First Cup of Coffee - April 2, 2019

Galleys of THE ORCHID THRONE are here! Plus a lovely note from editor Jennie. :-) I'm talking a bit about my process today - why I don't like the term "vomit draft" and how I mull the story a lot, then plug that into the flow of words.

The blog post by Vivien Jackson that I mention is here. 

Transcript

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Good morning everyone. This is Jeffy Kennedy here with my first cup of coffee. Today's Tuesday, April 2nd. And we are much springier. I'm going to go outside. I'm also doing the self-clean on my oven today. We have this really kind of nasty old oven that was here in the house when we bought it. And I actually thought it would be the first appliance to go. But no. Um we've replaced the dishwasher twice. Oh, that was the first thing to go. And uh the reason we did it twice was the first one was not a smart choice. We went to like the big box store and picked the on-sale dishwasher that I thought should have been a better one than it was, and it just never was. So when it died, I was actually pretty happy. And then we replaced the refrigerator. So now we have the pretty um, you know, brushed stainless fridge and dishwasher that kind of match. One day when I get to do my dream remodel, I'll be ready with at least the new appliances. But this stove is still this old kind of cranky stove. I mean, at least it's a ceramic top stove. Uh Megan was my friend Megan Mulray was laughing when I uh when we went to see their place. Uh she's got the um oh what do you call, you know, like the coil burner stove with the little um ceramic cover things that you could put on there, the you know, like painted with the harvest gold flowers. She was really she was like, look at these. I imagine they'll end up replacing their stove pretty soon. But anyway, so we have ours and it works fine, so you know there's no reason to shell out to replace it. But um it was gotten a bunch of stuff in there as it does over time. I don't clean it out all that often. I have friends who like wipe down their oven every time they bake or something, and it's like, no, this will never be me. So the thing is, is that David really hates it when I do the self-clean on the oven. He um he's got he's sensitive. Men, men, they're so sensitive. So it really annoys him to have that stink in the house, the smokiness. So the last time I did it was when he was out of town. It worked out well. Uh but lately he hasn't been out of town so much. So this morning he left, he had a someone call to give him a ride to the airport in Albuquerque. So I know he'll be gone at least three hours. The oven cycle is like four hours and twenty minutes. But if I play my cards right, most of the smoke will be gone from the house by the time he gets back. And then if he complains, I can say, hey, I did my best. I tried. Tried to accommodate you. But it is pretty smoky right now. I've got the windows open as much as they can be and not let the cats out. And since I don't have the screens on yet, I thought about waiting until I put the screens on, but I thought, uh, this needs to um it was one of those things like where every time we'd put something in the oven, there would be the accessory smoke, so needed to get it handled. I'm sure you're all fascinated. That was um yeah, fascinating rundown, huh? So guess what I got yesterday? I got my box of Orchid Throne arcs. Yay! Which St. Martin's calls the galleys, which I think is interesting. Uh, but they're so pretty. I posted a picture. Uh, but there's only ten. There's only ten of them. So Corrine and I will have to put our heads together on who gets those arcs. I know St. Martin's is sending out a lot to reviewers and so forth. So uh, yeah, I don't know who we will share these out to, but they're definitely going to be the precious commodity. They're interesting because this is going to be a mass market paperback size, and the galleys are um a little bit bigger than that. It's so obviously not the finished copy. I mean, it's got all that stuff on the back with the you know, where they put all the marketing information on the back and all that kind of thing. But just kind of a cool to see it. The cover looks really cool paper. I might have to mail one to Corrine. I'm very close to sending you your stuff, Corrine. Just need a few more, few more additional items to put in there. So I finished all of my revising on Fiery Citadel. I'm pretty happy with where it's at. I'm at midpoint now. So now I need to really just crank on through the finish. Um, but hopefully it will go pretty fast. I realize one reason I've been going slow is because I have been being fairly meticulous about stuff. Writing book two of a trilogy also is kind of a challenge. You really want that um midpoint hinge. Yeah, now I'm freaking myself out because now I'm thinking, oh my god, it's the midpoint of the whole trilogy, and is it a good enough hinge? Um not conducive. That's one of the things when we talk about I don't really talk in terms of fast drafting, but to some extent my method is similar to people who do do fast drafting. Um the the big difference is that a lot of people who do the the fast drafting, who say, you know, write so many words a day, you know, a whole lot of words per day, get it all on the page, and then go back and fix it. A lot of them will refer to that first draft as like the vomit draft or the first draft, which is um not I don't like that. I I think I I think you all know from listening to me over all this time, unless you're new, hi. I've had new listeners lately. I'm not sure why. Because I tempted uh someone on Twitter with the uh funny foster story. I hope it uh delivered. I still think that's funny. It's the uh unintended consequences always fascinate me. Anyway, you all know that I think it's very important how we uh frame things, how we represent them s to ourselves and to others, but you know you can't um I think you can't overestimate the effect of subconscious perception. And so for me, referring to my work in terms of vomit or shit is does not make me happy. Uh, I do not want my book to have anything to do with uh bodily um excretions that have to do with toxicity. I think that's fair. So for me, that first draft, I'm I'm lucky in that I write pretty clean. I have I'm one of those people who's pretty much a natural grammarian, um natural at punctuation. I mean, I never have understood commas, and I think I never will. Um I apparently will never get the difference between each other and one another, and lay lilaid is marginal. But other than that, I'm you know, I write pretty clean drafts. So when I put when I finish a draft, it's it's tight, it's pretty good. It's not something that I go back and do a lot of cleaning up of. Cleaning up of? Yes, that's right. So while I do pretty intensive word count compared to some authors, I don't do like some where I agonize over the composition of every sentence, though I will go back and fiddle sometimes. It's um I was listening to um well, I'm not gonna be able to think of her name. Well, somebody who talks a whole lot about intellection, and I didn't quite get her full uh definition of intellection, but she was talking about authors who feel bad that they um spend a lot of time thinking about the book and not writing it, and that they've discovered there apparently there's like this whole personality skill that they can a new test you could take. It cost $20 to take, so I didn't take it. I'm all about the free tests. I know my Myers Briggs, and and you know, and people say things at least like this skill was saying, oh, well, Myers Briggs is so confining, and I I don't find it all that confining, but then I'm an INTJ, and so that's absolutely an INTJ attitude. Um I'm amused at myself by that. So this that is apparently a much more varied, um lots more variables, and uh I don't know what all captures more nuance for those who want nuance captured. But anyway, one of the it like rates you on particular skills that you put prefer to use or ways that you operate. And one of them is what they call intellection. And like I said, I don't I didn't quite get the full definition because I think I would have to sign up for their course to get the full breakdown. Uh it's uh Vivian who is on our uh SFF7 blog. She posted about it a couple of weeks ago, so I might link to her post so that you guys can see what I'm talking about. Oh, and and this is a total aside, but with the new website being live, yay, and the stores almost live, yay! Um it's really slick the way the podcast works, because I can upload the podcast to BuzzSprout and publish it, and it pulls directly to the website, and I don't have to do anything else from there. Whereas before I used to cross-post it to the blog. And I know some of you are annoyed because now you can't comment. Uh, there's no way to comment on the podcast the way that you could comment on the blog. So I'm letting you know that we are working on this. I asked my website designer if there's a way to set up comments for the podcast. So we'll see if we can't get that running. I just yesterday managed to get into the uh composing blog section and cross-posted from the SFF7 blog on Sunday. But you know, maybe we could do a thing where on my Wednesday blog posts you all can comment on the podcasts or something. That might not be as viscerally satisfying satisfying, but I want you to be able to do that. So anyway, Vivian, why am I blinking on Vivian's last name? I mean, I could think of her book titles. I you know, I really enjoyed her books. The first one was called Wanted and Wired. Vivian Jackson. I think it's Vivian Jackson. Yeah, see, this is book brain. I'm absolutely book brain kicking in. So anyway, I'll put her the link to her post where she talked about this. But anyway, the intellection is apparently this um skill where you think about a book a whole lot, where you muse about it a whole lot and let it percolate in your brain and then write it down. And people who feel bad that they have long gaps between actually writing books, or like they're not like the writing every day doesn't work for them, discovering that they do this is a huge relief because they realize, oh well, you know, it's not that they're not working on the book. They are, they're just working on it at a different level. And I think I absolutely work this way too. It would be interesting to take the test, not for $20. Uh just to see, but I think that this is something that I do. I rem when I wrote my honors thesis in college, I talked about that I am a oh, what did I call it? Like a processor or something. And I I think about things a lot, uh, both consciously and subconsciously. I stick ideas in the back of my head and let them percolate. So when some of the people into fast drafting say things like, well, one way to draft faster is to know what you're going to write that day. And I could see that. You know, although people like me are like, ha ha ha ha ha. How do you know what you're going to write that day until you write it? But I think for me, some of that is if if I can get the intellection going, or my version of intellection, if I've been brewing the story, even if I don't consciously know what I'm going to write that day, um, I can plug into that and it will flow. And that's why we talk about um not going back and editing so much like I've been doing. I blame my editor, she kind of kicked me into that mode. And it needed to be done. It really did. So now I think I can cruise forward. But when you go back and edit, you unplug from that story flow. You you move into a different mode. So now what I need to do is really plug back into that story flow and get it going. And I think right now I have it set up for me to be done I think by Friday the 19th, which is not that many days late. I haven't told Jenny yet. Don't tell her. It's just it's a secret between you and me. Internet. I'll I'll mention it to her soon. I think I'll be able to send her most of the book by the 15th. I might even send her most of the book soon once I'm at a good stopping place. And then I'll send her the rest. So that's kind of where I'm at. Um a lot of things happened yesterday. It seemed like uh people popped up out of the woodwork, people were scheduling uh two people asked me for lunch dates, and another person, uh one of my mentees, popped up and wanted to have a video chat, and several other things happened. It was like, okay, we kicked over in April and everybody is raring to go. We're doing some things. Getting her done. And maybe one day it will be spring. The birds think it is. We're getting there. We're getting there. All right. Well, I think that's all I have to say. I'm starting to think about the books, I might as well go do book things. But I hope you all have a lovely Tuesday, and I will talk to you all on Thursday. Blog post tomorrow. Bye bye.