Award-winning and best-selling author of fantasy and romance, Jeffe Kennedy shares her first cup of coffee of the day with listeners, giving a daily insight into the realities of being a career author.
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I'm talking about Guardian (or Goblin): the Lonely and Great God, the fantasy romance K-drama that Kelly Robson turned me onto. Also about good omens, new opportunities, and why I withdrew from World Fantasy Con programming.
In the interests of transparency and being the best ally I can to marginalized authors, I've decided to withdraw from participation in panels at World Fantasy Con (WFC).
I've been listening to a lot of the conversations about the enduring and systemic problems with WFC programming. I know the con committee put effort into making fixes in the last week, but I've been convinced that in order for there to be real change, from the foundation, that white allies should pull back. Especially given SFWA's very public and committed stance on DEI, I feel can't participate in WFC this year. I'm disappointed because I was looking forward to my panels, but I'm also convinced this is the right thing to do.
Many people understand the issues far better than I do, but I can reiterate what other people have said. That a place to start is that there needs to be:
- a standing accessibility policy
- a standing harassment policy
- a standing programming policy
- an understanding that requirements that volunteers pay for entry will always be harshest on the marginalized voices needed to bring true diversity.
As an author of fantasy and lover of the genre, I really hope that we'll see a World Fantasy Convention in 2021 that we can all be proud to participate in.
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Good morning everyone. This is Jeffy Kennedy, author of fantasy and romance, and all of the wonderful places they intersect. I'm here with my first cup of coffee. Oh, it's hot. I don't know why it's so unusually hot this morning. With a little bit of a burn on the tongue. Today is Monday, October 19th. And the birds are all out here in the secret garden hopping around in the crab apple tree. It's in the mid-50s here, so I brought out my lap blanket. We're supposed to freeze the end of this week. Be pretty cold Friday and maybe Saturday. So I thought take care advantage of the sitting in the secret garden while I can. I always think I'm gonna bundle up and come out and sit here in the winter, but then it's always seems so much nicer to just stay inside. Beautiful blue skies though. Gorgeous sunlight. It's really a pretty morning. We did our walk right at sunset. Sunset, one of those, right at sunrise, and the uh sky was really pink. Had those pink streaks in it, so beautiful. I've been really wondering about I keep meaning to look up their air quality metrics in the uh with so fewer plane flights. You know, there's just no contrails in the sky. Every once in a while you see one, you're like, oh yeah, look, there's a contrail. Um I remember in the wake of 9-11 when all air traffic was grounded in the United States, and I'm not sure how much it was elsewhere in the world, but that there was a lot of discussion about how dramatically the air traffic or the air quality improved, like you know, just over the course of a few days. So I've wondered what it looks like now with a worldwide decrease in plane travel. It's interesting that we haven't seen more of that, but you know, so much of the news that gets surfaced is of the dire and dramatic kind. And besides, there are plenty of interests that don't want us to know how much better the environment is if we don't have so much plane travel. And I say that as someone who misses flying. I I totally miss flying. Um miss getting to go places. But so let's see. I had a pretty low-key weekend. I was not as hugely productive as I wanted to be, um, which David is always reminding me is okay. That's alright for me to not be productive. Uh we have several very cool things happening that I don't feel like I could talk about yet, but I sorted one of them out Saturday morning. Um, I think it's gonna make a huge difference for us. And then I got um we got a very interesting opportunity that we're excited about. So we'll see what happens with that. So it feels like things are really changing. I don't want to uh count my chickens before they are hashed. I am very gently and lovingly keeping those eggs warm. Um, but it's it was great news with the New Zealand general election over the weekend. Um, Australia is coming up, and I remember in 2016 that the cascade was going the other direction, and everybody was like, the U.S. election's gonna go bad too, and maybe this needs that uh we're getting a worldwide shift. Um pushing the hate and racism and awfulness away. I guess Lindsey Graham in South Carolina suggested that it would be a uh a good idea to segregate liberals, that it would be a good system if you know conservatives could go anywhere they wanted in the state, but liberals had to be confined to certain areas. Great idea, Lindsey Graham. What does that remind us of? David was asking me if he was South Carolina or North Carolina. I thought South, but um, at any rate. So let's see. I got a lot of businessy things done over the weekend. I did not get a couple of the major things done that have been sliding down my list, and I really need to get them done today. Uh granddaughter Arrow's birthday is on Saturday, and I need to get presents sent to her. This Robin is posing for me beautifully, and I'm wondering if I can get a photo. I'll try. Robin wants me to have this photo. I know I've mentioned it before on here, but I love it when the robins are coming through. They really um bring a festivity to the environs. And tons of finches and tohis quail have been around. So let's see. Um I'm trying to rem well, Saturday afternoon. I can't even remember what we did. I don't think I did a lot. I did a lot of reading this weekend. Um, we worked some on the landscaping, um, but not that much. We worked on it some Friday afternoon after I was done on Friday and got another phase done. And I thought we were gonna get a lot of it done yesterday, and then the day kind of got away from us. So we went and ran a couple of errands, and you know how some days are like that, they just get away from you. Uh until the time change comes, that'll help. Uh, right now we're sort of in this place where it's so cool and dark in the mornings that you know, right now it's 8:30, and you know, the sun's coming in now, but I don't know, it makes it really easy to laze around on Saturday and Sunday mornings and just read until and then it's like noon, and then it's starting to get dark earlier, you know, so we're uh well and cool. So we come inside and then we tuck in and watch movies. So it's it's all good. I I think I needed some downtime over the weekend, and that's what I had. Oh, there comes Jay, beautiful blue Jay. So let's see. Um I wanted to talk about is that I started watching um a K-drama. I think this is my first K-drama. Uh, my darling friend Kelly Robson turned me on to this one, and it's called Goblin. Goblin or Guardian? It depends on how you uh translate, I guess. And I've seen it listed both ways, and it's uh the guardian, the great and lonely god. And yes, it oh, there's Kirk Bill Thrasher. All the birds are coming in for a visit. And it's um, you know, in Korean with subtitles, and we watched the first episode on Friday night. I made a special petition for David to give it a try. It's like a 16-episode series, and the episodes are like an hour and 15 minutes each. And uh David watched, but he tapped out at about 45 minutes, which came as a surprise to nobody. But that's too bad. But I went ahead and watched, that was one thing I did Saturday late afternoon. He was taking a nap and I uh watched it on my computer, which I haven't done really before. But I have a great big monitor and it wasn't too bad. I put in my earbuds and really like the soundtrack. Um, but it is as uh Kelly predicted, it is absolutely my catnip, you know, about um the it's almost hard, and she had the same thing, it's almost hard to uh talk about it too much without spoilering it. Um but many ways it's a classic trope. Um there is the it's kind of a Cinderella story in a way with the um orphaned schoolgirl who is um living with her aunt and cousins and basically treated as a slave. And she manages to summon this immortal. Um and he is the goblin, which means something a little bit different in Korean, but basically he is an ancient warrior who was unjustly killed because his king was jealous of him. And he's been wandering the world for for centuries, and she is able to she summons him accidentally and then starts figuring out what exactly it is she's doing. And and it's a romance. Um he is a bird nearly flew right into my face, you guys. They were screwing around, they're just really wild this morning, and it flew right at me and barely dodged to the side. Funny. I think it was a tohi. I think it's this one that's sitting on the wall looking at me now, like you're not usually sitting there. What are you doing there? It might be that no? I was gonna say it might be that the Cooper's hawk went overhead, but there's too many birdies around for that. No roadrunner either. So um he is very jaded and lonely and sad. Oh, the gross beaks are in here too. They're really beautiful. I did not move the birdbath over the weekend, which I was going to do. And I thought, oh, I don't need to do it yet. And now I wish I had. I I had a good reason to want to do that. Oh well. Uh I did bring in the plants. I brought in all of the uh potted plants for the winter and got them organized, and that's that was a good thing to get done. So anyway, he um basically views her as like an annoying schoolgirl, but he's reluctantly charmed by her. And then there is this great by play where he is friends with a guy who is a grim reaper, and they have this uh kind of frenemy relationship, and the two of them are tied to this girl in interesting ways by fate and so forth. Um, but yeah, it's it's got a great soundtrack and it's um funny and it's emotional, and it really is wonderful. So, this is my oh I'll put a link to it uh in the show notes, but that's something I'm really enjoying and really looking to um carve out some time when I can watch that. Which is, you know, like one of those things that's like I know that I basically it would come out of time that I read, and I don't really want to give up my reading time. So I don't know. I'm I'm I feel like I'm gonna have to do a negotiation with David because I enjoy watching stuff with him, but I've got kind of a backlog of stuff now that I want to see that he doesn't, and and my usual watching time is time that I spend with him. I don't know. We shall see. So um I've been moving forward on Airs of Magic number one, still no title. Um I had a very good prophetic dream about Dark Wizard that felt um like a true omen dream, so that was really good. I'm not going to tell you guys what it is, so I don't uh diminish the magic there. This opportunity that has come up is a real magical thinking opportunity. It's it's amazingly ideal, and I hope it works out. Once um, that's again, I don't want to talk about it too soon. So, but it could be a really cool thing for both me and David, which would be amazing. And let's see, what else? I don't know. Is that I I haven't had much to say lately, have I? Yeah. Um I think I mentioned, maybe I didn't. I think I did this on Saturday morning. This was one of the things I did that I needed to do, is that I decided to withdraw from programming uh from World FantasyCon. And I posted to Twitter and Facebook my reasons for it. I suppose I could put my little spiel in the show notes for those of you who aren't on Facebook, Library Addict. Um we had a big board meeting on Friday. That was the other thing, is that Friday, and I know I was sort of grumbling about meetings and how that meeting goes too long, but we're we're getting so much good stuff done in these meetings that I don't begrudge it. But I was in meetings for two and a half hours Friday morning, and it kind of threw off my writing day, and I was grumbly about that. I I'm still on track on Airs of Magic One. Um, partly because I withdrew from programming on World Venicecon. I had marked off a day that I wasn't writing to do that. So um, but I did bring that up at the board meeting and we discussed and I got people's personal opinions. So this should not be construed as an official CEFA position, um, as if we did not take any votes or make any pronouncements or anything like that. But um several of us have decided that it's absolutely within um our CEFA's and the board's public and committed stance for diversity, equality, and inclusion. That we do not um, you know, that we that we want to support marginalized authors overall. Um and World FantasyCon has systemic problems that they have just not been fixing year after year, and they have made a last-minute switch after some criticism to get you know, rewrite some of their programming so that it's not so offensive. Um there was some stuff in there that was really poorly worded, and they did fix that, and they have brought on more marginalized authors onto the panels, but overall we felt like it was um, you know, several people made their cases to me, not just on the board, but other people I talked to, and that it's better for me as an ally to withdraw from programming because then that makes it clear that we are, you know, just can't support the same kind of thing going on. You know, and it's funny because you know, here we have these things happening at these different levels where it seems like, well, you know, World FantasyCon at you know not having very good wording in their programming, and then you have Lindsey Graham talking about putting liberals into pogroms or something like that, you know, and that's like ah, you know, there's yes, there is a a difference in extreme, but it's at root the same problem, and um things won't change if we continue to support the status quo. So, so that was why I did that. Um, and I'm disappointed because I was looking forward to my programming at World FantasyCon. But I was largely gonna go to the conference this year because it's in Salt Lake City, and I thought this would be a beautiful time of year for us to uh take a drive up through Four Corners and Utah, and of course we're not doing that. So another year, another year. I hope that um they get their act together because I think that one of the things that that m that taking actions like this makes clear is that it can be done. And FIA con happened this weekend. FIA is a black liter black science fiction fantasy magazine, and they had uh an amazing conference. I've talked to a number of people and saw the tweets and so forth, that you know, they they filled panels with all sorts of wonderful marginalized authors. So, you know, it's like it can be done, it just requires uh a change of mindset and and particular effort, you know. It it you can't just keep doing things the same way you've always done them. So, so those are things, and I think I am going to go in and get to work. Uh Airs of Magic is not flowing the way I would like it to, and I'm not sure why. It could be that's still all I want to write is Dark Wizard. Alas. All right. Um I'm trying to decide. Yeah, I think I will try to um no, I'll do it tomorrow. Never mind. Uh I am doing cross-promo for uh one of my favorite podcasts, Leslie Penelope's My Imaginary Friends, this month, but I'll put her promo on the end of tomorrow's. Um, since I cross promo her all the time anyway. All right. Uh first cup of coffee as part of the Frolic Media Podcast Network. And you will find more podcasts you love at frolic.media slash podcasts. And I will talk to you all tomorrow. Take care. Bye bye.
