First Cup of Coffee - March 30, 2021

Why I think the success advice "If you're not growing, you're dying" is total bunk, along with associated thoughts on waxing and waning, homeostasis, cycles in nature, and why the full moon is valued over the new moon.

THE SORCERESS QUEEN AND THE PIRATE ROGUE is here (https://jeffekennedy.com/the-sorceres...​).

You can watch the You Tube video of the podcast here (https://youtu.be/hW08_bfmFEU).

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Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:01

Good morning everyone. This is Jeffy Kennedy, author of fantasy romance and romantic fantasy. I'm here with my first cup of coffee. And I'm sitting outside. It's a beautiful morning. Soak up that sunshine. Today is Tuesday, March 30th. Almost almost there. So I thought about carrying the laptop outside, working on that. Maybe I'll work up to that. Um, I would probably have to make sure that Jackson's on his harness first, because uh, you know, he's a jailbreak and son of a gun. And I just know he's very wily that way, that I know he would um watch for me to be if you're carrying something through the door, you can't really be guarding for a cat to go darting out beneath your feet. And he knows us. What's really funny is if we have guests, uh people are even though we warn them, they just like they don't believe us. They don't um they don't realize how fast and oily he is. Uh yeah, like my stepdad, my stepdad takes a long time to go through the door, and he tends to be a little, I don't know, he's um, you know, kind of dreamy in a way. He's always thinking about something else, and like he goes through the door and he takes a fairly long time to go through the door, and he doesn't like guarding his feet. And uh Jackson just he can pick out that kind of personality, he'll be like, oh, that's a person who doesn't pay attention as they're going through the door. We had one of our trusted house sitters actually left kind of a scathing review. It wasn't scathing. She said liked everything about the house, but she said that um Jackson was a very ornery cat. And even though she didn't ever tell us so, I am I feel quite certain that she uh that he jailbroke on her. Because I could tell she was that kind of personality. Yeah, like if you're fussing with something as you go through the door trying to carry something, yeah, that's his uh that's his sweet spot. It's very funny because I was saying to David yesterday that I I feel quite confident that Jackson understands a lot of the stuff that I say to him. And and David said, Oh yeah, he does. But like I was trying to um I was bringing him around he'll you know, like he'll he'll go down the path and then come back up and he has his leash on, you know, and it's a very long one, but he'll get caught like around the pillar of the portal. So yesterday I was out here freeing him from a bush and he started to walk back, and I said, No, no, no, don't go that way, go this way. And he changed direction and went around the other way. So, I mean he we communicate fairly well. All of his um misunderstandings are our deliberate bending of the rules. And so I'm heading up the road, at least not too fast, right? Yeah, and I'm actually getting warm. Take off the sweater. Can hear the birdies singing away. Birdies are very happy. Shall we do earrings? So today's earrings are crescent moons that I've had since college. Um little silver crescent moons with a nicely detailed profile face on them. Uh, one in each direction. And because I was getting these out, I got out my necklace, which is also a crescent moon that I bought in college. So that was my sorority symbol, um, Gammafy Beta. Uh and I had a lot of crescent moon stuff. I even wore my crescent moon sundress for you guys. I'm going with a theme today. So it's kind of funny because um, you know, Crescent Moon was a great symbol to have for the sorority. I collected a lot of crescent moon jewelry. And in later years, because you know, like all of these things become corporations, which I think is interesting. Um, you know, and even though Gammafy is a nonprofit corporation with a foundation and so forth, um, they like get deeply into things like branding. And, you know, so while the Crescent Moon held a sentimental value for me, uh they like got into this big thing for a while, or not for a while. It was like a watershed and and it changed that someone suggested successfully, um, and I guess it's not backwards to you guys, we would always do the crescent moon like this. Uh, and I mean, we've elected, you know, with the songs. I love the crescent moon. Uh but at one point someone made a huge case. A woman in the sorority made a huge case for that we should always draw the crescent moon as waxing, that it should always be waxing and never waning. And the way that we had been traditionally drawing it, which I believe our founders had tradition had drawn it. Well, sometimes they did it upright like a horseshoe, but um, that we had always done it as waning, and they're like, no, this is wrong, this is bad for the you know, the the outlook of the sorority, you know, that we should always be waxing, we should always be growing. And I first of all, you know, I'm shaking my cane. You guys need to give me a cane to shake. Um you know, it's like, really, this is this is our line in the sand. Uh and now everyone must adhere to the uh to the to the waxing crescent moon. The other thing I find very interesting about it is that it's all the value is placed on waxing, on going towards the full moon. And I know what they're going for. They're going for growth, which is like clearly one of the values that American culture worships, right? You know, like I've seen some of the success people talk about it. I had a teacher once who was like, if you are not growing, you are dying. It's like, really? Um you know, I I could make a whole lot of arguments about complex biological systems, and I'm I'm not much of one for a binary anyway. If you're not growing, you are dying. Uh it creates this relentless pressure. Um that if you have any kind of downtick, if you even if you are at homeostasis, which is arguably the point of of biological systems, uh the waxing and waning creates homeostasis. You shouldn't be forever growing. Um, you know, I I kind of want to come up with saying saying like if you're only growing, you will eventually outstrip your resources and collapse. How's that? For you know, it's it's not going to go on a t-shirt, right? So the other thing about this is not only does it place all the value on growth, but it also places all the value on going towards the full moon. And I'm very interested in why we think the full moon is the valuable thing and the new moon is not, right? That the waning moon going towards the new moon, which is invisible, is is like nothingness. We think it's nothingness. The full moon is awesome, the new boo new moon sucks, I guess is the uh thinking there. And and I don't agree with it. And and you guys have probably read some of my books um where I'm trying to think of which ones I've I I know I've used the theme in more than one book, but it's that the new moon is actually the most powerful, uh, especially for like a moon goddess, like Moranu, who is associated with the moon, that moving towards the new moon is mol moving to the fullness of darkness. Uh and that I liked playing with the idea that all the magic is in the fullness of darkness instead of the fullness of brightness. Uh, but you know, really the waxing and waning is part of it, you know, and and there's my Taoist coming out. You know, you find the middle path, and it's the cycle, right? The the homeostasis is in the cycle. So, like a complex biological system, we could take a fairly simple one that most people understand, like our body temperature, which works like essentially like the thermostat in your house, right? You know, it starts to get too cool and the system kicks on and pushes it up so it warms again, starts to get too hot, system kicks off to lower it down again. And the whole point is to maintain that consistent temperature. Well, you maintain it by this cycle of waxing and waning, right? It's not this steady line. There is no such thing as an absolute steady state in nature, right? It's always a little bit of oscillation in there, a little bit of waxing and waning. And in fact, the whole idea of growing and dying is a cycle too, right? You grow a bit, you die back a bit. Um, that's how our seasons work, right? You have um, you know, spring, everything burgeons. Good morning. Summertime, everything grows, right? Then in the fall, it dies back, packs back, goes back down to the roots. Winter's time of sleep, then it grows again. So if you're not growing, you're dying. Well, I mean, there's a lot of other things you could be doing. If you're not growing, you are storing nutrients in your roots. That also wouldn't be great for a t-shirt. So all of these things brought to you by the crescent moons, and you'll notice that having a crescent moon on each year, one is waxing, one is waning, which is as it should be. Uh I'm sure Gamma Phi Beta International does not care what I think. Um for a lot of reasons that we won't go into. I just realized my shadows on my wall, on the wall next to me. Is that distracting? We'll move it over this way so it's a little less. Give you more blue sky. New Mexico blue skies. I was glad that you guys uh appreciated that. So let's see. I I only got through like 26 pages of Sorceress Queen revisions. Sometimes some of you have asked me about how I track uh goals on editing, and I know I've talked about it before, but just to reiterate, because it never hurts, is that I do it by working for for three hours. I do my same thing that I would normally do with with drafting, that I work for an hour, take a break. Good morning. That's my neighbor who cannot see, he did like chin on the steering wheel, did not see me. He also had on like a parka and a ski cap. Different strokes, right? Well, you know, here I'm against this Adobe Wall, so it's um nice and radiant. So so yeah, I do my my three one-hour work sessions with breaks between, and then I call it good. With editing, revising, it's tempting to go longer, and I used to do that, but it does tire me out. So so I try not to. So I only made it through 26 pages yesterday, which was actually just in two hours, because the first hour I spent assembling notes, and I talked to Emily Ma, who gave me comments on the story. She really liked it. Um, Dorinda really likes it. She says it's her new favorite, but I think that's partly Dorinda's personality. Uh everything is her new favorite, makes her a delightful person. But you know that scene that I was telling you about when I told you guys that it was an unexpected scene and unexpectedly hot. Dorinda loves this scene. She's like, oh my god, that was fucking hot. It's like, yeah, I know. Jack, gosh. We're gonna do cover reveal next week. I don't think I got the exact date, but I know it's gonna be next week. Exciting. So um, 26 pages in two hours is actually pretty good for me revising the beginning because that's always the part that requires the most adjusting once I get done writing. And Emily's comments mainly had to do with that, you know, like tweaking. She's like, Well, did you mean to do it this way? And I was like, No, that was actually me not knowing what the answer was yet. So I do need to layer that in. But otherwise, it sounded like it was pretty tight. Um, Dorinda said, Don't change a thing, so that's good. And yeah, so we'll see how far I get today, but um, I'm feeling good about the revision. Uh I do just track number of pages, that's what I started to say before. JD Salinger. Um yeah, I keep track of how many pages I do in that hour, and I've found that my average, my average for revision is 60 pages a day. Um but remember, remember how averages work uh because some days I'll get like 90 pages, um, and that makes up for the 26 page days. So um, and and things that I look for at this point is like I noticed that there were a couple of things like personal ticks, that sort of thing that I mentioned early on that I dropped later, and and I know that I do that, especially as I'm writing fast and I'm mostly just trying to get the character arcs and the plot arcs in place. Um, then I'll go back and put in like some of those details, you know, sort of the um what happened to the dog syndrome. It it's hard when you have somebody um I I tease Durinda about um a bracelet, because in one of her books she had um her heroine have uh be given a bracelet. Those of you who have read her um betwixt and between books will know what I'm talking about. And so she has the bracelet and she likes the bracelet, and then the bracelet gets like burned to ash off of her wrist, and then later she had the bracelet again, and she kept having to go to these contortions to account for the bracelet. And she and and I was reading an early, you know, this was before you guys saw it, you know, because she was like, um, the the the Blackthorn bracelet I still wore, and I was like, nope, because it got burned out on page 50. And so we were really giggling about that because it's really easy to do. Things that are so obvious to the reader, because the time compression is so much shorter, are things that are so easily lost when you're writing the book over a course of a couple of months. You know, two months later you forget that your heroine had this treasured bracelet from her grandmother that she never took off, like which apparently vanished somewhere in the first, you know, around page 75 and never reappears again. You're just like, damn it. Forgot about that treasured bracelet she never takes off. So those are the kinds of things that you account for in revision. Um and when I was a newbie-er writer, I used to really resent myself for forgetting those things, and now I am much more at peace with it because you know it's just it it's the nature of writing a book. You're you're just going to drop certain details like that, and that's okay. That's um that's how it goes. You can't account for everything all the time, and that's why and that's why you get to revise. So um I don't know if I have much else to tell you guys. That's that's where I'm at with things. Uh very yeah, just just happy that everybody thinks that um I mean Jack kind of shocked me with this carriage scene. I I didn't expect that, and so I'm I'm glad that it's going over well. It's nice that spring is coming too. Okay, well, um I think that's all I have to say today. But I hope that you all get a chance to be out in the sun if sun is your thing. Jennifer Estep would say no. She she only likes inside. But she also has that beautiful milky skin, you know, that's like the the princess who has never left the tower. I I envy her complexion, but not enough to uh deprive myself of the sun. We all make our choices, right? I will remind you all that first cup of coffee is 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 Thursday. Take care. Bye bye.