First Cup of Coffee with Jeffe Kennedy
First Cup of Coffee with Jeffe Kennedy
First Cup of Coffee - July 6, 2018
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Good morning everyone. Today is July 6th. It's a Friday. And it is 7 15 a.m. I got an earlier start today than I did yesterday and I skipped today. I don't run absolutely every day, so that's part of why I'm a little bit ahead of schedule. Jackson is sitting here in the kitchen waiting for me. He's hoping for extra snacks, but he's not going to get any.
unknownAlright.
SPEAKER_00Getting the coffee going.
SPEAKER_01He married my mom when I was before myself.
SPEAKER_00And uh Leo was the vice principal of the middle school. So he would do the PA announcements, sorry, I guess that's redundant, isn't it? The wooden dress announcements every morning. And he was rather famous. I mean I was in a different school district, but uh whenever I would meet kids who went to a school, they would always say, Oh, Mr.
SPEAKER_01Candy's so funny.
SPEAKER_00He would always do the uncleas to go. Every once in a while, it seems like it's a couple of colours. The nice thing about this I have the uh recycle bag that we can order from them, so put all of these things in the recycle bag. Once we're done, so apply it's open.
SPEAKER_01Okay, well, I'm trying to find this morning.
SPEAKER_00We did get some rain yesterday. Not tons, but it was supposed to get sun, and it came in on this huge storm, incredibly windy, lots of turmoil in the atmosphere in Octum.
SPEAKER_01I think sure of my sinuses and my my bones, my opinion bones today.
SPEAKER_00Well, we can go outside. Today is favorite mug day. This is my red ceramic mug. Oh, sorry, hold on while we pass through the passageway of doom.
SPEAKER_01There we go.
unknownOutside.
SPEAKER_00Oh, the garden looks happy. It's amazing what a little bit of moisture does. Really just the planks look greener and sprightlier and fresher. I'm going to fix the chip system here. I put it on rain delay yesterday in case we got a ton of rain and we didn't, so I'm going ahead and have it run a little bit here. So anyway, my um very favorite mug is this tall red ceramic mug with the Starbucks symbol. It's a Starbucks 2015 holiday mug. I'm always happy on the days when that's clean and I get to use that. Looks like the storm shook down quite a bit of detritus from the grape bar right here. All right, first sip of coffee. Perfect. Hope you all are having a good day so far. So let's see. Statistics today. Woke up at 5.30. This time I slept six hours and fifty-two minutes. Weight down a little bit from yesterday. Not tons, but 168.8. Um body fat's up a little bit, but that's uh because I didn't run. I always take my body fat from after I run, and if my because I'm sweating, it the the way that the scale measures the body fat, it's um it's basically like it passes a current through you, and so it depends on how uh how much moisture is in your body, and or how much moisture is between your body and the scale, I suspect. Um so hummer is flying around my head here. My little hummingbird. She's got something in her beak. I wonder if she's building a nest. I don't think this is the right time of year for that, but I could be wrong. Maybe the rains triggered her. Anyway, if I haven't run, my skin is drier, and so it's like my body fat comes out higher, and I've learned to be philosophical about this. I try to be ph philosophical about the whole thing, really. I I know I'm not supposed to weigh myself every day, but if I don't, it really does get away from me. I seem to have a huge capacity for denial, so seeing the actual numbers helps. Um we walked 1.1 miles, uh, skipped the run, did my jump roping for a minute. Today I was up one from yesterday. I did 14 in a row. I'm not sure why. Last week I did 19 and 18 in a row, and then this week I've regressed. It's the story of my life, right? Word count was yesterday. Was yesterday. Word count was much better yesterday, however. And you could tell that I have a little bit of book brain today. Whenever I have a good writing day, I'm a little bit foggier. I think I use up all my neurotransmitters. At any rate, I got uh 3,049 words yesterday, so I'm at 68,893 overall on the book out of 100K, which starts to feel um starts to feel better. I'm closing in on the Act II climax. And I might even know what it is. It's um, you know, people always I don't think people quite believe that I write for discovery the way that I do. Um that's how I prefer to put it. Some people call it pantsing, as in writing by the seat of your pants. Uh which to me always sounds like something that people who really like to plot talk about pantsing that way because it's to them it sounds very out of control. And it doesn't feel out of control to me so much as giving over conscious control to something else. Um but the main reason I don't pre-plot is because I can't. I I don't know what the story's going to be until I actually write it. And I kind of have to ride around in my characters' heads and discover the world along with them. And I find out what happens when they find out what happens. So, yeah, people will often say things to me like, Oh, come on, Jeffy, you you at least know how it ends, or you know where the story's gonna go in general. And it depends on the book. Sometimes I have a general idea of how it's going to end. Um, this particular book, The Orchid Throne, because it's the first in this trilogy for St. Martin's, and my editor agreed that I could do the same hero and heroine for all three books, which means that I can do a slower romantic arc. And I can do a more detailed arc for their kind of epic journey, what will happen to them as they travel through not travel, but you know, as they fight the big bad and so forth. Since it's called the Forgotten Empires, I think you probably have a pretty good idea of what those empires will be. Yes, they have a little bit of a cough today. I think that's the pollen in the air. The wind was just so tumultuous last night. It was blowing huge billowing gusts of dust down the middle of the green belt from the roads. So fortunately the rain washed some of it clean, but clearly not all of it. Ah, now the sun is breaking over the edge of the grape barber, really lighting everything up. Birds are singing. Very pretty morning. So, Orchidrone, I think I know what will happen at the Act Two climax. I I do follow structure. I do know kind of what the structure is going to be, and I track word count, and so for a hundred thousand-word book, um, the act two climax occurs at 75%. And it makes things nice and neat. So you could tell when I say that I am just shy of 69,000 words, that means I've got about 6,000 words to go to the Act 2 climax, which would happen at 75%, 75,000 words. Nice and neat math on that one. The book may come out slightly longer than that in the end, but that's because I'll go back and I'll layer some things in and so forth. I think midpoint hit around 52,000 words. Um, but I am not taking that too seriously yet. Um, plus or minus a few thousand words doesn't really concern me a whole lot. So yeah, Act II climax, six thousand words away. That's about two chapters. My chapters on this book, I do keep a running average, and they're averaging at in the high two thousands, twenty-eight ninety or something like that right now. I'm not looking at it, but it's in that neighborhood. So two more chapters. Hmm. Yeah, I think I think that it's going to uh what I think will happen will happen. I'll say welcome to my world. But at least it started flowing a lot better yesterday. I I can often write at a rate of about a thousand to twelve hundred words an hour if things are going well. Uh this last week things have not been going well, and I've been doing about 600, 650 words an hour. So like half, which is just feels mind-bogglingly slow and difficult to deal with. Frustrating. But a lot of that is because I was going back to earlier parts of the book and layering things in. Excuse me. So that's the other part of writing for discovery, is that sometimes later in the story I'll start finding things out, or things will occur to me, and I'll think, ugh, in that one conversation, she should have been thinking about this thing. And so then, and because I sometimes I'll make a note of it, but this week it's felt like I needed to go in and put those things in. So I've been going back and like finding that conversation and weaving in various concerns. Hummingbirds down now by the ground, checking out the low-level flowers. I don't have a whole lot of blooms this year, despite the drip system. I think because our winter was so dry. And the drip system gives a fairly minimal amount of moisture, so the garden will really kick in later in the summer with the once the monsoon rains start dumping all of their moisture. But if you listened yesterday, you could tell that it's a lot less windy this morning, a lot less breezy the wind chimes aren't going. There's a little bit of a breeze in the leaves of the tree up there, but so yeah, writing took me most of yesterday. I had to really stick with it. It started picking up later in the day. The first few hours were the low word counts. Um, and then all of a sudden I had an hour that I did like 1,300 words. So that was the big woo-hoo. So I did not go to yoga. I like to go to the yin yoga classes, my favorite, on Thursday afternoons at four o'clock, which means I really have to leave the house by well, it takes me like um 15 to 20 minutes to get there, but this is a popular class, and if you don't get there kind of early, then you uh don't you don't get the good spot for your mat. And I've started to learn that this is uh highly competitive um jockeying for the highly competitive yoga, jockeying for the primo spots on the floor so that you're not too crammed up with somebody else. Um I think it's probably a false competition because our teacher always says that there's room for forty, which I don't see how there could be room for forty, and there's usually something like thirty people, so clearly we could fit more in. But um, you know, people like their personal space and you don't want to be um too crammed in with other people and some people like create extra space around their mats so that you feel funny about trying to get in there. It's uh I guess even in yoga, even in yin yoga, it is um a study in human nature and competition, unfortunately. So anyway, I have to leave the house by about three twenty, start getting ready like three fifteen, three twenty to get there in time and all of that. And I went in for my last sprint uh around two thirty, two thirty-seven, maybe something like that. I write them down and then time up for an hour. So I knew right then that I wasn't gonna get done in time to go to yoga, but I have to prioritize the writing, so that's what I did. And so no yoga for me yesterday, but that's alright. I'll go tomorrow on Saturday. And it was nice to finish up, and I took care of some um board business because I'd been uh a little bit behind on that this week. I went in and looked at the board forums and made some votes and commented on some issues, so I was happy to get that done. And otherwise David and I hung out in the evening and it was a pretty quiet evening. It was a nice day. And we watched a really good movie, um, which I'm sure we've never seen before, called In Time, with um Justin Timberlake and Amanda Seifried. I don't know how you say her name. Seifried. Um, it was a twenty twenty eleven movie. And I've noticed that there's a lot of movies from that era that were sort of like post uh video store, you know, when a lot of the stores w had gone out of business, so you couldn't really get go rent videos like we had before. Um but before things were really totally on streaming, and so we wouldn't so we missed a lot of stuff. And I know that's a r we moved to Santa Fe in 2009 and we had a hard time finding places to rent videos. And I'm not sure what year we got our Roku, but it was something like 2013. So at any rate, it was a really good movie. Here comes David, I think, saying goodbye. He's about to head out to work. Oh, maybe he's putting the cat out. Probably so. Probably the latter. Anyway, in time was very good. It was about a um group of um well the sorry, let me back up. It was the screenplays by the same guy who did Gattaca, uh, which is also a really excellent science fiction movie, near future. And in time, this was everybody stops aging at the age of 25, and you get those first 25 years free, and on your 25th birthday, then you get a bonus year, and everyone has the the clock on their forearm that shows how much time they have left. And the rich have centuries of time, they acquire all kinds of time, and there are time banks, and you have to purchase everything with time. So, like a bus ride costs you two hours, and rent costs you a month, and if you when you go to work, you get paid like a day. Um, so the poor often have like only a day left. They're basically living day to day. So it was a great metaphor and really an interesting currency exchange. And I'm not I'm just surprised I never heard of this movie because it was really very tight world-building and very well done and ended up being kind of a great Bonnie and Clyde thing, so that was fun too. So at any rate, I highly recommend that. And otherwise, I'm still at the same place on my reading, still reading Snared by Jennifer Estip. And uh, I didn't get much done yesterday since it was a heavy writing day. Speaking of which, my coffee is done, and I'd better get inside and get after it. I hope you all have a wonderful day, and uh thanks for sharing my first cup of coffee with me. Bye bye.