First Cup of Coffee - November 7, 2019

#PantsNaNoWriMo day 7: The magic trick of square brackets, also evaluating opportunities - and opportunity cost.

L. Penelope's podcast is here: https://lpenelope.com/2019/11/running-uphill-my-imaginary-friends-episode-39/

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Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:01

Good morning everyone. This is Jeffy Kennedy, and I'm here with my first cup of coffee. Doing mute podcast this morning. Heading in for writer coffee. The uh fog over the mountains is really just extraordinary this morning, kind of wrapped lovingly around it. I'd like to be able to get a photo of it, but I'm not sure that I can get to it very well. Maybe if I can get one, I'll pull over and snap it for you all to see. We had um quite a lot of rain yesterday, which is nice. Oh, and I should say that today is um Thursday, November 7th. So yeah, we had nice rain yesterday. It's been cool. It's not freezing, so we're just getting rain instead of snow. And it's supposed to be pretty overcast and rainy again today. Good riding weather. I think that would be as much as I think it would be cool to live in the Caribbean or a place like that, uh, I'm not sure that I could. I suppose I get rainy enough weather. There's definitely something to living in a temperate climate of being able to cozy in and enjoy the snugness of being in the warm while it's cool and rainy outside. Fog. Although I couldn't do it all the time either. Um those of you who are following me back when we spent a few weeks in Ireland in August, boy, I just um cannot do that all the time rain and clouds. Just doesn't work for me. I like the shift. And Santa Fe is wonderful because we really do get all four seasons here. And that's definitely I don't know, that just works for me. Works for my particular mindset, I suppose. I'm watching the fog on the mountains looking for the ideal spot to get a photo. We buy try it from old Las Vegas Highway. Hopefully, hopefully I won't be too close at that point. For those of you who are listening in for the daily NanoRimo tips, I know that you're out there because the listeners have number of listeners and downloads has gone up. So hi, that's very nice. I hope that this is helpful to you. So today I'm just going to have a a short tip for you. Um, and that's to I use square brackets when I need to fill something in so that I don't break up the flow of what I'm writing. So what and I did that this morning. I got a little over a thousand words this morning in my first hour. So I'm happy about that. But there were a couple of places where I had to put in something that's like either from previous in the books, in the series, or that I just can't think of a word that I want right at that moment, and I will put it into square brackets. So, like this morning, I said um that put Desnarian curse in square brackets, and then later I can go back and I can search for the square brackets, and that makes it easy for me to find the things that I need to fill in. Very often, by the time I'm done drafting a document, drafting a book, I will have in the neighborhood of a hundred square brackets to resolve. Sometimes it's naming characters, especially secondary characters. I haven't decided what I'm going to name them, and I don't feel like it's all that critical to my understanding of their character. So I'll just like I know that I have in there right now teacher, like whoever the teacher for the kids is, just have her in square brackets. I have like I put square bracket teacher then square bracket, right? So I'm not a fan of doing like insert sex scene here, which I know many authors do. No, Dorinda Jones does that. Still looking for a good spot to take a photo. Um, you know, all through here there are the telephone lines are not buried, or the electric lines are not buried. I guess telephone lines, that's dating me, isn't it? Most of them aren't telephone lines, are they anymore? Or they're co-opted telephone lines. Oh, my neighborhood, they're mostly buried, but there's um a long chain of them here all along old Las Vegas, which would interfere with my photography. Although this is a pretty view right here of the fog. So, yeah, I the reason I don't like insert sex scene here is because it gets in the way of character development. It goes back to this thing where I've talked about with you know, pantsing a book that I believe you have to go from beginning to end and tell the story, the way a story unfolds, the way that you read it. I think it works best that way. And so if you do an insert or if you write scenes separately, I feel like then you have to do a lot of knitting together later. So, and maybe that's works for some people, you know, on your process, right? So if that is your process, you can do that. I know that um Dorinda Jones, she does the insert sex scene here, which she confessed that to me, I was I had to give her a lot of shit for it, but that's part of my job as a friend. So I think in the end, it's better to do a square bracket and insert than to stop. I think you know, keeping the flow going is the most important thing. So, you know, instead of stopping and going and looking up whatever Desnerian curse might fit, I just put it in the square brackets and kept going, and I got that nice flow. Alright, I think I've probably belabored that point. And I'm gonna try to get the photo on the way back because yours just hasn't been now. My good view is I've passed that. Oh well. I also didn't want to try stopping and untangling the microphone from my seatbelt, so there's that. So I was listening to Leslie Patel Leslie Penelope's podcast yesterday, my imaginary friends. She just podcasts once a week, but I have to wait till I'm like, I pretty much just listen in my car, and I'm not in my car all that often. But I always enjoy hearing her insights on writing life. But she was talking about an interesting thing about taking advantage of opportunities, and um she referenced somebody's I can't remember who, but I'll link to the show in my show notes. Uh yeah, some somebody's maxim, I guess, which is that everything should either be a hell yeah or a no. So if you're offered an opportunity, if you don't feel the hell yeah, then it should be a no. And she was musing over that, and it and it's an interesting question because as she said, there's not a lot of room for nuance in that. Because there there is a big difference between there, I would say there are probably not a lot of things that I do that I respond with a hell yeah. Um yeah. I I was trying to think of how often. I suppose there are. There are occasionally those things where you know someone says, you know, like when Grace asked me if I wanted to do an anthology with her, when Thea Harrison asked me, actually, even when Thea Harrison asked me if I wanted to do an anthology with her, even though my initial feeling was hell yeah, my answer was I really can't because I had made another commitment to Grace, actually. And then I mentioned it to Grace, and Grace was all hell yeah, and she said, Let's rearrange our plans and do that with Yeah, because that's an awesome opportunity. Those are the nuances, but I totally get where Leslie is coming from on this, especially since she's at an earlier stage in her career and than where I'm at. And she's I understand that feeling very well and remember it very well that every time you are invited to go to a conference or do a thing, you feel like you have to grab onto every opportunity because part of it's because before you get to that stage of your career, there are so few opportunities, you know. And and I see writers saying things like, you know, they'll they'll post saying, How do I get invited to this conference? And I was thinking, how do I get them to stop sending me emails? You know, it's it's a very different perspective. So when you don't have opportunities, when you're waiting and waiting for people to send you, you know, to open the doors to you, you know, when you're waiting for those doors to open and then they start to open, and you get those opportunities that you were denied for so long, then you feel like, yeah, that you absolutely have to dive in there and take advantage of them. This person in front of me was going very slowly, and now that I can pass them, they speed up. They were happy to go slow when they could block me. People are so funny that way. Oh no, and this person just turned left in front of me, and now they're going slowly. There you go. That's that's better. Okay, so you know, it wouldn't be the commute podcast without a little bit of yelling at other drivers, right? So, yeah, I think I've always been interested in the idea of opportunity cost, and I think that that's a good way to weigh that kind of nuance because yes, opportunities are precious and important, and you don't want to ignore them, pass them by, let them go easily. I think they all deserve, you know, maybe that kind of initial gratitude to the universe, which obviously I wasn't showing when I'm thinking about, you know, like how do I get them to stop emailing me? And I need to be better about that because I do need to be grateful that I receive opportunities, all opportunities are valuable to a greater or lesser extent, however, opportunities also come with a cost. There's always some kind of opportunity cost, whether you know, like even if you are offered to be a keynote speaker at a conference where they are going to pay you an honorarium and pay your travel, and you will have wonderful opportunities to meet with new readers and do all of these great things, you still have the cost of losing that writing time, which for a writer is something that cannot be. I'm trying to think, is it overestimated or underestimated? It cannot be overestimated, maybe. Certainly for me, as someone who writes five days a week and plans on that pretty heavily. Not everybody does that. There are people who take months off between books. I can't afford to do that. Not if I want to pay the mortgage, which I do want to pay the mortgage because I like my house. So for me, if I take time off to go to a conference, there is not only the lost time of being at the conference when I'm not writing, but then there's also the attention that I put into going to the conference. So, you know, like the day or two before I leave, I'm thinking about being at the conference, and I'm thinking about what I need to do to prepare for that. When I am at the conference, I maybe can write sometimes, maybe not. It's not what I would do while I'm at home. So that's something to be figured in. When I am when I get home, then there is still a ramp up time. It gets me out of my routine. And I think there is something to the you know, the building up of a consistent routine is very important for a good writing habit and for maintaining that flow. Um, maybe especially writing the way I write. I really have to be able to sink into the world of the novel. And keep that story thread and flow going in my mind. So that's always the the cost that must be weighed in. And there are other opportunity costs, you know, travel can be stressful, you know, whatever. I think one of the things to look at with conventions too, book festivals, comic-cons, what have you, is to assess the hidden costs, not just your opportunity cost. Well, I guess this falls under opportunity cost, right? Not just your time that you lose, but the how much they're going to ask you to put into the conference, besides, you know, travel and being there and so forth. Because more and more a lot of these reader conventions are uh hounding writers to invest huge amounts of money in them, like a couple thousand dollars, and that if you don't agree to like sponsor a party or a table or something like that, then you don't get the access to the readers. That's why you went in the first place. And a lot of times you don't find out those things until after you've committed, and then they start bugging and they start sending you these emails and saying, Oh, well, you know, will you pay for this and will you help sponsor this? And oh, we're not gonna be able to go forward unless we are able to you know get funding for this thing. And it's um it's something you find out only by talking to other people who went to the conference. So it's worth paying attention to. And now I'm here at Iconic ready to have my writer copy. So I hope that you all have a wonderful Thursday.