First Cup of Coffee - October 8, 2019

Thoughts today on fixating on minor chores, preparing to travel, and working through solidifying Act 1 of this book. On my fourth opening and counting!

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Good morning everyone. This is Jeffy Kennedy, and I'm here with my first cup of coffee. Today is Tuesday, October 8th. I'm gonna head out to the front this morning. I'd like to go sit out in the Grape Arbor, milk every moment that I can, but it's um kind of a cool and damp morning. And I think I need to be over here in the sunshine. We have some clouds coming in. Dark sky said we might get rain in a few minutes. So I'm come over here. So I went down to the $18 package, and that's been great, except now for this month I've like less than an hour left. And three possible podcasts, right? Today, Thursday, and Friday. So I like did the math. I have like 56 minutes left. So I can only do like 18 hours. So I don't know if this has been a long month. I've been maybe a better podcaster kitty. Um, I think I've been talking longer too. But anyway, I'm gonna have to be a little bit careful about that. I'm also sort of um waffling on whether I'll even do a podcast Friday morning because I'm headed to Phoenix this week, weekend, with uh Minerva Spencer. She has a big signing at the Poisoned Pen in Phoenix, Arizona. And I offered to go with her because the fabulous Brantley, her husband, uh Mr. Spencer, as it were, uh, is not able to go. He needs to work. So I said I would go, so we're gonna do girls' road trip. And so I'm waffling, it's like we're gonna leave, she's gonna stay here Thursday night, and then we'll leave Friday morning for Phoenix. And I'm it's like, well, should we am I gonna blow off podcast Friday morning or should I have the celebrity guest Minerva Spencer on the podcast? I don't know. So, you know, it's like, should I reserve those precious minutes for her? I don't know. Is she worth it, you guys? Um, maybe not. Maybe not. Oh, okay, so it's actually it's a funny time of year because it's cool inside the house, but then once I came around to the east side of the house in the sun, I'm in my leggings and my cardigan, and it's just way too hot. Come on, Jackson, come back this way. Don't go there. And he goes anyway. Come here. Sorry about this, you guys. Cat wrangling, part of the brand. Yeah, you're not heading off that way. Yeah, he comes trotting back all sweet and frisky, like a cat who would never ever try to jailbreak, even though he's managed to slip his harness several times in the last few days. Now he says fine, he'll go in. I think maybe we should try the arthur, you guys. What do you think? I think uh since Jackson's going in, Isabel's out, but she can take care of herself. Let's go out back since it's not as cold as I thought it was. So I actually don't even feel like I have all that much to say today. I'm starting to uh, I wouldn't say I've got book brain, but I am starting to get more into that creative flow. Settling into writing this book. Uh passing through the passageway of doom. There we go. It's hard when I have the phone in one hand and the coffee cup in the other, having to work the doorknobs. My life is a nightmare. Oh, I've got some cosmos blooming. They came really late this year for some reason. I think they can stand a little frost, but you know they're saying it's gonna get down to 23 Thursday night, Friday morning. So that won't bother Minerva too much, though, because Taos is always colder than Santa Fe. Well, let's see, we've just got like one little choya cluster here. I'm just gonna toss that off to the side. Oh yeah, it's lovely out here. Just lovely. So, yes, I'm um I think obsessing's a strong word, but I am unreasonably fretting over bringing these plants in just because I really burgeoned this year with all of these impatience, and I'm trying to decide about where I'm going to put them, and I have to buy saucers for them, and is it worth it? And I know I'm building this up in my head to be a much bigger task than it will actually be when I just freaking do it. Um, I should probably just do it this afternoon so that way I have time to get everything sorted. I was thinking, well, I would do it Thursday afternoon, but I know I need to pick up the house for Minerva. And what did I tell you guys? My life is a nightmare. I I could really uh see in myself some of the feminine tendencies in our family to fret over minor tasks. Uh, one of my first published essays that were in Wyoming Trucks True Love and the Weather Channel is an essay called Appliances, which I wrote after going through my grandmother's calendars. My grandmother was very good about keeping calendars, paper calendars, and she would write on the calendar each day various things like the temperature and uh what was going on in her life, and she would track like how the TV was doing and how the refrigerator was doing, and the refrigerator became sort of one of those symbols in our family, both a running joke and a metaphor for so many things, because my grandmother was always convinced that the refrigerator was not working correctly, and it was working correctly, so all attempts to fix, replace, or otherwise get the refrigerator handled for her would come to nothing because there wasn't actually anything wrong with the refrigerator. Um, and she, of course, had some kind of dementia. We never did have her definitively diagnosed, you know, like Alzheimer's. Um I think even still, although that's changing, had to be diagnosed with a uh autopsy, and we did not do that. But there we definitely have a tendency to uh fixate on certain tasks, and I have discovered that one way for me not to build up the task in my head is to get it done sooner. So maybe I will bring the plants in this afternoon or at least bring some in. There's no reason. I always want to do things all at once. I always want to get a whole job complete and finished, and that's not necessary. So maybe I'll like start bringing in the impatience and figure out the saucer situation and get everything staged today and tomorrow, and that way I won't have to worry about it for Thursday before we leave. So it should be a fun girls' trip. I'm I'm feeling a little bit um like I'm being wrenched out of my nest again, especially when I'm just starting to get into the groove of drafting. But I have that this weekend, and then next weekend I have to leave on Friday again, and we have to go up to Denver, and I have to be at Mile High Con next weekend. So that should be fun anyway. Get to see some people, also get to see the grandchildren. That's my granddaughter Arrow's birthday. So I have some things to give her. So yeah, I think those things are on my mind, and otherwise, I'm just I'm still working on this first 25%, you guys. Worked on it a lot yesterday. I added a whole new scene to the beginning. Um, as I you know, I think I said I've rewritten this opening scene. I it's not even that I've rewritten the opening scene, although I have revised the opening scene like four times now, but I keep this is my fourth beginning. Um, my original beginning is now in chapter three, and I've added three beginnings in front of that now. Um, which is funny because I think most people end up uh certainly for me, very often I end up having a beginning that I end up decapitating and starting the story further in. Um there's just so much staging for this story, there's so much uh laying of the groundwork that yeah, so it goes. So it goes. Let's see. I'm trying to think of if I have much else to tell you. I mean, I really just worked on that yesterday, and I don't have a whole lot else to say. Um it feels like nothing's moving right now. There are I'm waiting on a number of things. I mean, certainly the submission. Uh Agent Sarah is not feeling well. Uh she did let me know that um I'm trying to decide if I can say this or not. No, I think it's um no, I won't say it yet. I'll I'll wait until it's public knowledge. She let me know something about one of my former editors. But otherwise, um she was out sick yesterday, and then I've been waiting on like a few other things to come in, and they're they haven't been. I feel like everyone's consumed with paying attention to politics right now. And certainly I don't often talk about them on the podcast because then I would start ranting and raving. But, you know, I think um, boy, I just feel like Trump and his ridiculous presidency, oops, politics, um, you know, has just sucked up so much of our attention for the past three years that it's just been, just been insane how much attention we have had to pay to him. I think uh, you know, I often hear people complain stuff, you know, like Americans don't talk about politics enough. I had this one friend from Spain who would mention that. She's like, how come you all never talk about politics? And and I remember thinking at the time, and I've sort of refined this opinion over time, that ideally, if things are going well, you know, you vote for the president that you want, and then you put them in office and let them take care of shit. I mean, that's why I'm not president, right? I don't want to be running the country. I don't want to be passing the laws. I do want to put people in place that will pass the laws, but I think that ideally, and I know that this comes from a place of privilege, but ideally, you know, we kind of want everything just to run so that we can lead our lives and do our thing, right? You know, we don't want to have to be out there fighting for our rights or fighting for other people's rights. You know, it's like I want everybody to have their rights and just be able to go out and um get medical treatment when they're sick and be able to get the jobs that they want and be paid fairly for their jobs and do the things that they love, and that we shouldn't have to, you know, fight for it every day. Fight people who are trying to take it away from us. I think it's it's a hard way to live because it's sort of like um, you know, basically you just want to be gathering your berries and eating your grass, and instead you're constantly protecting your group from the predators. Predators and scavengers. I feel like it's uh flattering to call some of these people predators. They just want to get fat off of everybody else. So I feel like that's consuming a whole lot of attention. There's you know more news every day, and we're certainly in this cycle of, you know, it's good for the newscasters, right? They really want people glued to what astonishing thing is going on next. And I I just don't watch news. And and David has really taken to updating me on the impeachment stuff, and I know he likes to be able to tell me stuff, and it's like, I don't, I just don't want to know. I just I I really would love to see him impeached. I think he's a criminal, and I think, and I'm not usually someone who's a whole lot of a patriot, but I think that he's betrayed our company and or company, ha ha ha. He's betrayed our country to line his own pockets, and which we knew he was going to do because that's absolutely in character. So, you know, it's like, could we just get him out of office and get some people in there who are actually interested in running the country and trying to do things for the people who live in this country? You know, you guys, I know I'm an idealist. People are always it's it's amazing to me. And I always think that I will stop being an idealist at some point in my life, but apparently not. My books are all about you know, noble rulers trying to do the right thing, and that that is how I want the world to be. So I was having this conversation yesterday with uh Kelly Robson on chat, my my daily chatte, and she was asking how the uh signing went on Saturday and so forth. And I was commenting to her that I found it very interesting that all the people that came to the signing were people from the science fiction and fantasy community. Um none of my romance people came, which I don't expect people to have to come to my signing, but it was unusual. And I don't know, an indicator of something. This book has been much more in listed on fantasy sites than romance sites overall. Um and you know, and Kelly asked me what I made of that, and I was like, I don't know. I I'm not sure what to make of it. I I often joke, and and this is a science fiction joke, and I sort of developed it in Sephwa, but um, is that I'm an exoplanet. An exoplanet is one that's sort of been caught uh in the gravity well of a solar system, and I'm an exoplanet with an erratic orbit. So I feel like I have this kind of orbit that swings in and out of romance and science fiction fantasy, and I'm part of both communities, but at different phases of my career, I'm like more on one side of the orbit than the other. And I really started out very solidly in romance and in RWA. I was a member of RWA long before I was a member of Cepwa, uh, partly because I could be. RWA, you don't have to have any publication credit to join in Cepha, you do. And I don't know, as uh my career has developed, I've moved more and more and more towards the Cepha side. And I'm not sure if part of it's being on the Cepha Board of Directors. There was a call for um RWA for people to volunteer for the ethics committee, and I was trying to decide. I was contemplating volunteering for that, but I've been trying to curb my volunteer slut inclinations. I really need to um I've been giving a lot of stuff away, and I really need to think about doing some stuff um that will bring money in. And so there we go. All right, I am closing in on 18 minutes, and I really uh want to represerve time in case we decide to podcast on Friday morning. So I'm going to call that good for today, and I'm going to go bury myself in this uh try to move this book forward with delight and gladness, god damn it. So I hope you all are able to get things done today. I hope that you are able to go out and live your lives and do your jobs without anyone getting in your way. Um, it may feel like a tepid blessing, but these days I feel like that's what you sometimes that's really what the best we can hope for, right? Or um that sounds cynical. It's it it's not a bad thing. That could be a really good thing, is to have the freedom to go live your life and do your thing. So go forth and do that, huh? And I will talk to you all um Thursday. Take care. Bye bye.