First Cup of Coffee - July 20, 2020

Why getting people's names right - and honoring their choices! - is important. Also thanks for the kind support on Friday's podcast. Plus a shoutout to debut author Lorelei Parker for her rom com CRUSHING IT!

You can find Lorelei Parker here (http://loreleiparker.com/) and more about CRUSHING IT here (https://www.kensingtonbooks.com/9781496725707/crushing-it/)

Friday's podcast is here (https://blog.jeffekennedy.com/2020/07/17/first-cup-of-coffee-july-17-2020/)

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

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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. Nothing like that. First is it on a Monday morning. And today is Monday, July 20th. It's a lovely morning here in Santa Fe. We got rain last night, so the garden is cool and fresh and rainwashed. Just lovely. Also, today's episode is brought to you by Kensington's brand new title from debut author, Lorelai Parker. Crushing It. Congratulations, Lorelai. I haven't met Lorelai, but so exciting to have a debut book and a trade paperback from Kensington, just as uh the book that really did launch a lot of stuff for me. Came from Kensington. And Crushing It looks just delightful. It's uh exciting new romantic comedy. It's a rom-com. It combines humor, second chances, and a good old-fashioned love triangle and a thoroughly relatable tale about a woman blossoming into her own and learning the key to love can be found by first loving oneself, which I can totally get behind, because you know what we that's very true. Have to love yourself first, right? Before you can love someone else. And boy, we can all use a ro uh romantic comedy right now, huh? So I I'm looking forward to reading this book. It uh came out at the end of June, and it's already gotten a whole lot of great buzz. It's listed as a good reads, favorite read for June. Uh I'm looking forward to reading Lorelei because uh I understand her wit, knack for complex characters, and exploration of the intricacies of modern relationships uh will appeal to readers of Christina Loren, and who doesn't love that? So, yeah, let me uh read you guys the blurb on this book because it does sound great. Uh in life as in gaming, there's a way around every obstacle. To pitch her new role-playing game at a European conference, developer Sierra Reed needs to overcome her terror of public speaking. What better practice than competing in a bar's dirty slam? Oh, sorry, not dirty slam. That would be my book, Diary Slam, regaling an audience with old journal entries about her completely humiliating college crush on gorgeous Tristan Spencer. Until the moderator says, next up, yeah, Tristan Spencer. Sarah is mortified, but Tristan is flattered. Good boy, Tristan. Caught up in memories of her decade-old obsession as they reconnect, Sarah tries to dismiss her growing qualms about him. But it's not so easy to ignore her deepening friendship with Alfie, the cute supportive bar owner. She and Alfie were college classmates too, and little by little Sarah's starting to wonder if she's been focusing her moves on the wrong target all along, misreading every player's motivations. Maybe the only winning strategy is to start playing by her heart. Cute, cute blurb. Sounds like a great book. You know, I have a surprise bartender love story, too. That's um exact warm unholy. And it's it's a fun thing to play with. So Crushing It by Lorelie Parker. Absolutely think you guys should check this out. It looks just wonderful. You can find Crushing It by Lorelai Parker wherever books are sold. You can find out more at Kensingtonbooks.com. And I will put a link to the book in the show notes. And congratulations, Lorelai. Very exciting to have your new book out in the world. So, other than that, I am ready to work more on Promised Queen developmental edits this week. I did get through the most difficult part. I um in fact I can tell you all where I'm at with things because I actually brought my computer out here with me so I could tell you about Lorelai's book. So I got through that first really um heavy cutting section. So now I've gone through 140 pages, I've got it down to 395, got it down to 109, 209 words. And I feel really good about those first 140 pages. I think it just flows a lot better now. I know that sounds a lot to you. I've seen some of my readers freaking out a little bit on, you know, that I've cut officially well, just shy of 13,000 words, and they're all like, no, we want those words. And asking me if I'm going to do deleted scenes. And I don't think that the there will be some deleted scenes, but again, it's mostly sort of pulling out circling where people were trying to decide things, and a lot of it's not exactly a coherent scene. But I really I don't think you guys are going to miss some of this stuff. Some of it was emotional flailing, too, that we don't need to have. There's plenty of emotional flailing in this book. Poor Conelia, they've been having a hard time. I did um listen to more of Fiery Crown as I re cleaned the house yesterday. Really love the job that Gabrielle Baker has been doing on this. Enjoying listening to my own book. It's funny when my own book makes me laugh and respond. Yeah. So I'm I think um probably it's gonna go pretty fast, knock on wood, for the next couple days, because I'm basically at the read-through phase. Um what I've got so far is pretty tight, and then I'll make a decision. Do I want to give it one more read-through before I send it to Jenny or let her do that read-through? And yeah, I haven't made up my mind. I'm just gonna see how I feel. Trola Tolet, I'll think about that tomorrow. So, one thing that I probably have not confessed to you guys is that I'm a little bit addicted to Reddit's I am am I the asshole. I I want to make that I am the asshole, which I I am the asshole. You know, am I the asshole? A-I-T-A. Mostly I follow the Twitter thread, um, which only selects some of them. And I like to look at those. And if you don't know what it is, it's basically people writing in. It says for the frustrated moral philosopher and all of us, but people write in and they say, okay, so these things happened. Am I the asshole? And people can comment and they weigh in on either you're the asshole, not the asshole, or everyone sucks here. And the one struck me yesterday, and it wasn't even the most interesting one, but I find myself telling stories about things that I read on this Am I the Asshole thread? Which I don't know, maybe it's substituting for having actual human contact with people. So many things from people being stuck in lockdown together, you know, like deciding, oh, I've been dating this guy for a month, and we decide we might as well do lockdown together. And it's like, oh yeah, that's a recipe for disaster. Um it hasn't always turned out badly, but you know. So there was one that I saw yesterday as I was sort of catching up with them, lazy Sunday afternoon stuff. And it was about uh a woman saying that she had a fairly common, easily recognized name like Hannah, that occasionally gets messed up and changed to something like Anna. And that she, you know, sometimes corrects people and sometimes doesn't, but there was this incident where she was at a family party and a friend of her father's had, you know, she introduced herself and said, Oh, I'm I'm Hannah. And he said, Oh, hi Anna, it's nice to meet you. And she said, No, actually, it's it's Hannah. Um, you know, a lot of people make that mistake, and which I totally get because I'm forever having this conversation. And he said, Oh, well, I've I like the name Anna better, so I'll just call you Anna. And sh and she lost it. And I'm Karina's nodding along because Corrina and I have talked about this often. It you'll like when people deliberately decide to call you something other than your name after you've told them how to pronounce your name, and they're like, Oh, well, I'm just going to say it this way instead. Um, you know, and she she got mad and she said, No, that's not okay. My name is Hannah. And her mother got upset with her and pulled her aside and said she should have just gone with the flow and that she'd embarrassed people and upset and he's an old man and all blah, blah, blah, blah. And it was funny because some people were weighing in saying, Yeah, you know, it wasn't a big deal, you should just let the old guy call you Anna. But then there were all these people weighing in saying, no, no, this is a thing. And this is a thing that men do to women, and especially to young women. Like they get to decide what your name is going to be. And I totally sympathized with this because I've certainly gone through this all my life, and I I know a lot of people would argue that I get what's coming to me because I have a weird name. I've actually been told that my name is not a real name. Someone once told me that that uh Jeffy is not a real name, and that I should go by my real name, which is Jennifer. And a lot of people weighing in on this thread were saying things about that, you know, like the people who, and I've certainly encountered this, people who push and push and push to find out what your quote unquote real name is, and then insist on calling you them. And I will occasionally find, run into people like that, you know, who they'll be like, oh, well, Jeffy's surely not your real name. It's like, well, it is my real name. It's it is my name, it is how I think of myself, it's my byline, obviously. I write everything under Jeffy. I, you know, the and and I'll and they'll push, you know, and they'll say, but you know, is it is it short for something? I'll say, you know, finally, so okay, you know, because I do try to be nice. Melissa Marr asked me why I'm trying to be nice to people, and I don't know, but I guess I do try. And I said, Um, I'll say, Yeah, well, my my given name is Jennifer, uh, but I've been called Jeffy all my life. And I'll say, but the only people who call me Jennifer are the RRS and telephone spam callers. So then they'll try calling me Jennifer, and then they get annoyed with me when I don't respond, because there are a lot of Jennifer out there, and one thing I can always be sure of is if somebody wants to get my attention, they're not gonna say Jennifer. So there are a few people in my life who I've known for a very, very long time. My first boyfriend Kiv, one of my best friends from college, who call me Jennifer, and for them it's like their special privilege, and that's fine, whatever. But one of the ones that was most interesting to me, and I had I'd kind of forgotten about this for a while, but when I read something about men doing this to young women, it reminded me of my um graduate advisor. When I was working on my PhD in neurophysiology, I had this graduate advisor who was um a manic depressive Hungarian, which whenever I tell people that, they tell me that that's redundant. Um he was US-born but from a Hungarian family and a very Hungarian name and this incredibly morose nature. And he really did oscillate between kind of manic behavior and terribly morose behavior. And I was, you know, I went to graduate school when I was 21, arguably too young, but I felt like I was um well, it's interesting looking back on it because my mom, I think, encouraged me, a lot of people encouraged me to take a year off between college and graduate school to work just to do some stuff. And I was at the time so worried that I was gonna lose momentum. I had this idea that I had this momentum in the research field, and I'd been working in a lab at uh I went to Washington University in St. Louis, and I was had been working in a neurophysiology lab my senior year at the med school, and I felt like I had, I don't know, like it's funny when you look back on it, and it's like I felt like I really just had to get this moving. I had to do this. I didn't, yeah, I just remember I kept saying, well, I don't want to lose momentum. And and grad school was hard for me. Um I moved to, you know, went to grad school in Laramie, Wyoming, because this particular guy was working there in exactly the field I was interested in. It was auditory processing and bats. I was, you know, exactly the thing I was interested, because I was interested in sensory processing, neuroethology. But um it was a hard move for me in in many, many ways. I was lonely. But one of the things about my advisor was that he refused to call me Jeffy. He insisted on calling me Jennifer, and he told me that Jeffy sounded too much like Buffy. And I think this was after the movie Buffy the Vampire Slayer had come out, but before the show. Because was it the show like in the late 80s, early 90s? Yeah. And this was around, well, probably around that same time, right? Yeah, anyway, this was late 80s. But yeah, I remember him telling me that. No, Jeffy sounds too much like Buffy, so I'm gonna call you Jennifer. You know, and looking back on that, that's so emblematic of of our entire relationship. Um that, you know, he he really wanted to me to be a different, I don't know, to fit a particular mold. Oh no, he said a lot of stuff to me like that, that was um, you know, in this era, I think would be considered abusive. And back then there was this idea that graduate school was partly hazing, you know, that it was like they would make you as miserable as possible to see if you had the chops to, I don't know, to survive the misery of academia, probably. So anyway, that made me think of it with with names. And now I guess I was kind of surprised to see people not getting it on the Reddit for thread because I I think there's much more respect now. There's much more um of people maybe kind of going along the lines of with the pronouns, saying, no, no, no. This is how I would like to be identified. This is the name I want you to call me, and people are much better about respecting that. Um, and it's funny how back then, you know, it wasn't the same way. Hello, bluebird. Good morning. So, um, and then thank you all for your very kind comments uh from my uh uh discussion on Friday. I almost didn't post that. I later in the day when I was going to put that up, I thought, uh, maybe I shouldn't say anything about this. And then I decided, well, I should, because I've promised to be honest with you guys. And professional jealousy is something that we deal with. Um, maybe this is more linked into the name thing that I thought of. You know, it's always this kind of jockeying with other people and trying to find our way. And so I very much appreciate um everyone who contacted me in comments and private messages. Uh, it was very sweet of all of you, especially those of you who often offer to go beat this person up for me. I am actually not very concerned about this person. I'm glad to know what they've been saying so that I can counter it. Uh, but as with many people like this, uh, this person has really made their own health. They are a very unhappy person. And, you know, and Corinne said, well, don't fall into being sympathetic with the bully, which is one of her things. And I said, no, no, no, that's not it. It's more uh more a karma thing. It's like I don't have to do anything. There's nothing I could do to this person would make them more miserable than they're already making them themselves, which is unfortunate. But you know, it sort of relieves me of any burden, as it were. Um, but you know, that's that's a thing, right? We all go through in our lives that there's you know somebody who decides that you are competition for something and decides to, you know, talk smack behind your back. It happens. So, but it made me very happy. Uh, those of you who wanted to know who the author is so that you could not read them, you know, this person only has one book in the world and it has not done great. So I don't know that there's much danger of coming across it. Um although I appreciate the thought. I I don't think that you need to to boycott this person because they're they're already not doing great. So, but I I I it meant a great deal to me that all of you said such kind things to me about it. So um so I'm going to go get to work. Uh let me know if you check out Laura Live Parker's Crushing It. I'll be interested to know. It looks great. So um always glad to welcome more authors to the world, right? We need more more people writing wonderful books. Uh, first cup of coffee is part of the Frolic Media Podcast Network. And you will find more podcasts you'll love at frolic.media slash podcasts. And I will talk to you all tomorrow. Take care. Bye bye.