Award-winning and best-selling author of fantasy and romance, Jeffe Kennedy shares her first cup of coffee of the day with listeners, giving a daily insight into the realities of being a career author.
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I'm muzzy headed from being head-down in THE FIERY CITADEL - which is going well for me, but very badly for my characters - but also reporting on my walking desk outcome.
Good morning everyone. This is Jeffy Kennedy. I think it was my first cup of coffee. Today is Thursday, April 11th. It feels longer in April than this to me. But I think that's because I've been writing so much. Time flies. Time flies when you're writing a lot. It kind of does, you know. I end up sort of being in this haze of partly in this world, partly in another. A friend asked me this morning, she got online and asked me how I was doing, and all I could think of was how my characters are doing, which is not well at all. I got made it through the Act II climax last night or yesterday, which I kind of knew was coming. Um an idea of what was gonna happen. Uh and it was um very emotional. Yeah, my uh hero and heroine made some pretty bad mistakes. And and it's interesting, you know, it's always tempting to tie them into their personal flaws, which I think there is something to that. But also, um, you know, they just couldn't know. They couldn't know how things would go. I always think of that line of Picards, which I know was borrowed from elsewhere, but you know, that it's uh possible to do everything right and still lose. They didn't do any everything right, but so things are going very badly. It's um probably the black moment of the whole trilogy. So I'm yeah, it's like you know, people ask me how I am, I'm like, forget me, let me tell you about these poor people. That's probably why writers are have a reputation for being kind of crazy, right? I don't hear voices in my head so so much, but there's definitely a blurring of worlds. You know how like when you're not sure if something really happened or if you dreamed it, that's kind of how it feels. That's uh occurred so vividly in my imagination that um it does feel real pretty devastating. And I'm back inside because it's winter again. Winter forever. Uh we had that um big storm came through Colorado yesterday, which is the state north of us. And uh uh we got all we didn't get much snow. The mountains got some snow, but we had the you know hugely high winds, like you know, like sustained winds of 30, 40 miles an hour with 70 mile an hour gusts, and it was um, yeah, it was it was windy. They warned us it was coming, and by golly, it did did blow. Um so and it brought a lot of cool and damp with it. We're supposed to get a little snow the next few days. Just gonna be a cold spring. That's all there is to it. I'm hoping for a gorgeous summer. We've paid our dues. Uh, for those following along on the treadmill saga, my treadmill repair guy came yesterday, drove up from Albuquerque, and I'm kind of wondering if I'm making wrestling noises on his microphone. I want to drop the this is very bad. I dropped a little fuzzy thing that buffers the sound, and it went under the treadmill. So I'm gonna look there he goes. Alright. That's what I get from that, right? Move it up to here. Here's that. Probably you guys were fine all along, and you're like, Jeffy, just quit screwing around with the microphone. So, anyway, repair guy came. He was very nice, very pleasant. And I had the brand new motor, and so he starts listening to my ominous clanking noises, and so it turns out that it's not my motor. He's like, Well, if it had been the motor, we would have been in good shape. But it turns out that it's my rear roller, which is uh he says pretty much shredded. Um and so unfortunately that means that he would have to order the roller and then come back. So his visit was $175, which I knew about. And if it had, he's like, oh, you know, if it had been the motor, I could have just done that and cleaned this all up for you, and then we would have been golden. But since it's not, he said they would give me a discount on the return visit, um, which would be $100 just to come up and install the roller and get the thing cleaned up. Um, and the roller would be $150. So for those of you doing the math at home, we're at $275, $325, $425, and then some tax on top of that. Um to replace the treadmill entirely is $650, uh, including shipping. Including tax and shipping, $650 total. So he was he was saying, you know, I'm not gonna tell you what to do. He said, I'm happy to replace this roller for you and all of that. And he said, but the thing is, is he said, this treadmill is showing a lot of wear. And he says, Do you walk on this a lot? And I said, Well, I walk about 10 miles a day, and he goes, Oh, and he says, Okay, I don't want to call you abnormal, which made me laugh. I was like, Okay, yeah, maybe I'm abnormal. But he was showing me how there's like a little bow in the middle of where I walk, and that the belt is showing, the belt itself is showing a lot of wear, and the surface underneath is showing wear. And he said that I'm probably not lubricating it enough. And I said, Well, I'm lubricating it once a month, like they told me. And he said, Yeah, but you're again, he's like, I don't want to call you abnormal. He said, I think you should do it by miles instead. He said, I think you should lubricate every 250 miles. Um, he said, maybe every 200 miles, and he and he did show me how to uh really thoroughly lubricate it, which was more than I had been doing, and how to test that's lubricated enough. But he said he could feel under there the wear from where it hadn't been lubricated enough. And then he said, but the the other thing was is that I should probably just figure on replacing my treadmill about every three years. You know, and he said, you know, you use it every day. He says it's not like you're using it as an expensive towel rack like a lot of people do. And you know, he said, I think you're just gonna have to figure on investing it. And he says, Really, that's not that much money considering how much you use it. So I thought those were good points. And he told me to keep the motor that they'd sent me, and he showed me how to pull out the uh little electronic panel that's still good in this one, and he said, pull that out and keep it, and he said that way you have those parts in case something goes on the blank with the new one. So I thought that was good advice, and so that's where we are. It would have been nice to not pay the 175, but so it goes, right? It's um and I did learn a lot. I mean, he did take his time and showed me things, so uh an expensive lesson, but it sounds like uh the amount that I walk and use it, that's just um what I'm gonna have to figure on investing in, which makes sense. That's fine. It's only money, right? Um, we're very close to the website store going live. Uh Corine is working furiously on uploading books, and then we're going to try to do the test. Um, we haven't completely hammered out hammered out how we're going to do the test, but we'll get this going soon. Uh so watch for that. And oh well. Yeah, okay. All I can tell you is about the terrible things that are happening to my characters. Um, I'm trying to think if I have any other news. And I guess I just don't. So it'll be a short podcast today. Um sorry I didn't vlog yesterday, but I ended up not even getting my full 3500 yesterday just because of dealing with treadmill guy and all of that. So treadmill guy and various other interruptions. But I I wonder if I would have anyway, because it really did take a lot out of me to get to that Act Two climax. I don't know why that is. I know it makes no sense at all, but I was really drained. I'm noticing from sitting here that the pin on my shelf holding my arena award is looking. Oh no, it's alright. It was just my angle. It was like, haha, we can't risk my wonderful award um falling. Endanger award. Alright, well, I will talk to you all tomorrow, and maybe I'll be a little less muzzy headed. Hope you all have a lovely Thursday. And all of those wonderful things. Talk to you later.
