First Cup of Coffee - June 18, 2020

Finishing up THE LOST PRINCESS RETURNS, so I have book brain. My mom and stepdad arrive today, too! So random thoughts today and a plug for Frolic Podcast Network sister, Boobies & Noobies!

First Cup of Coffee is part of the Frolic Podcast Network. You can find more outstanding podcasts to subscribe to at Frolic.media/podcasts!

Transcript

Copy

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Good morning everyone. This is Jeffy Kennedy. I'm here with my first cup of coffee. That tastes good. Today is Thursday, June 18th. And my mother is arriving today. Yay! Jean Stepdad Dave will be driving from Tucson, leaving later on this morning. Be here this evening. So I am super excited to see them. Did not get all of the plants I bought planted. And this one that is in his pot has done a prodigious wilt. I keep watering him, but he's hear that? He's very crunchy. Very crunchy. I need to re-vivify the green stems here somehow. I think he's still alive, just apparently sensitive, which doesn't bode well. You can't be a uh super sensitive to drought plant in these hair parts. So I'm feeling like I have a ton to do today. Um Lost Princess is is very close to done. I've revised up to the last 20 pages. Uh and I actually think it's pretty good. There's a lot of stuff in there I didn't remember putting in there. So I just have to um I am at something like 38,000, 39,000 words on it. We could look. Let's look. It's funny how I don't remember from the night before to the next day, you know. It might be just past thirty-eight thousand. But I got a fair amount done yesterday, but I also had a lot of running around yesterday. Which always um feels disruptive to me. You know how I am. You all know how I am. Oops. Let's see, I've made a mistake on my tracking sheet. I need to fix that. Um yeah, I just passed 39,000 words, 39,048. Um, so I think I've got maybe another 2,000 to go to finish off these final scenes. And then I'm gonna send it to Kareen to read, and then I'm going to send it to Evergreen for proofreading. So, Evergreen, if you hear this today, which you probably won't, since I know you listen in batches, um, it'll probably come tomorrow. I'll have to remember to go online and say something to you about that. Maybe even Saturday. Sort of depends on how things go with getting my folks situated. They're going to stay with us tonight, and then we'll take them over to their VRBO tomorrow and get them checked in there. And you all know I've been musing on what it'll be like trying to uh work with them here. I'm not gonna prioritize work, I'm going to work my way around their schedule and prioritize spending time with them. But I know I mentioned, did I mention the other day? I probably did. Yeah, June 29th release for Lost Princess. Pre-order links are up, at least for the website and Amazon. There will be a print copy. Uh, I just can't put that up right yet because you can't do an assetless pre-order for print. But there will be. And what else? Yeah, so I've got book brain. I've got book brain. And yesterday I went out, I did a couple of hours of writing in the morning. That was good, and then I had to go get my hair done. First time I've gone into the salon since what February? I did that one DIY episode. So I went and uh and got color and cut, got several inches cut off my hair because then I went and got a mani petty in the afternoon, and that was the first thing my manicurist said is she's like, You got your hair cut. And I guess I did. I didn't realize how much she took off. But um, I mean, when you have long hair, people don't notice when you get it cut because it's um so so different. But you know, that's he could take four inches off my hair. I I said it's so different, so not different. He could take four inches off my hair and nobody will notice, except for apparently Ruby my manicures. Um David did notice the color. He says, Wow, that's a totally different color. And I said, No, it's not actually, it just looks really intense right now because he really pulled the color all through, and it looks very, very red at the moment because it had really faded out. I got yelled at to stay out of the sun. I need to start wearing my hats more again. So I um so I did the back and forth. I don't always do the back and forth. I thought I'd stay into town, but I went and got my hair done at 11 and then came back and did an hour and a half of solid work on the book, and then went out from my manicure again. Many petty later, and thought I was gonna get more work done in the evening. Not on the book, I thought I was just gonna get some of my other stuff handled, but I was tired, I just felt um worn out from all of the running around and probably from finishing this story. So today I need to get the laundry going and then try to finish off the end of this book. It really is a book, it's gonna come out to more than 40k, so uh that's I forget, is that novella now? I know I keep talking about this. Maybe that yeah, I think more than 40k. It depends on who you're talking to, right? Because RWA I don't know if RWA even has their rules up anymore because they've changed up, you know, because they're coming out with the new award and all of that. Let's see what it says here. Vivian, the reader words. Let's see if this even has the rules on it anymore. They tend to take stuff down, which is annoying because then you can't look things up. Yeah, they just have past winners and stuff. Thank you. So anyway, this is uh definitely an in-between book, so we priced it accordingly. Uh we decided that $4.99 was probably right since we're doing like the the 25k novellas are $2.99 and the books, the full novels are $6.99. So we decide, well, $4.99 for this one because it's kind of in-between. But for now, we're doing the pre-order price at $3.99. A little loyalty award. The print copy will probably be like $6.99. That's another thing I don't know until I do it, because the way that you do that is you have to find out the number of formatted pages. So once I'm done and we get it formatted and have the final, you know, back and front matter in there and everything, then we can get the actual print page count. And once I upload that to say Amazon, Amazon gives me the the metric for you know like how much how much it costs to print and how much I'll make on it. And they won't let you go below a certain amount. So I think it'll probably be $6.99, guessing by how the combined like um snows of Wind Roven, Crown of the Queen, those ones I doubled up. I think it'll be like those. I'm I'm a little hoarse today because we're really getting a lot of smoke from the forest fires, including that Arizona fire, which is burning near my folks' house. It's going the other direction though, so hopefully they will um it'll be nice for them to get out of that. And let's see, so when I was driving, I caught up on Leslie Penelope's podcast. That was nice to catch up with her a little bit. I'm just trying Googling novella length to see what I get. Yeah. Publishers and literary word societies typically consider a novella's word count to be between 17 and 40,000 words. Yep, so it's always funny to see the people also ask. It's like this little sampler of society. So the other people also ask are how many pages is a novella, how many pages is 60,000 words, how many pages is 40,000 words, is there a market for novellas? How many pages is 90,000 words? How many words is in a 150-page book? The answer to that last one is about, it says a hundred-page book would be about twenty-five thousand words. Yes, that's a lot of fuss, Tohi. Two Tohis just came barreling through, one's sitting here looking at me. What? Very busy. Uh those coil chicks, you know. I posted that video of the coil chicks the other day, and uh they are just they're so cute. Oh, and there's so many of them. This clutch is so huge. I'm looking at the is there a market for novellas. I wonder how old this is. It says, it seemed like it can seem like there's no place to publish a novella, but actually the opposite is true. The form is experiencing a revival from Melville, Melville Houses the Art of the Novella series of classic novellas to big fiction magazine and novella. There are more places than ever to publish your novelette or novella. Should we take bets on how old that is? Because I've never I've never heard of big fiction magazine and novella. Um, okay, let's look at we have to click and see. And it's from John thejohnfox.com. 33 publishers and journals seeking novellas. Okay, there's no date at the top. I really hate stuff that doesn't have dates. Okay, it's listing stuff like McSweeney's. Are you not gonna give me a date? Oh yes, here we go. 2012. That was 2012. And and the only reason I can find a date on this is from the comments. Is that the first comment was posted on July 29th, 2012? Uh I um yeah, it's two of my pet peeves with the internet. Allow me to shake my cane a moment, is things that are not dated. Because we've all experienced this, and I think maybe we're getting smarter about it. But when people circulate on social media some article saying, Oh my god, you know, look at this thing that just happened, and you remember it, and you're like, no, no, no, that happened, that was five years ago. It's just coming, making the rounds again. Look at the day, look at the damn date on the thing, and some things don't have dates, and I think people do that on purpose to like try to make things be evergreen like that. The other thing that I find bizarre, and I find online newspapers are particularly guilty of this, is not listing the place. They don't say where they are, and it can be really kind of have have you guys experienced this? Like you see an article, you know, where we'll say, oh, well, you know, like I don't know, uh community moving to expel all birds, something like that. And you're like, whoa, where the hell are they doing that? And you look at it, it'll be something like, you know, the the Greenville Gazette. You're like, okay, so you're like every state has a Greenville, and probably countries around the world have Greenville. And so you're looking at it, and you know, and it'll say, and it'll give the address, you know, like 102 Main Street, and all these things. And it won't say the goddamn state, you know. It's like a lot of times it won't give the city because it'll have like a name, you know, like Brown Gazette. It's like, where are you? Where you know, and it's a it's a curious blindness because I think they're still thinking of themselves in terms of paper distribution and local distribution. Little Wren is hopping around the grapevine next to me here, getting bugs. Get those bugs. Get 'em. I tried to buy ladybugs the other day to get because I have some aphids on my roses and they were all sold out. Alas. So those pet peeves, uh relevant to nothing. So this is kind of a funny thing. Um, people who attended the Mysterious Galaxy Zoom event, let me know. But one person who, you know, virtually attended, did the online thing, received in the mail a Tor book plate with something that looked like a J Kinr on it. And she said, Did you sign these? And I said, No. And I said, you know, and they had said something to me about being in touch about how to get out signed book plates, and that was supposed to be one of the things in lieu of the signing, they were gonna do that. But I didn't sign those things. I mean, isn't that kind of weird? She's gonna call and ask them about it today, but it's like, did they just like somebody else put like a smudgy pretend signature of mine on the book tour book plates? If so, I've I'm kind of bothered by that. Um I think my signature is pretty distinctive, so you're gonna know if you actually have my autograph. And yeah, I mean, it's not like I even did one of those remote things. So it's weird. It's very weird. Probably well-intentioned, but um really inauthentic, right? So, you know, I've been bouncing around on topics today, but yeah, all kinds of stuff to do. Um, once I get this get these words finished, that'll be a loadoff, and I have to get laundry going today. So I'm gonna go inside and get my laundry going and get the house cleaned up because partly because I I mean I want it to be nice for them when they get here, but then I also don't want to deal with house cleaning after they're here. And I will try to be doing podcasts because they are um used to an hour time difference, and I doubt I'll um be popping out of here really early. I might just try to go to like writing for an hour in the morning and then hooking up with them later. But we shall see. We shall see how it goes. And I guess that's all I have to say today. I I had other things I know I wanted to talk about, but um maybe we'll just go ahead and flush book brain first. So I'll remind you all that first cup of coffee is part of the Follic Media Podcast Network, and you'll find other podcasts you love at frolic.media slash podcasts. And I will talk to you all tomorrow. Take care. Bye-bye.

SPEAKER_00 17:57

Hey everybody, it's Kelly, host of Boobies and Newbies, part of the Frolic Podcast Network. Every episode, I invite a romance reading newbie to read and review their very first romance novel, alongside me, a self-proclaimed romance novel addict. We're talking everything from bisexual pegging. We need more pegging on TV, we need it in books, we need it in real life, we need to talk about it, to the deepest intricacies of relationships. It really is like we're fighting for us. Like we're let's fight. We cover it all. Find and follow us on social media at Boobies Podcast and catch up on previous episodes on your favorite podcast streaming platform.