First Cup of Coffee - May 7, 2019

Thoughts today on giving yourself vacation days, and also how not actually writing can still be working on the book. A bit about water rights in the West, too, which is all part of what we offer here, along with cats and New Mexico weather. Some updates on my schedule heading to Los Angeles this week, and Game of Thrones Season 8, Episode 4 spoilers after the 14 minute mark. 

Transcript

Copy

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Good morning everyone. This is Jeffy Kennedy. I'm here with my first cup of coffee. Particularly good batch today. And today is Tuesday, the what, the 7th of May? Yes, it's the 7th of May. The merry month of May. Uh, which means something different in certain circles for those of you who know. I don't follow some of that stuff as much as I used to. But yeah, here we are. It's kind of a cool and cloudy and rainy morning today. It's supposed to be rainy the rest of this week, the way the forecast looks. Um and I did not podcast yesterday. Is that a verb? Are we verbing that now? We kind of verbed everything without consideration. That's the era we live in, right? Um, I did not post to the podcast, record the podcast. I did not podcast yesterday. I did not do it, Sam IM, uh, because I elected to go fishing with David instead. Oh, I had a pretty late back weekend. I didn't do a whole lot over the weekend. I got um my house cleaning done pretty early on Saturday morning, which is unusual for me. But I didn't go to yoga because I'd kind of tweaked my knee and I didn't want to further tweak it. So, especially with going to conference and that I was gonna be walking around in heels and everything, because not walking around in heels is obviously not a consideration. Uh, my left knee is um my my questionable knee. I don't like to call it my bad knee. It tries, it tries very hard to be a good knee. Well, but I did uh wreck it a long time ago now, like 25 years ago. Um I tore out the reticulatum on the medial side and tried for a while to build it back up again, but then when they when I finally relented and did the surgery, it turned out that I had torn the reticulatum clean apart, and they there was nothing to build back. And then they did a lateral release and cleaned out some garbage from the knee. And in general, it does pretty well. I can do most everything on it, but every once in a while I'll catch it funny and it'll get aggravated with me and get a little inflamed. And so then the trick is to baby it. So I did not go to yoga. Got the house cleaning done before early in the day, kind of hung out and read, and I did a bunch of weeding. I think I posted a photo of my big weed pile that was satisfying to get done. And then on um Sunday, yeah, I did some business stuff and then I hung out in the sun and read. So really I did not need another day off. But David came home Sunday afternoon and was it was looking like the weather uh for Monday was going to be really gorgeous, and the fishing reports were great at Santa Rosa. And that's a it's a long-ish drive. It's an hour and a half each way. And so, and he likes having the company. He'll he'll go to Cochiti, the closer places on his own. But I knew he wanted my company, so I said, eh, I'll go. Because I thought, well, I'm leaving on Saturday for Nebula conference and abandoning him for a week. So I thought, well, it'd be nice to spend this time together. And one of the things I've reflected on on this podcast, especially with bouncing around the idea of going back, getting another day job, getting a full-time day job again to help supplement the finances. Um, which by the way, nothing has happened on yet. I've applied for two jobs at the same place, and both are still listed as open. And their policies is that they only contact you if it's like for an interview or to find out stuff. And both jobs are still lips, one of them's been listed since January. So I think clearly they are not in any huge rush to fill these positions, and I'm frankly not in any huge rush to get employed because we have a busy summer ahead. And I would like to kind of save that for later in the year if I'm going to change my life over. But anyway, one of the things I've reflected on with um being a full-time author is that I still um work an awful lot, and I don't always give myself time off the way that I would if I um worked for somebody else. It's a hazard of self-employment, and lots of people talk about that. It's um it's hard to give yourself time off. It's very interesting that way how we are our own worst bosses. So anyway, I thought, well, that's silly to worry about, you know, getting losing one writing day like that, which I do obsess about. Uh but you know, I'm still in the early stages of the fate of the Tala, and I'm gonna have a big interruption next week. So I thought, ha, I'll just go fishing with David. And no, I don't really write there. Um, I used to take my laptop, but it's it's not easy to do that, you know, like sitting in the chair even under the umbrella. I did it in the past. Uh, I did take um my notebook, which I ended up not using. And I finished reading The Mark of the Tala, and I also read a whole bunch of miscellaneous stories that I had put together over the years. Um I think it was Library Addict, reminded me that I'd put some of those up on my Patreon when I was doing that. There's a few little scenes that people ask me to write as like fun things at conferences or as guest posts for blogs. And I don't do it so much anymore because you know, Corine kind of has her list of things I do and don't want to do. I don't really do a whole lot of writing extra scenes for people's blogs anymore, simply because that was a whole lot of effort on my part, and it didn't feel necessarily like it brought in a commensurate amount of attention. I could be wrong on that. So anyway, I reread a few of those. Um, The Scene on the Beach with Rafe and Andy, that's a good one, and the Rafe origin story, which does need some tightening up, and um a little thing that Amelia from Amelia's point of view on the Feast of Miranda Feast of Morano, which I ended up using in the snows of Winderover. So that one's kind of been cannibalized, was useful. And my deleted scene between Ursula and Harlan when my editor thought I had too many sex scenes in there. What does he know? And I reread Negotiation, the prequel story that I wrote about Selena. So yeah, I've got a lot of notes now, and I've got um a better understanding of many of the threads that I established early on that I want to make sure to tie up in this book. So I can tell you that yes, there are things that are going back to Selena's story and what Selena was doing from the very beginning. Which is cool, which is fun to to re-explore. So I think um that's the other piece of writing work is to acknowledge that there are times when um reading and ruminating are good things to do. And on Sunday, that was what I was doing when I was laying around in the sun, was I was reading the mark of the Tala and making notes. So not entirely, not entirely frivolously spent. So and yesterday, no, he did not catch any fish. We think the water's still cold, although it was nice and full now at um Santa Rosa. That's on the Pecos River, which is not part of the Rio Grande system. I don't know if I mentioned, and you guys may not care, but I'm going to tell you anyway, that I did find out more about what's going on with the Rio Grande and why when we went to Abbecue Reservoir a couple of weeks ago, it was so incredibly low. I mean, you guys, it was so low that the fishing cove we normally go to not only was low, it was dry. I mean, it was like the whole thing was high and dry. Uh it was really interesting to walk around and see all of the rocks and stuff that normally was under, would be under like 10 or 20 feet of water. So anyway, I looked up some stuff. We met this ranger who fed us entirely bad information. It was kind of funny. Uh but it turns out that uh one of the water rights deals on the Rio Grande, and there are people who will tell you that the history of the West is the history of water rights, but that once the flow levels in the Rio Grande drop below a certain amount, which they have because of course we're in you know like our 10th year of or more than that of severe drought, once they drop below a certain level, then no one is allowed to hold water in any reservoir built after 1929. And Abacu Reservoir was built after 29, and so that went into effect a year ago, May. So they have not been able to hold water in Abacu for a full year now. So no wonder the thing is incredibly low. I thought that was very interesting. They've just been passing it on through, passing it on downstream, and I think cochiti is probably the same. So now we're gonna start getting runoff, and real grand will start filling again. So, but it was a lovely day at Pecos yesterday. It was um good and relaxing. We both enjoy it. So now I am going to try to um hit it hard for the next four days. I am going to try to um write during conference. We'll see how that works. I'm flying to Los Angeles on Saturday morning and kind of kicking my heels on Saturday. I'm thinking about going to go visit the Ripped Bodice bookstore. But other than that, I'm going to be pretty much hanging out at the hotel. And I think I might, since I um took yesterday off, I might try to get a full word day on Saturday. That would be kind of cool to do, huh? Um, because my friends don't get there until later afternoon. And at that point, um, Kelly Robson and Alex Della Monica will arrive and we will go to the Amanda Palmer concert that evening. So that's going to be really fun, really exciting. And Sunday we will do museums and stuff. But I'm thinking that, you know, most days I don't have a very early start, so I'm gonna try to do like a thousand words in the morning just to sort of get keep my hand in. And on Monday I have an appointment to talk to Agent Sarah because I mentioned that I sent her the proposal for the new shiny, and she really likes it. Yay! So which is good because Sarah will not say she likes something if she doesn't. She said, I like it with a couple of exclamation points, but then she wants to talk to me about how the story will unfold uh before we go, before I dive into pages, um, which doesn't surprise me because I I knew that it would not be clear where this story will go. Because of course, it's never clear where any of my stories will go. So that'll be fun. Talk to her on Monday morning, and then I get to go to the Getty Villa with Kelly and Alex, and it should be a super fun day. And Tuesday I might do beach. So I'm kind of thinking I should look in to see if I have friends in Los Angeles I should say hello to. I'm not sure who's there anymore. And so then, now that we've hit 14 minutes into the podcast, I will talk a little bit about Game of Thrones Sunday night. Um so spoilers, go away if you don't if you haven't watched it yet. Um so season eight, episode four. We only have two more episodes to go, and at this point I'm just kind of waiting for it to be done. Um, I have just not loved this season. I know other people have liked it better than I have. Although I did find someone on uh Twitter who went through and listed all of the things that were wrong with the Battle of Winterfell that I complained about too, so I felt like I fist bumped to this person. Um I don't know. I thought that episode was a hot mess. I just couldn't even. I feel like they're do they're changing the character trajectories to wind up the plot, which is something that happens a lot, especially in movies and TV. Or yeah, movies and TV, I think. You know, they want the plot to go to a certain direction, and so they have a character uh behave differently than they have all along. They give them a different motivation, and you know, now it does seem like they are really trying to make Daenerys seem power mad and crazy so that we can um be happy to see her lose the game. You know, and it's just I know that they feel like the most important thing is, as the title suggests, the Game of Thrones. Who's going to win the Iron Throne at the end? So that's why they've set it up this way. Battle of Winterfell ends with third episode. Now we're setting up Big Fight with Circe. Episode five will apparently be the whole big battle for King's Landing. Episode six will be the windup. Um, you know, and frankly, I don't care. I do not care who gets the Iron Throne at this point. If I were writing this, I would have switched it around, I would have changed up the battle for the Iron Throne and had the defeat of the Night King be the finale, because clearly the Night King is a much bigger threat. And at this point, you know, Circe with her pouty posturing, I just don't even care anymore. Um I almost don't care who sits on the Iron Throne anymore, and I think they're kind of trying to make me care, um, but I don't. And Varus telling Daenerys that he thinks that, you know, like she's doing something wrong that he'd say so, you know, and it's like, you know, Varys knew back when he went and found Daenerys and Dorn that it would come to this, you know, and now he's acting all, you know, oh, you can't do that, you know, and trying to make her seem all rapacious and terrible. Um, and before that, you know, you guys, I have been shipping Jamie and Brienne from way back, and you guys told me I was not gonna get Jamie and Brienne together, and I held out for that. And so, and I didn't even care. I was glad that they got together, but it felt so rushed. Um, it felt passionless to me, and then I mean, we had what, you know, like 20 minutes of Jamie and Brian together before they tragically break up. Um, and then of course it turns out that apparently Brian had no plan with the Night King, and that's all there was. And and Sansa just sort of gleefully breaks her word. So I don't know. I think um it's I just don't see it's just not a satisfying ending to me. And maybe I will feel differently about it later once it's done. But you know, I think this is what happens when you take the writer out of the process, you know, and the the showrunners have done a good job with the story continuing on, and and the the writers on the show have done a valiant effort, but um, I think we're so far now from where George would have taken the story, even if he said how it ends. The you know, he had such a meticulous way of laying out how one thing led to another and the inevitable consequences, so that when people died, this is I think this is a big thing. Um, you know, when people died, they always died as a result of their own errors in some way, you know. Ned Stark through his naivete. Um, I'm not gonna be able to think of his name now, you know, the Prince of Dorne through his arrogance, you know, like when he could have won that duel, but then he had to taunt just a little more, and he dies. Um Caitlin Stark and Rob Stark being killed at the Red Wedding, you know, which was you know not exactly their fault, and yet at the same time it was a consequence of of Rob's actions, of Rob making the decisions that he did. And now we're having people die, and the the major death in this episode, of course, is now mainly to. I can't think of her name. I always want to call her Melisandra, which is of course the Red Witch. Um I don't know why I do that. Min Mini Ann Melian. I can never think of it. Avnoth, the the Gow of Noth. Um now she's dead, which will motivate Grey Worm to go nuclear, which is you know, fine, that's great. But you know, she she died as a pawn, and I'm not sure that um that it would have necessarily stacked up that way otherwise. You know, like even Shay, even Shay, who was essentially a pawn, you know, she dies because she betrayed Tyrion. So anyway, I think at this point they're just sort of knocking off characters and going for same with Battle of Winterfell. It's all being done for dramatic effect rather than for sense. And there we have it. And I've been talking too long. So now I shall get back to work, and I hope you all have a fabulous Tuesday, and I shall talk to you all. I don't know, maybe tomorrow. Maybe tomorrow, maybe Thursday. Bye bye.