First Cup of Coffee - November 6, 2020

How to know when to push on wordcount and when to back off - and how to push, if you do. Also a look ahead at upcoming interviews with L. Penelope, Melissa Marr, and Nalini Singh!

You can read up on my Productivity Mastermind offerings here (https://jeffekennedy.com/mastermind).

The interview with Kelley Armstrong is here (https://blog.jeffekennedy.com/2020/11/05/first-cup-of-coffee-november-5-2020/ ).

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 0:05

Good morning everyone. This is Jeffy Kennedy, author of fantasy, romance, and all of the wonderful places they intersect. I'm here with my first cup of coffee. Ah wonderful. Today is Friday, November 6th, before I forget to say so. Here today with my um Star Trek mug. Now I can show you guys who are watching on Instagram, um, either live or in my archives. This is the mug that Chris Pine is Captain Kirk is carrying in the reboot series. I love this freaking mug. It makes me all kinds of happy. So I decided, well, I would branch out. And so I got a whole variety of different kinds to try, see what else I would like. And they do have like a caramel creme brulee, which is okay. It's a close second. But I got this one that's called Cocoa Truffle. Guys, the cocoa truffle is so rocking my world. I might have to get a supplemental shipment of entirely cocoa truffle because it's like drinking coffee hot chocolate. It's um has a sweetness all of its own. I I can't even tell you how good it is. So totally glumming that. Um no kickbacks here from Nespresso. Though it'd be nice if someone from Nespresso wants to send me a free shipment of the cocoa truffle. I would um happily continue to pimp that. Um, if you are watching on video, you can see I'm out on the front porch this morning. The portal. The front portal. Uh there is um you're getting a reflection off of the window behind me, so it might be hard to tell, but you can see some of my dangling Halloween decorations still. We're this is going to be one of the last nice days that we've had since uh, or sorry, one of the last nice days we will have. It's been a really gorgeous week and amazingly warm fall. And but tomorrow, tonight, we're supposed to get a big change in the weather. Um which would be actually seasonal. So uh thought I should enjoy the warm weather on the portal while I can. I don't think we we may get snow this weekend, supposed to be mainly like just rainy and blustery. Perfectly reasonable for uh uh heading into the middle of November. But um enjoy the uh it's nice to be outside in my shirt sleeves at whatever it is. Oh, eight in the morning now. So let's see. Yesterday I did not do an Instagram live because I recorded the podcast interview with Kelly Armstrong. If you missed that, I will put a link to it in the show notes. Is that a bluebird? Yeah, bluebird, I think, was surprised that I was out here. Now it's sitting over in the juniper looking at me accusingly because clearly that was my fault. Uh and and the bluebird distracted me. So, oh, interview with Kelly Armstrong. So if you didn't listen to that yet, um take a listen. It's just half an hour long, but I think it's pretty good. Hopefully, um there's not too much disruption. She had a weak internet connection, and so that may have interfered in places. If it's difficult to hear, that's exactly why. Curved bill thrasher is over here talking to me, wondering why I'm out here. Going for the seed under the bird feeder. Oh, Roadrunner update. You guys, I have become that person trying to train the roadrunner out of its cruel behavior towards its fellow creatures. Those of you who are longtime listeners will uh appreciate that reference. But the roadrunner keeps coming back and wanting to lay ambushes to eat the birds that come in at our bird feeder. Uh, and I keep calling it Velociraptor for the way it behaves. And yesterday I ran it off the portal. David was inside because he didn't have his shoes on, and he was telling me where it was going because it was like not running off. I you know, I just wanted to scare it away, and it would like run this way, and if I went that way, it would go around the other way and stand over there looking at me. So he's pointing to me where it was, and then finally David cracks the door open so the cat won't run out, and he said, Throw a rock at it. I'm like, Oh, you know, and I am not throw a rock at birds kind of person. And so I pitched a rock at it, and I didn't want to hit it, right? So I threw the rock and it land, you know, like right next to the roadrunner, and the roadrunner cocked its head and just looked at the rock and looked at me, and I swear it like held up its little middle finger at me. But eventually I ran it off. Uh, this could be a full-time job trying to run off our mini-neighborhood Velociraptor, but I don't know. I I might have to give it up. You know, the Cooper's hawk comes in and gets birds off of the bird feeder, and we've off long called it the two-tier bird feeder, you know. We feed the songbirds and the songbirds feed the Cooper's hawk. Um, I suppose it's just as fair for the roadrunner to get its share of snacks, but I don't know. Something about that incident that we witnessed watching that velociraptor get that little songbird, it was so I don't know, predatory. Nothing wrong with being predatory. So um things are going well this week. I made a lot of progress on the golden griffin and the bear prince. The prequel story, of course, is going to be in the Under a Winter Sky anthology, which will be out in just a couple of weeks now. And we do have a secret surprise announcement coming up on that, uh, hopefully Monday. I think that will happen on Monday. So the prequel story, the long night of the crystalline moon, will be under a winter sky, uh, in with Kelly Armstrong's story that we talked about yesterday. Her story really is wonderful. And I don't think I would have been into time travel Victorian Christmas. I never, I never got the Victorian Christmas Jones, but it's such a great story, you guys. She's an amazing writer. Uh, and then you can look forward to more interviews with the other contributors in the next couple of weeks. And I am looking at that. On Tuesday, Leslie Penelope, who writes as L Penelope, she will be on the podcast, a return visit. She was like, Do it, should I come back again? Because she was on earlier this summer. But I said yes, because we're gonna have all the contributors on there. So she'll talk about her story, and then the following week we'll have Melissa Marr on on Monday the 16th. So, for those of you who like the Instagram live listen, those will be podcast only, simply because I'm not coordinated enough to monitor the interview and the bandwidth and worry about Instagram Live. So there's I can only multitask so much. And then Nalini Singh did email me back. She says she's been ignoring deadlines, ignoring deadlines. She's been ignoring emails in favor of deadlines, but she is definitely going to be on the show uh the week of Thanksgiving. Yay! So that'll be really interesting to talk to Nalini. Uh, because she's in New Zealand, I will do the podcast in the afternoon. I'm gonna do it on the afternoon of Monday, Monday the 23rd, and record it and post it the morning of Tuesday the 24th. So you can look forward to that. Uh but as far as the book is progressing, Golden Griffin and the Bear Prince, I've got about, oh, just shy of 36,000 words. Um and I have been, you guys know that I monitor my word count uh for each hour that I'm working, and for some reason this book has been writing slow. I think I've mentioned that several times now. Uh, for no good reason, I've been getting pretty much, you know, like eight to nine hundred words an hour. And I've been going into that fourth hour uh fairly frequently, trying to get up to my 3,000 words a day. And I've been hitting the 3,000 words a day more or less, but it feels like it's taking a long time to get there. And and I know that for many people working that 8 to 100, 800 to 900 words per hour is a good pace. But for me, you know, usually like that first hour is you know, like 600, 700, 800, and then I pick up, and the next two hours I'm usually over a thousand. I have not been doing that. It's been really puzzling to me. I don't know what I was fighting through. So then a couple days this week, uh, you know, because Dorinda and I start at nine, but with going back to real time, I uh I've been waking up at the same time. I won't say I'm waking up earlier, but I'm waking up at the same time, but now the clock says uh five o'clock instead of six o'clock. So because I have that extra time a couple of days this week, I did half an hour before meeting up with Dorinda and got like about 300 words each time. Because I thought, well, maybe that would help. And the and the reason that I mentioned that is because I know a lot of people have been sharing my post about doing the training to increase your word count. You know, if you're doing nano rhymo to gradually increase that word count. So I thought, well, maybe if I have that half hour ramp up, that that will help. Um and it did help to some extent, but mostly in that I would do half an hour and then my three hours, and then I'd only have like half an hour after that to try to get up to my 3,000 words. So then yesterday, for some reason, something broke loose. And I I had this feeling like I needed just to keep pushing at it, just keep tap, tap, tapping on that wall. And that is something that is definitely an acquired skill as an author. When learning when when is the manuscript like physically repelling you, as I have, I think I mentioned um podcast last week. I think last Friday. Well, I could tell you what day it was. Yeah, on the 30th. On the 30th, I tried poking at the manuscript and it was just like boom. Oh, yeah, because I talked about it being a down day, and I talked on Monday about how sometimes you just have those days. So there's it's just uh a real art and a skill to learn yourself well enough to know when is when are you being bounced out? When does the manuscript say, not tonight, I have a headache, don't touch me, stay on your side of the bed. And when should you keep, I don't know, to extend the analogy, attempting to seduce it. So this week I was really just it's like okay, if I'm getting 800, 900 words an hour, then that's what I'm getting. Truck going by with like a bobcat on the trailer. It's going to park there and be noisy too. Oh well. Hopefully it's not too loud. Oh, it's gonna back up into this street. Who knows what they're doing? The perils of being on the portal. Uh our normally quiet neighborhood occasionally gets like weird construction things. I don't know what they're doing. Oh, good, good, they're just turning around to leave. People often turn down the wrong streets here. I think it's very confusing to the non-native. Okay, so anyway, I so I just kept pushing, you know, and at least getting my eight to nine hundred words an hour was, you know, I it was getting me there. So then yesterday I was complaining to Dorinda because I got 799 in the first hour, 784 in the second hour. I was like, okay, great, whatever. And I really didn't want to go into a fourth hour yesterday. So I'd said, you know, if I could get, I just need to get like over 1,400 words, just over 1,400 words, and I'll have my 3K for the day. But that's a lot for me to get in one hour. And she said, You can do it, I know you can. But she was also snickering, and I told her that that didn't count as positive reinforcement if you're snickering while you say it. So I thought, okay, I'm really gonna put my nose down and get it. And fortunately it was the third hour, so I was, you know, in shape. My muscles were loose and warm. You guys, I got 1,422 words in that third hour. I was so happy. Woohoo! So I actually to get 15,000 words for the week, I just need to get 3119 today. So I'm gonna try for that. Uh we'll see. We'll see if I um used up all of my energies. So then the other thing I wanted to tell you, uh, I think I mentioned that I had uh hinted anyway, saying that I was going to get the mastermind thing together. I officially posted on the blog on Wednesday that I am starting the productivity mastermind. There's a couple different options for you guys. You can do um, and I'll put a link to that, but there's a whole page on my website now for it. So we can either set you up with another few people. Um, we'll figure out what works for you if you're better one-on-one or with a few people or a few more, and set you up with a mastermind group, and I will teach you guys how to support each other through champagne problems and otherwise. I can also I'm also offering an option where I will work with you like I'm working with Dorinda on accountability and writing sprints, where either I will meet with you and write at the same time, or I will set you up with someone else or several of someone else's to do that with you, and similarly teach you how to be supportive, which little details like not snickering when you tell people they can do something, Dorinda. Um, or you can do both. And I really am hoping that uh that this will answer what a lot of people have been asking for. I've already gotten a couple people email about it. You can email me, and then what we'll do is we'll do an interview. We'll get either on video chat or voice chat and we'll discuss what works for you. You know, what are you trying to accomplish? Um, are you better one-on-one? Would you be better with like a bigger group of people? Maybe a group of three, something like that. Um, I definitely want this to be something that is what's most effective for you. Uh I also I am charging for this because my time is valuable, and a couple people have said things about it being more expensive that they can afford, which I can appreciate. And I'm sorry about that. If this is something you hugely, hugely want to do, and money is your only barrier, then we could talk about it. Email me and we can discuss. But another reason that I'm charging for it is because the way that these kinds of masterminds work, the productivity, um, accountability is if you are paying money into it, then it's one of the ways of getting yourself to pay attention and do the work. It's it's just a lot of a lot of what we're going to do with productivity is about teaching yourself to do the work. Because being a writer, especially when you're starting out, it can be difficult because it doesn't look like you're doing anything. And your family doesn't think that you're doing anything. Um they for some reason they think that like when you're staring at a blank computer screen, that you are available to do something like help them with things that they want. Whereas it's hard to explain how much is going on inside your head, and you get those invidious questions like, um, haven't you finished writing that novel yet? And the last thing you want to do is admit to people that you actually haven't written anything on it at all that you're still thinking about it. But that's perfectly legitimate. But what we're going to do is get you so that you're actually writing words down so that you can start getting that momentum, start getting that flow. And making you have to sacrifice a little bit of money to do that is uh you know, make sure you get yourself to pay attention. It also makes your family respect it more if they know that you're paying for the thing. Uh, although I totally know that some of you might not want to tell uh what you're spending your money on. So, anyway, check out the link. Uh, feel free to ask questions in the comments and so forth. Email me with questions and so forth. So I hope that you all have a wonderful weekend, stormy or otherwise. And um news is looking good. News is looking good, so maybe we can all uh relax and have uh an actual government again, wouldn't that be nice? So I will remind you all that first cup of coffee is part of the Frolic Media Podcast Network, and you can find other podcasts there that you'll love at frolic.media slash podcasts. And I will talk to you all on Monday. Take care. Bye bye.