First Cup of Coffee - September 18, 2018

Talking today about how "networking" is truly making friendships and supporting each other. Updates on THE ORCHID THRONE and THE ARROWS OF THE HEART, too.

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Good morning everyone. Today is September 18th. We are in the latter half of September. Can you believe it? And it is 8.05 in the morning. Ugh! And I just walked into the kitchen and my milk cafe spewed. So you get to hear it. Every once in a while it does something, I think it gets a cavitation in there. And I mean I should stand here and watch it, but you guys should know that I'm so bad about standing and watching anything. My mom is always complaining that I won't sit still when I talk on the phone. And I don't I like my eggs over easy, but I often make them overcook them because I wander away during the cooking process. I don't know, it's just like a huge character flaw on my part. So anyway, I do not watch the milk cafe. I set it and it goes, and every once in a while it'll do this where it gets like some sort of cavitation in there, and then the foam builds up and it goes all over the counter. And I can tell the moment I walk up to it, as I did just now, because the foam is like up against the top of the thing, and it gets all over the place. But it's far from a disaster, it's just always kind of perplexing. It's like, why, why today, milk cafe? Yeah, I don't have a very difficult life overall. Um, all right, so what was I saying? Oh, it's 8 05 in the morning. Um I decided not to run today. I've it's always tempting to run. I think I've mentioned this before because it drops my weight and my body fat post-run, partly because I'm sweating. Um which is always, I don't know, being a numbers geek, I like putting lower numbers into my charts. But I sometimes think it's better for me to run every other day. Most of the um, you know, the exercise gurus, the real runners, the people who actually know what they're doing, um, recommend training every other day. So and then I do think that it's probably better for me. I can kind of tell I had a very good run yesterday, so I thought, okay, I won't run today. However, I did oversleep. Uh David was off early, and I woke up from deep sleep at uh seven, which is later for me. Um usually I wake up around six, and I woke up briefly around five and thought, oh, I've got another hour or so. So I went back to sleep and boom woke up at seven, and you know, I could tell by the Fitbit what kind of sleep I was in, and I did go back into a deep sleep right before morning, or right before waking, I guess would be more accurate to say. Some REM sleep and then into deep, so I was a little groggy when I woke up, but um, it felt good. I worked very hard yesterday, so that could be part of it. There always seems to be a correlation there. Um, I got about a third of the way through Orchid Throne, which is what I needed to do. I've got three days to revise it, and I made it through something like 126 pages. So that was great. I added a little scene to the beginning. My editor felt like I needed to establish something, and uh my friend friend Kelly Robson came up with a brilliant idea. I wasn't sure what to do because some of it had to do with um, you know, one I don't know if it's a drawback, it's a a restriction of writing and first person point of view, is that of course the everything that you put in the text is determined by that person's lens on the universe. You can't have anything in there that they don't know or don't understand. And so the heroine Karen in Arrows of the Heart, which, and this is not spoilery because you all should know this from reading her in other books, you know, Karen has just, you know, been a pretty protected person. You know, she's also from Desneria. She has a lot of parallels with Jenna. It's been something of a challenge to write them both at similar times, even though they're very different people, um, trying to find the sort of different trajectories and different qualities for each of them. When in some ways they do have the same kind of cultural definition to overcome, um, having come from very restrictive backgrounds where they were not given broad educations and where they have a lot of ideas about their own limitations because they're female. And so Karen not only is she from another place and she's in Oniphon and she's you know a major fish out of water, but she also um doesn't understand a whole lot about the stakes, about what's going on in the world. Um, to some extent she doesn't care because it's all the same to her. Um it's it's not her war. Um she's from one side of the from the country on one side of the war and taking refuge in the country on the other side of the war, but you know, she really doesn't have huge stakes in one or the other. You know, she w just wants to have a normal life. Uh she just, you know, wants to she'd like to find a husband and maybe have kids. And you know, she'd be very happy if someone just gave her a little cottage and a loving husband, and she would just settle right down and do that. But of course that doesn't work out for her or there wouldn't be a story. That would be a funny story to write. Well it wouldn't, because of course it would end in a couple of pages. Um you can't jump right to the cottage and the happy ever after. Hi Jackie Boy, what you doing? Coming up to see me? He was down in his sweet spot watching birds, but he must be bored. Heard me talking. So so anyway, it's hard to really establish world stakes um with someone who doesn't care about them in their first person point of view. But then Kelly Ros, so I was really kind of wondering how could I do this? Because I could see his point. Um, but I wasn't sure how to do this. And then Kelly Robson, I asked her and she had a great idea. And I was like, Well, that's a perfect idea. How did you how did you come up with that so fast? And she said, Because I is smart. So there you are. Kelly Robson is smart, and she will come up with solutions to your plot and character problems. I believe she takes payment in wine and chocolate. So there you are. Lady walking a doggy down the road, huh, Jackson? Big old dog. It's a pretty one. Not sure what that is. It might be an untrimmed schnauzer. Schnauzers are so funny when they're not groomed in that typical schnauzer style because they look like big woolly beasts. So I got that written, and then I did some minor tweaks throughout, a little bit of adjusting. Um but yeah, I made it a good pace, put in a pretty long day, but uh that was pretty fantastic. And then I also did some business yesterday, went back and forth with Agent Sarah and editor Jenny on the Orchid Throne. Uh that is now going to production. We're all done with the developmental edits and so forth, so now it goes uh into the sort of a different set of people who will handle things like line copy editing, proofreading, and so forth. And uh Jenny wants to send it out to three to four authors for uh blurbs. So we're we were talking about who to send that to, who to hit up, as it were. Um thing that is good about being where I am, um, Sarah and then my friend Grace Draven often laugh at me and say that I know everybody, which is not true, but I do know a lot of people. So Jenny was kind of laughing at me because she was saying, Well, what about such and so? Do you think we could get a a blurb from them? A blurb is when the author says, you know, something nice about the book that they put on the cover. She said, Do you think you could get a blurb from them? And I said, Oh yeah, I did a blurb for her last year. I could hit her up, she owes me. Um But you know, it's something that I talk about in person. I don't know if I've talked about on this podcast, but I really do believe in the importance of networking. And networking is one of those words that people hate. Um and frankly, I hate it too. I I don't like the word networking because it sounds, well, first of all, it sounds like very I don't know, it sounds 70s to me, which may not be legit. Um I don't know when it really came into play. But you know, like at conferences sometimes they'll have those, you know, networking cocktail hour, and you think, oh my fucking God, what does that mean that I'm going to be standing at there with a cocktail in one hand and a stack of business cards, my business cards in the other, which is, I mean, the I that's what I always picture. I always picture a bunch of people in their suits, and the ladies are still in their sensible heels, which hurt by the time you hit cocktail hour, and you're have your drink in one hand and your business cards in the others, and you relentlessly network. And we've all met those people who relentlessly network. So I really don't I don't like the word because I do think that it's um it implies a certain level of of callousness where you attempt to use other people to advance your own interests. How's that for a definition? Uh and what I always tell people is that there is a much better phrase for the concept of networking, and it's something that they already know how to do, and that is making friends with people. Yes, I know, gasp. Um it's something that I think we I don't know, a lot of times our friendships in life come about more or less by accident. We end up making friends with people who are doing the same thing that we're doing. So it's easier when we're young because you make friends with people that you're going to school with. College is great because you're all away from your families, you're living together, um, you're in courses together. Uh, you know, my friends in college became like a second family to me, and it was amazing, and I loved them, and I mourned greatly when I graduated from college and didn't no longer have that. But one thing that oh well, I should finish on that thread. This is the disadvantage of me talking instead of writing. I, you know, other times you'll like uh a lot of women have their mommy groups, you know, the other women who have kids the same age, and they trade babysitting and carpooling, and they form intense friendships. And soldiers talk about making friends, d especially during war, you know, the whole band of brothers idea, which is a profound kind of friendship because you're actually responsible for each other's lives. Uh you know, and you could probably think of other times in your life where you've been friends with people while you were doing a similar thing. You know, the people at work, you tend to be friends with, you know, make friends with people at work. You know, you might have one or two people. Um, you know, sometimes people talk about my work wife or my work husband, uh someone else that you work with that you work with very intimately, and it's in a team that's almost like a marriage. You might work with them for many, many years. And then when you leave the job, sometimes those friendships fade away, and you think, well, was it not a good friendship? And the thing is, is it was a good friendship, but it was a friendship that was defined by that thing that you were doing together, and once you no longer are, the energy behind the friendship goes away. So as a writer, as authors, yeah, we're friends with other authors because you know, we're doing it's like being colleagues, right? We are colleagues. One of the tricks with writers is finding other people who are essentially at the same level that you are, and that can be a little bit painful because when you start out, you're friends with other newbie authors, right? You're all aspiring, and that was certainly true for me, and maybe you're friends with a few people who are farther along than you are, which is great because they they're helpful to you. And but then you know, publishing is such a funny industry, and there's a lot of serendipity involved and a lot of variables, and some of your newbie author friends uh get published very well ahead of you. That certainly happened to me, and others might not, and and people get jealous, and the jealousy really comes into play, which is unfortunate, but it does, and some of those friendships fall away because of that. Um especially if it's you know, some of the authors who were ahead of you when you were newbie, and then if they feel like you have in some way past them, they don't always handle that. Wow. Um which is unfortunate, but I think that's just part of life. But after a while you sort of begin to settle out at the people who are at basically the same career level you are, and maybe more important with the same sort of career ethic that you have, um, because then you can talk to them about certain things. Uh one example of that would be once you're farther along in your career and you are trug trying to juggle a couple of different book deals and you've got a lot of pressures and you're trying to decide on marketing and this sort of thing. And if you complain to someone who does not yet have a book deal, they'll say, Oh, well, it must be nice to have those problems, you know, or they'll call them champagne problems. And you can acknowledge that yes, it's a great problem to have. You know, it's definitely a better problem to be trying to juggle a couple of different book deals than to be like not getting any bites from agents and editors at all and feel like you're getting nowhere. Uh but the thing is, is that, and I often say this to people when they're like, oh, I know it's a champagne problem. It's like, well, a champagne problem is still a problem. You know, it's it's a good problem to have because it's better than the alternative, but that doesn't mean that it's not a problem that you need to solve. I mean, you still have to figure out how you're gonna juggle those book deals or the marketing or dealing with your agent and your editor and all of this. So you have to find people at a similar level. Um and it sounds mercenary, but it's not. It's really not because the whole thing about friendship, the reason why I like to frame it in terms of making friends with people is instead of networking, is that friendships are about about real support. I mean, it is about the band of brothers or band of sisters. It's you know, and people can snark about those mommy groups, like people snark about everything female, but you know, those women who are supporting each other because they all have children about the same age, that's a huge support. It's emotional support, it's life support because they can trade off the carpooling and the babysitting and trade off advice. I mean, that's a a very important kind of community. Um, and when you're friends with people, you help them out because you want to help them. Uh, because it's a good thing to do because you care about them, and because they care about you, they help you out. One thing I learned in college from my friend uh Karen Koontz, now Karen Weisner, who we I still chat with from time to time. We've been friends most of our lives now. But Karen was my sorority sister, so I met her through the sorority, which was a good way to meet people. And we were in a class together, and Karen said, that one guy in class always says very interesting things. Let's go make friends with him, let's go invite him to have pizza with us after class. And I was totally taken aback by that. Um, and Karen comes from a very social, higher social level family, I guess you could say, um, in Memphis. And this was just something that she had learned or second nature to her to be. I guess is can you be second nature about something very deliberate? She certainly had acquired the skill where you pick out people who seem interesting to you, and then you make friends with them. And you do it by going up to them and saying, I thought this thing you said was very interesting. And would you like to go have lunch and talk about it? Which is exactly what we did. And um, that guy Steve was my friend for many, many years. And he was a very interesting person, and even though he was kind of surprised by these two women coming up to him and saying, Hey, you want to have pizza with us? It well, he he liked it, and we ended up having a great time. And it was never a romantic or sexual thing between us because it was um it was really just friendship, it was a sharing of ideas. So that's one thing that I joke about it sometimes where I say, Oh yeah, I read this person's books and I wanted and I stalked her and made her be my friend. Um but that's essentially what it is, and and I shouldn't use the word stalk because that has a much graver meaning than I'm using it there. But you know, it's like you you make contact with them, you find out, you know, find out their email or you find them on social media and you say, hey, you know, I loved your books and I think you're an interesting person, want to be my friend. Only you do it a little bit more subtly than that. That would be a great, I should write that down that would be a good workshop for a conference, wouldn't it? So I think I will write that down. And on that note, I'll wrap it up and dive back into revisions of Arrows of the Heart. And thank you all for sharing my first cup of London fog with me. And I hope you all have a wonderful day. Take care. Bye bye.