First Cup of Coffee - September 9, 2019

Talking about Elizabeth Gilbert's BIG MAGIC, a bit on genre-dissing and the ubiquitous descriptor "churn," and my magical drive on Saturday. Also about the Love in Panels RAICES benefit auction!

My RAICES auction link is here: https://www.32auctions.com/organizations/55109/auctions/68631/auction_items/1891379  Please share! 

Transcript

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Good morning everyone. This is Jeffy Kennedy. I'm here with my first cup of coffee. Still assembling it actually here. Pour out the phone. Today is Monday, September 9th. I even looked at the date before I logged on to voice recorder. And then I had to pause anyway. The timelessness, the timelessness. Alright, there we go. Let's have a sip. Oh. So tasty. So tasty and delicious. Okay. Let's head out for the passageway of doom. See what pack rett has wrought overnight. So I ended up not coming out here Friday afternoon to clean up because I realized I was going to be gone all day Saturday down to Albuquerque. And I thought, well, what's the point of cleaning it up? Oh, she was busy. Look at that. She did a lot. Okay. So I thought, okay, well, I would just come out here on a Sunday and have it cleaned up for morning. That way I'd let her assemble all of her ammunition. And I did put it all in a sack. But she came up with plenty more. But I've got my sack out here, and I'm just gonna start putting it in there. But she did a lot more overnight than I expected, the industrious little thing. But she cannot win. As I recall, she gets more intense in her efforts towards fall. I think that she has this idea that she's going to make the patio table into a vast pack rat den. If only she could pile up enough stuff. Pretty funny. So I've been busy so far this morning already, um, sticking with my thing of doing a little bit of work before I do the podcast. Soon I will be able to get back to drafting, and that will be nice. Um Troy Burr sticking to my glove. Sorry for the noise while I open up this bag a bit more. Okay. Uh I did, I've been doing some every morning doing interview questions and guest posts for Orchid Throne promo. So doing a lot of interview questions for people I haven't done before, and they come to St. Martin's. So Corrine has been pretty good. Assistant Corrine has been pretty good all this time about kind of screening out interview questions unless people ask me stuff that's related to the book, which I know makes it harder for the blogger. Um, but the the standard interview questions just get hard to answer after a while. So there was one I opened up and I had to put away because the answers were, I don't know, I didn't have the I wasn't in the right headspace to answer those. So I did another set and they asked me about um dreamcasting the book. For those not familiar with the concept, dreamcasting is when you pick out if you got to cast the movie adaptation or the HBO mini-series of your book, who would you cast? Which a lot of people find really fun. And it's not that I don't find it fun, I find it difficult. I find it difficult for a couple of reasons. One, I think casting people are amazing. I don't know how they go from character to actor. Because for me, you know, it's um I don't know, the characters feel like such real people to me that's hard for me to translate them to what kind of actor would play them. Uh also I worry about skewing old because especially for the the heroes, for the men, so that didn't take too long to clean up. Um the men that I find heroic and sexy and attractive, uh, the younger women think of as like fathers and grandfathers, which is understandable, but it's a it's a funny thing. So so I texted Agent Sarah, one of her many jobs, where I thought she might have some ideas because Sarah's younger than I am, and asked her for ideas. And one of her ideas was Tom Hardy, and I was like, Well, isn't Tom Hardy too old? And she said, Who cares? He's he's got the rugged thing going and it doesn't matter. And I was like, Oh, okay, well, so maybe I'm wrong. So I said, Well, what about Richard Armitage? And she was like, Eh. And so it's like I know that Richard Armitage totally went into like boring granddad territory for her. It was kind of an amusing conversation. But um she had some great suggestions, and I ended up I nearly picked Sophie Turner for Leah. Um Sarah hit on that, and I was like, oh yeah, Sophie Turner is perfect. But I still wasn't happy with any of the choices for the hero for Khan. And they were all a little bit too pretty, boy, for me. And maybe that's me being old. But uh or being older, right? Uh yeah, some of these younger guys just looked. Tom Hardy has never done it for me. I know that's just um anathema for a lot of people, but he's just never had the zine for me, so I didn't really want to pick him. And some of these younger guys that she suggested, yeah, they were a little too pretty, boy. Um yeah. So, and then I realized that that too that one of my huge inspirations for the story, someone who I had you know envisioned in some ways or had fed into it, um, was Kit Harrington, who played Jon Snow in Game of Thrones. So I thought, okay, I really want to put down Kit Harrington for Khan. He's about the right age, and he's got that swarthiness. I wanted this more swarthy complexion too. And he's not a pretty boy, he's got that um tougher look to him. But then I thought, well, it would be weird to put him with Sophie Tur Turner because uh Jon Snow and Sansa are brother and sister, and it just isn't romantic anymore. Uh or not romantic, so yeah, I felt like I couldn't um put them together. Mm-hmm. A lot of times the um El Dorado fire and rescue will get called out for stuff on the interstate or if they need them in town, there's something big going on. Uh so then I went back to another of Sarah's suggestions, which is Margot Robbie. And I think um Margot Robbie would be a really interesting choice. So now I'm invested in this because I would really love to see Margot Robbie and Kit Harrington play Leah and Khan. Margot Robbie has that delicate prettiness, but she's also got um, I don't know, she's got that steely core. She can play really tough. I loved the way she did Harley Quinn. So yeah, I think actually she would do an awesome job of it. So, so there we were with the dream casting. And now I'm going to get to work on this final polish of Fiery Crown. Get that sent in. I see I need to clean out the hummingbird feeder too. Should probably put that on my list for today. But I had a good weekend. Um, Saturday I went down and gave a talk for Southwest Writers with Robin Perini. Robin's in Lyra with me, and we gave a talk on romance tropes, adding romance tropes to your work. And the gal who brought us in was super happy with what we did. So that's always nice. Uh, she said that we exactly nailed what she wanted. The Southwest writers is like all genres, so we kept it pretty general on you know, romance reader expectations and tropes, guidelines, and so forth. And then afterwards, I had lunch with um Jim Sorensen and Sage Walker at Roots in Tierras. Um, a little farm to table place a little bit outside of Albuquerque on the um eastern side of the city, sort of heading up into uh the sort of flank of Sandia, I guess would be one way to put it. And so we sat out on the porch and we had good conversations. And then I, because I was at that point, I drove home a different way. I didn't go back into Albuquerque and up the interstate. Instead, I came back on this back highway from Tierras through uh the area that's called Sandia Peak and then through Madrid. It is Madrid, not Madrid. Um Madrid and up the back way to El Dorado through Glorieta. Um not through Glorieta, sorry, through Galastale, little towns, little backways. Um, all pretty nice area though. Some really beautiful spreads back in there, a beautiful landscape. They call that road, part of it the turquoise trail from way back. Uh and I had I was driving the Jag, I had the convertible, so that was really lovely having the top down. Uh, and it was well I started back around three in the afternoon, I guess. So that's when our thunderstorms are gathering. So there were thunderstorms kind of all around me on the drive back. And in many places on the little two-lane highway, it had been raining hard, and you could smell the petrachor in the air and uh rain and the ozone. But I never there were occasional drops, but I never got rained on, so I never had to put the top up, though I could see all rain all around me in different places and lightning around me in different places. So it was very dramatic drive back. And it was nice time. It was um, it's a little bit longer, it takes a little longer to go that way, but definitely worth it, kind of in keeping with what I was talking about on Friday, with um not being in such a damn rush all the time. Uh something I have to remind myself of. Don't always need to hurry back, so it was nice. I had I'd actually never been on that full road before. I'd gone from the back way from El Dorado to Madrid before. Madrid's kind of a fun, funky little town. Um a lot of artist stuff there. But I hadn't ever done the piece from Madrid on to Albuquerque because I'm just always in too much of a hurry, I guess. So that was um that was neat, neat to see, uh, nice to have that time. And I was listening to Elizabeth Gilbert's Big Magic, which was some of you may recall a while back, I had like one Audible credit that I needed to use up, and I'd asked for recommendations, and so that was one of the recommendations, and I went with it obviously. Part of the reason is it's because on audiobooks I'm finding that I don't love listening to fiction on audio. I think my mind drifts too much. I start drifting into my own stories. For some reason, it's just too much of a different mechanism than if I'm reading. I yeah, my mind stays focused on the story when I'm reading, either on paper or Kindle, in a way that it does not when I'm listening on audio. I'm not sure what the deal is. But nonfiction is much easier for me to pay attention to on audio. Maybe I'm just trained, you know, like from school and college and grad school and all of that, of listening to lectures. So Elizabeth Gilbert is reading her book, Big Magic, which I enjoy too. I enjoy hearing her audio narration. I would love to do my own audio narration someday, but I think I could only do it very well with nonfiction. I feel like my um fiction narration is not as good as many audiobook narrators. Though I'm tempted, I I'm tempted to record my own books just because it's so freaking expensive to pay an audiobook narrator. I'd kind of like to start getting some of mine onto audio. Maybe starting with some of the novellas or something. I've thought about reading them here on the podcast. I would definitely like to do that, but I need to um I need to get good at doing it. So torn, so torn. Um, now I'm thinking about audiobook costs, but I'm not going to go off on that tangent. Listening to Elizabeth Gilbert read Big Magic. I like Elizabeth Gilbert. She tends to be a little back and forth for me. Um maybe it's because I don't completely love everything she has to say. She has these wonderful gems that I glom onto and that make it totally worth it, but other things I just don't quite understand or don't quite empathize with, maybe would be a better word. And also it annoys me that she disses genre books. You know, I mean, what is it with these lit fiction people that they feel compelled to sort of casually dismiss genre fiction? And she did it a couple times. She, and I'm just like a third of the way through, but she said something about, she's telling this very interesting story about uh she and uh Anne Patchett, who, and Anne Pachett's one of my all-time favorite authors. I think she's amazing. Anne Pachett getting essentially the same story idea, and Anne Patchett ended up writing it, which became the book State of Wonder. As soon as Elizabeth Gilbert started talking about that she had tried to write this book, I knew, I was like, wow, didn't Anne Pachett write that book? And it turned out yes. And and it's a wonder it's a really neat story, and it is really well worth listening to about how two different authors got the idea for the same story without ever discussing it with each other. And it's about how ideas are alive in the world. And I and I do think that that happens, and I so I think that that's um it's it's neat to listen to for that reason. But when she's describing this storyline, she says she's going on about how this is such an unique storyline that it's not something that would be that it makes um you know, back up, Jeffy, think about how you want to phrase this. That it is such a unique and unusual storyline that you would not expect it to be easily occur in multiple places. And she says, after all, it's not a vampire novel. So, you know, clearly she used one other novel too, but that was the genre I tweaked to, of course. Um so apparently a vampire novel is an easily replicated plot that many people will use. And then later on, when she's talking about Harper Lee and how Harper Lee never wrote anything after to kill a mockingbird, and she talks about competing with yourself, and that's also really valuable, you know, about the idea that you need to top yourself and talking about some of her own struggles after the success of Eat Love Prey. And so that's very valuable too. I really enjoyed hearing her talk about that. But then she said about Harper Lee that she wished that she had just written something, anything, not tried to top herself, but that she had uh, if only she had dashed off five, uh churned out, she used that word churn. I always hate it when writers dismissively use the word churn, churned out five uh cheap and ev easy novels after to kill a mockingbird, and you know, that way she may have continued to write, and one of them is a light romance, and it's like, oh yeah, yeah, um it's really easy to churn out a light romance. Um something that in romance we talk about a lot is that easy reading is hard writing, it's it is not easy to write a light romance. And I you know, these people who you know talk about, you know, like Elizabeth Gilbert talking about, you know, struggling with her Amazon book and doing research for a year and everything, it's like I suppose the take-home message is your creative model is not my creative model. And somebody who writes quickly very often is tapping into the big magic. You know, you're you're getting that from another place. And I've I've I've talked about this often that correlating quality of work with a slow speed or with difficulty is is false. It's a false correlation. So I wish that she had resisted this cavalier dismissal of other types of stories. But those are the waters she swims in, so it's not surprising. And I will keep listening because I do think it's a very useful book for um really for anyone, you know, thinking about life and creativity and how ideas come to you and how you connect with the world. So that's always my back and forth with Elizabeth Gilbert, is that she says these wonderful things that I get a lot of out of, but then it's it's sort of like she has this divinity and humanity together, and the divinity is truly divine, and you know, she's amazing, and then her humanity just has me kind of gnashing my teeth. So there we are. So I'm going to get busy today, and uh hope you all have a wonderful week that this Monday kicks off a lovely week of accomplishments, that you get to read some good books. Oh, oh, I almost forgot. I have to, and I was even going to use this as my photo today. Uh, I'm participating in the races, the auction to benefit races, uh, which Love and Panels is sponsoring. So I'm offering a first chapter synopsis critique along with uh genre analysis. In other words, I'll help you figure out what to pitch the book as is it urban fantasy or contemporary fantasy or paranormal romance or what have you. Uh so please spread the word on that. I really feel like um races, that's the acronym, R A I C E S. Uh, these are the lawyers helping people stuck at the border in internment camps. They're really doing noble work. So uh please spread the word on that. I will put a link in the podcast uh description there, and I'll put it up in other places too. But I would, it's a cause I really believe in, so I was happy to jump in kind of at the last moment and offer that. So, all right. Go out there, do good work. I'll talk to you all later. Take care. Bye bye.