there was this whole crop of California poppies over here. And and it's great because you really want the California poppies in your garden, but when you come back next season, you need to account for the fact that there's a whole bunch of California poppies in there, too. So uh in writing the second book, I was aware that I had not completely refreshed myself on all of these threads, and I knew that the timing of the page proofs would work out for that. In fact, I emailed my editor and asked her when I would get those page proofs and verified that it would work for me to um it's kind of killing two birds with one stone, since I have to go through the book in detail anyway. So in writing The Fiery Citadel, I just pretty much forged ahead and made some assumptions as I went. Um, you know, and Nora Roberts is very famous for saying that I can fix anything but the blank page. Uh and I think that I it's something I have to remind myself of as I go through and you know, write a second book without being a hundred percent sure of what I had in the first book, as far as all of those California poppies. But you you kind of take it on faith that it'll work out okay, which it always does, and also you know that you can fix it, that you can weave it in. So if I have my queen say, well, let's we can't do that because of this, you know, we can't plant a rose bush there because there's California poppies there, and then I come back later and I figure out that actually the California poppies are in a different spot, well, then I just have to adjust that. And it works out fine. Um, but I do have pages and pages of notes, and I'm kind of at that phase where I need to sink in and just mull the book, let the book fill my head and not think about much else. There's been a lot of busyness going on about the uh Rita Awards, and I posted a post to my blog yesterday to SFF 7. And David's bringing in the garbage. I'll move over here so it's not so loud. Although I think Mr. Finch was being pretty loud there, wasn't he? Come over here to this bench, the Teddy bench. Going by the fountain here that I often post pictures of.

unknown 6:41

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 6:43

So, yeah, I posted to my blog yesterday, you know, that there's a lot of concern about lack of diversity in the Redus, which I do think is a real concern. However, I think that the steps that the board has been taking to address it, and this is why I said my blog post, are going to be effective steps. It's just that it's not an instant fix. And I think people want an instant fix. Um, a lot of people I noticed that have been commenting about it are also um saying the exact same things that were said last year. And I kind of wonder if you know people are trying to remove them that this has been discussed before, and the board has been taking steps. Um but they they kind of want to present their same argument. But I've seen things with people saying that they're going to boycott the Ritas and that the contest is meaningless. And the unfortunate side of that is that the people who did final um are feeling like we we have a private loop for the finalists. Uh and especially the people who are filing them for the first time are being told that their accomplishment is meaningless, that um that they won unfairly, or that they finaled unfairly. And boy, that's that's a rough thing to do to somebody. You know, because these are all people whose books made it through five judges and scored high enough to be a finalist. Uh, one gal is um, this is her first final and also her first book. And she said that people have been telling her, Oh, it's just a popularity contest. And she says, I don't know how it can be a popularity contest when I have like 20 reviews on Amazon and nobody's heard of me before this. And she's with a small press. And and it's it's a valid point. I'm not quite sure where this mythology comes from that it's a popularity contest, because when I judge the books that I get, I don't know most of the people. Um, and even when I occasionally get a book from someone, if it's a big name author that I've heard of, I'm usually very interested to read their book to see what I think. But I don't think that that influences how I rank the book. In fact, sometimes I'm disappointed. I think, geez, you know, as famous as she is, I thought her book would be a hell of a lot better than that, or that I would like it a lot better than that. I think um, yeah, I mean, occasionally I've gotten friends' books, and you know, I've and we can recuse ourselves. We can ask to be switched out for a different book, but the contest coordinator says, Well, do you feel like you can judge this book fairly? And I I do feel like I do. I wouldn't ever give my friends a higher rank just because they're my friend. Sorry, guys. Uh I think I'm fairly objective that way. And I know that there's these theories about that, there are these cabals of people who only vote for their friends, but I'm not sure how you do that when the books are assigned to you randomly. It's not like you get to pick which books you judge. Um, also, there are people in RWA who are tremendously popular. Um kids think of a couple offhands, and I don't want to slam them, but people who are very high profile and very popular, and you know, what kind of, you know, everybody loves this person, and they've never finaled for a reader. So, I mean, I assuming that they enter their books, you don't always know who enters. But I really don't think that the uh you know, I think those people would be finaling all the time if the popularity theory was true. So I think uh that's that's my stance on the whole thing. I think that the readers need to be improved for diversity. Um I think that there's a long way to go. I think that the steps that are required for this to happen are going to take more than one year to put into place. Uh this year the board started keeping track of metrics on judges in a way that were not kept before. And some of that was the limitations of technology, and some of it was just the previous traditions. But you know, serving on the CEFOA board uh I will I can vouch that, you know, people will say, well, we want this thing to happen, and you can't always make an instantaneous change. It's just especially when it's something as uh uh systemic and deeply rooted as homophobia and racial bias. Arguably, some people who are applying these biases don't think that they are. So, you know, it just as we're having trouble making this change in society at all overall, it's not something that's gonna happen overnight. And in the meantime, I think it's important. Uh one of my friends on Twitter uh put up a tweet that I it really meant something to me, as she's an author of color too, where she said, you know, it's simultaneously possible to recognize that there's a diversity problem and celebrate the finalists. And I think that that's important. So I would encourage you guys to, when you see the finalists, give them a little pat on the back because I think a lot of them are feeling like they are not legitimately deserving of what they've accomplished. So that's that's been going on this weekend. Um the other thing is that I wanted to mention is we watched Robin Hood, the 2010 version, with Russell Crowe and Kate Blanchett. Blanchett, yeah, Blanchett, and Matthew McFadfagin, who didn't wasn't cute in this, alas. And it was directed by Ridley Scott, and we were trying to figure out why we had never even heard of this version. And we watched it, and it was good. It was really good. And I was looking up stuff on it, and apparently there was a big several big brows around it. Um the original screenplay had been vastly different. It had been a very hot screenplay, but it was a vastly different story, and really Scott got it changed. Um, it's not your traditional Robin Hood tale. People complained that Russell Crowe was too old to play the part, he was 46 at the time. And they complained that his uh English accent was bad. Apparently, he walked out of a BBC interview where they started giving him shit about his accent. Um and so the movie did not do well at the box office. And you never know what they mean by that. You know, like it only made so many millions instead of the tens of millions that they wanted. So there had been a sequel planned, but they did not do it because it did so badly at the box office, which was kind of really too bad because this movie is all kind of how Robin Hood came to be an outlaw. And then I assume the next movie would have been like all of the cool outlaw stuff. The other thing that was neat about this movie is that Alan Adale is played by Alan Doyle, who is the lead singer of Great Big Sea, um, which is a Newfoundland band that has long, long been one of my favorites. In fact, I saw them in concert uh in um what was up near Boulder, Colorado, probably in I'm gonna say like 2007, something like that. They did a great concert. I love that band. I still listen to their music. So it was great hearing his voice in it and seeing him in it. Um really good people in this movie. Uh Kate Blanchett is, of course, amazing as Maid Marion. I it was just it's an interesting what case study, I guess, in how uh bad press and the yammering of the time can really tank something that doesn't deserve to be tanked. Especially, you know, like it seems like it wasn't it didn't meet certain expectations. It's not that there was anything wrong with it, it was that people wanted it to be something different than what it was, you know, a a younger Robin, um more of the outlaw story, uh better English accent, maybe the uh original storyline, which sounds interesting but kind of confusing, where it was apparently supposed to be kind of a detective story with uh the Sheriff of Nottingham and Maid Marion working together to solve some sort of mystery, which sounds confusing to me, but you know, hey, whatever. I'm sure we would have understood if it went on, if it had gone on the way it was supposed to, but um yeah. And then the other thing I wanted to tell you guys is um I'm excited, this is kind of a silly thing, but you know, I moved, excuse me, I moved from iTunes to Google Play Music because I changed phones, because I changed to an Android phone. And one thing that I've been able to do is recover all of my music because you know I've ripped all of my CDs and all of the songs I've collected over the years were all in there, but iTunes will never, you know, was always dropping those from the library and not letting you access them because they're always trying to get you to buy things again. So I moved everything into Google Play Music, which took a little while, but was so worth the effort because they let you store up to 50,000 songs for free. And I've got something in the neighborhood of 7,000. So I have created in the past these um playlists for working out my aerobics playlist. I actually have 16 of them. I finally found my spreadsheet of them this weekend, and I recreated the first one and ran to it this morning. And it was so nice to hear that music again and to have my playlist that I've sort of set up for the different rhythms of the warm-up and the cool down. So I am just so happy with Google Playing Music. Uh, it's just unreal. I've it's been years since I haven't been able to do that because of stupid iTunes. So that was great. So this morning I am thinking all about uh okay go. Here it goes again, which seems apt for everything that's going on. And then also uh my cooldown song on that particular misk is Antya Dovecoat's Merry-go-Round. And I just love the some of the lines in that we we sing our songs to keep the hounds at bay. Great line. The night's not dark enough, the moon won't glow. So, with those ideas in mind, um go out there, say something nice to a read a finalist for me. Not me necessarily, I've got a thicker skin, and it helps having finaled once and been through it before when it was shinier. And I will talk to you all tomorrow. Hope you all have a great Monday. Bye bye.