First Cup of Coffee - July 26, 2018

Getting back into my at-home routine, so I discuss writing habits, creativity, the RWA conference, Suzanne Brockman's Lifetime Achievement Award speech - and what being quietly civil really means.

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Good morning everyone. It is coming up on 8 30 on July 26th. I am just all over the place schedule-wise. I had been waking up early in Denver, but here, and actually the last two days on the boat on the Aqualodge, I slept in till about seven, which is usually that's late for me. But I think for all that I didn't really exhaust myself at the conference. I was tired. I was tired from finishing the book, and then being at conference is just kind of tiring. For well, I guess it's it's a lot of extrovert time. But now I am back in my space. Jackson is here on the garbage can keeping me company. You good boy? And I have the most favorite red coffee cup today. That's good. All right, let's head out to the passageway of doom here. No, you're not coming out. You're not going out there, silly cat. Get back. Get back here. Join the house. You have to have your harness on. Hey! Sorry, this cat's trying to bolt. He almost made it, too. All right, there we go. Cat is still inside. I am outside. Garden has done well in my absence. Strip sip system makes all the difference. One of the hanging baskets flew blew down while I was away and got all dried out. It's hard for the hanging baskets anyway. The wind is hard on them. Wind and the heat. I need to start adding some plants to the garden. Great barber is looking a little untended under here. Go on. Go on. That's me. I heard cats and stink bugs. Okay, I'm gonna put down this phone while I turn over the cushions that have all sorts of detritus on them. Making sure I'm not stepping on the stink bug. He's sitting there with his little hind end in the air, like that's gonna be all the defense again in the world against me stepping on him. Ah, all right. So I don't know what happened with the hummingbird nest. It's um it's empty now and starting to degrade a little bit in the rain, so it's clearly untended. Maybe the little hummers hatched and flew away. I don't know how fast they fledge. Pretty fast, I'm betting. I wouldn't think you know, hummingbirds, um their physiology really depends on constant movement. Not unlike sharks that way. I mean they do sit, but they um don't sit for hugely long periods of time. So I would think that the babies have to get up and get going pretty quick. So I'm back in the saddle. That was a long absence. One of my friends noted that I was gone, including my two travel days, going there and coming back. I was gone twelve days. Um, what with the extended conference retreat, and then little mini vacay after. Um things were sure piled up when I got back. I've started teaching the lit reactor class on Romance 101. I think if you would like to still enroll, you could. If you can't, if you want to and you can't get into it, and I would think today would be the last, maybe today or tomorrow. I'm I'm not sure what their rules are, but I'm thinking as far as I'm concerned, just for you catching up, I would think the next couple days would be fine. But if you uh want to try to get in and the system won't let you, and it's litreactor.com, L-I-T-R-E-A-C-T-O-R dot com, and the class is romance 101 with Jeffy Kennedy, always Julie, uh you can um just contact me somehow, ping me, Twitter, Facebook, email me through my website, comment on this, post. Uh all of these things will work. So, yeah, it is funny. After being gone for twelve days and rooming with Dorinda for a week, I sort of created new patterns, and I'm obviously very much a creature of habit. I I really do believe that most writers should be creatures of habit. Mostly because creativity is a tricky thing and it only flourishes if I won't say it only flourishes, it the e the easiest, maybe the easiest, is that the word I want, maybe the most reliable way to manage creative flow is by creating a path for it to flow down. And and that's habit. You know, so that's why we talk about writing every day. And I you know hear people complain about that, how that's not sustainable for some people, and some people's lives don't allow for it, and all of that. And, you know, I've been there. There was a time in my life when I was getting up at 4 30 in the morning, not sleeping and until 7, but getting up at 4 30 and writing for a couple of hours before I went to work because it was the only time of day that I could write at the same time every day. And I resisted doing that for a very, very long time. Years, years and years. Uh, and I would fall out of it and get back into it again. And every day doesn't necessarily mean every single day. I mean, I when I would ask other writers about this, I would always like, I don't know, try to poke holes in the theory, and I would say, you know, like, what about weekends? What about holidays? What about if you're sick? You know, all of these things. And obviously it it doesn't mean every single way day. I mean, if it's a holiday or you're sick, or if you have programmed in days off, which I think is really super important, then all of those things count and you don't write on those days. Um but the point is is that you do write on your work or writing days. Stickbug just crawled across my foot and made me jump. I'm flinging him across the arbor. No, he's his butt up in the air again. Yeah, you showed me. Startled me a little bit. Okay. Hello, Hummer. Am I in your place again? She's looking at me all suspicious. Oh, but she's gonna eat a drink from her feeder. Hi. Yeah. I'm back, aren't I? She's flying right up and hovering in front of my face. I don't know what she's wondering. Do you think you have some strange flower? Yeah. I ain't that sweet, honey. Okay, she's gonna get on the feeder. I filled it up fresh for her yesterday. That was one of my coming home activities. So maybe that was a thank you. You're welcome. I am happy to provide the sugar water for you. Alright, so double distractions. Stink bugs and hummingbirds. It's a busy place in here. Now she's really looking at me. Now she's sitting on a branch and staring at me. I don't know what this is about. Maybe she's happy to have me home. So anyway, when you talk to people about their jobs and you ask them, hey, do you work full-time? Or do you go to work every day? And they'll say, Yeah, I work five days a week. I work full-time. I I work six days, I work four, twelve-hour shifts. You know, it's people always know what their everydayness about their job is. And if somebody tells you that they are a lawyer or a CEO or a banker or something like that, you don't ask her, hey, do you really work every day? What about weekends? What if you're sick? What about vacation, right? Because those are parts of life and part of self self-care. Um, but if you want to be a writer, if you want to make a living as a writer, if you want to build the habit of creativity, and if you want this to be your job, then yeah, you do have to do it every day. Um but it it really does require that habit where you put yourself in the place where you will write, whether you know what you're gonna write or not, or whether you feel good about it or not. And you write. And you know, and and they, the ubiquitous they, say that you should write uh that that I'm sorry, that it takes thirty days to build a habit. And I believe it. It certainly takes more than a few, more than a week. Can you guys hear Jackson? He's like sitting on the kitchen window around the corner meowing at me because I wouldn't let him out. I know I'm a terrible mean cat mom, but as soon as I'm done here, I'll put him on the harness and let him go out front. So so here I am back working back into my habit. And and it's always painful the first few days. And that's just uh I guess I'm sure that they, the ubiquitous, they have a rule for that too, you know, like thirty days to build a habit, seven days to break one. That sounds kind of good, doesn't it? Uh it certainly doesn't take much to fall out of the habit. And I could really feel that this morning, um, sort of getting back into my ro morning routine and running and jumping rope, although I made it twenty-two jumps this morning, so perhaps I feel without without you know, faltering, without tripping on the thing. So that's my new record. And uh so maybe that speaks to a bit of rest and relaxation and making my coffee. I almost forgot how. No, I it wasn't I forgot how, it's I didn't have that rote habit in me anymore. I just started building on that habit of running across the street to Starbucks and picking up Duranda's order along with mine. And so now today I need to get back into actual writing work or the actual work of writing as opposed to the business of being at conferences and doing various things and vacationing. So I got the page proofs for Warrior of the World, the third book in Jenna's trilogy, Chronicles of Desneria. So I decided I'd just go ahead and do those. That's a fairly low-key um ramp back up activity. Basically, I just have to read through and see. They want me to look for mistakes. I look to see if there's anything more I want to put in, which makes them annoyed because then they have to reset the pages. But you know, it's my last chance to make it what I want to be. And it's it the by the time the page proofs come, I have some distance from the book and I can see a little bit more about what is and is not working in it. And so sometimes I'll catch things that I missed on previous revisions. So I'll do that, and then tomorrow I'm gonna get back into drafting the arrows of the heart. And I'm going for a fairly ambitious writing schedule on that. At RWA at the trade show I ran into Peter Sempleben Sempfleben, who was my editor at Kensington, and now he does all of my um freelance editing. My or he freelance editors for edits for my self-published books. So his schedule is sounding pretty booked. His he's at um PS, as in Peter Sempleben, editorial, ps editorial, I think, dot com. Or you could certainly Google P. S. Editorial. At any rate, Peter's a great, great editor, so he was promising he could like slide me in at some point, which sounds sexual, but isn't because Peter doesn't bat for that team. Rather unabashedly. So I um yeah, my my joke. Now I'm wondering if that was a bad thing to say it probably was. I I do want to talk about, let's see, how much time do I have? I have a little bit of time. Um at RWA at the Rita Awards, Suzanne Brockman received the Lifetime Achievement Award, uh, which is of course an annual award given to a romance writer who's been around for a long time. And I have always known of Suzanne Brockman. It's entirely possible that I have read her books. I probably have over the years, especially when I was younger and um, you know, sort of voraciously read any romance I could pick up. I don't recall offhand. But um meeting her or seeing her there was pretty amazing, and I um wasn't surprised she got Lifetime Achievement because of course I knew her name as being one of the lions of the genre in the industry. But I did not expect her Lifetime Achievement Award speech. Um and just as last year, when I won the Rita Award in Paranormal Romance, the Paranormal Romance category comes right after the Lifetime Achievement Award in the program. Uh so last year Beverly Jenkins received the Lifetime Achievement Award and she made me cry. So then when I got up there when they called my name that I'd won, I was already crying from Beverly Jenkins. So that was like the first thing I said is Man Beverly Jenkins. Uh and then this year I got to present the Paranormal Romance Award, which comes right after Lifetime Achievement again. So I was up next to the stage when Suzanne went up to accept her award and give her speech. Uh sort of sitting next to it. Me and Ronnie Lauren, who was doing erotic presenting the erotic romance award next. Uh so we're sort of sitting on these two little, I don't want to say spindly, but you know, like those hotel, really basic hotel chairs. We're sort of perched on the edges of the chairs in our fancy dresses in the shadows, sort of beneath the stairs. And Suzanne Brockman gets up there and she starts talking about um, and she and she has a thing that starts out, her son introduces her, and I thought that went on a little bit long, but it ended up being really important because her son is an out gay man. And she and he talked about how good she'd been to him, you know, and accepting, and and he's uh working in film and has a film about a gay romance, and they played a trailer, and it it looked cute, but you know, all the whole time I was thinking, well, this should be about Suzanne, not about this kid. Kid, I mean, he's like in his 20s probably. So anyway, um, Suzanne starts in on her speech, and you can find it online. Uh, but she started talking about how back in, I think she said 94, was it 94? She had a best-selling hardcover about uh gay men. And she talked about before that how she was made to take a gay sheriff out of a book by an editor because it would offend some people. And she talked about how at that, I think she said 94 um RWA conference, she MC'd, and they and she'd said that she wanted to make a little statement about her book and about acceptance of gay rights, and they had asked her to preview it at the rehearsal, and she was asked to take it out of her speech. And she did, and regretted it ever since. And she felt like she'd been silenced, and she felt like she had let people down by sort of contributing to this culture of well, we don't say things that might offend people. And so she really, I mean, she did this class is, you know, this speech was an amazing speech. She did a wonderful job of varying the levels and all of this. Uh I don't know if she's just that good or if she got help with it, but she really took it up and down because she said, Um, RWA, you know, you are partly responsible for for this culture. You know, that you have by asking people not to talk about stuff, and editors by asking them to take gay characters out of the books, you are responsible. Um and she took it a step further and she led into saying, you know, that pointing out that 53% of white women in the U.S. voted for Trump, which has turned out to be a which turned out to be no one we all could have predicted the signs were very clear, a hateful administration that uh wants to remove rights from gay people, from disabled people, from people of color. Um, you know, of course the list goes on, it's been horrific to watch, you know, and so she called on everyone to to do better, to do better at the elections at midterm in November and to um, you know, think about who you're voting for and why. And I found it rousing, I found it stirring, um, I clapped hard. Uh and a lot of it was history I didn't know. And so I was really glad that she said it. And I've heard other people say since. I mean, there are the detractors who are sending hateful things. Apparently, the board was getting death threats even before the ceremony was over via email from people who are mad about it. Um, RWA members or not, I don't know. But, you know, somebody else, I've a couple people have said, well, you know, was it her place to take away from the celebration of the evening? And it's like I don't I'm not sure I believe that that takes away from the celebration. I'm not sure that celebration means not talking about important things. And that's kind of become a f a refrain on the US lately, you know, like what's happened to civility in politics. And some of that is is that, you know, it wasn't civility before, it was silence. It was people did not speak out and say what they believed for fear of offending someone. That's not civility, that's oppression, that's being a doormat. That's, you know, like saying, oh, please don't be offended by my ideas, I'll just very quietly keep them out of your hearing so that you won't be bothered. And I think demonstrably that time is over because if if we believe in things like gay rights, if we believe that people of color deserve equal rights, if we believe that uh people traveling here from other countries deserve a chance to be part of America in the same way that our ancestors got to be a part of America. You know, and and if you're listening to this, maybe you don't think those things. You know, I saw someone recently do a tirade online about how these kids think that they have a right to health care and how wrong they are. You know, it's I do think we have a right to health care. I I do think that that all people are created equal, and it doesn't matter who you love, and it doesn't matter what color your skin is, and it doesn't matter what religious background you have or what religion you practice, you know it I I really do believe that we have to speak up and say, yes, we do believe these things, and the fact that you didn't know that so many of us believed these things is because we were being politely quiet and not bothering you about it. And yeah, I do think that the Lifetime Achievement Award is absolutely the place to say something, to espouse your personal idealism, or not idealism, um ideology. Because idealism has a little bit of shade to it, right? You know, like that. It's not realistic. So anyway, it's worth listening to her speech online. If you find the whole live stream of the awards, you could stick on a few minutes longer and see me get up there. Um and yeah, I I won't talk any more today. I've I'll now that I'm back in the saddle, I will talk some more in the next few days. Um get back in the groove on the podcast. So hope you all have a wonderful day, and I'll talk to you tomorrow. Bye.