First Cup of Coffee - April 2, 2021

Finally, the story of how we ended up in Santa Fe! Mostly because I have no brains left, now that the revision of The Sorceress Queen and the Pirate Rogue is 25 pages from done. Yes, I know I forgot about the earrings.

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/GcFPwJ4rIIA).

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 0:00

Good morning everyone. This is Jeffy Kennedy, author of Fantasy Romance and Romantic Fantasy. I'm here with my first cup of coffee. Yummy? So let's see, today is Friday. Yay! April 2nd. And uh I I have to resist the urge to put my coffee cup up on the keyboard of the laptop that's just asking for trouble. Ah spring is here in Robust Force. I put my hat on, beginning of hat season. I wear my hats in wintertime sometimes, but um mostly, I mean, the whole reason I started wearing hats is to keep the the sun off my skin. Since I am a uh a pale-skinned Irish Scott extraction girl. Feels good. So um here we are. I'm pretty excited uh going out of town this afternoon on a little excursion, um, having to pack, which is funny because I'm all like, what is packing? Who am I? And so no podcast Monday, because I come back Monday night. I know you're all waiting with baited breath uh for you guys know where baited comes from? You all are smart, you probably do. It drives me crazy every time I see uh some author write it as B-A-I-T-E-D, baited breath. It's supposed to be B-A-T-E-D and refers to horses having the bits in their mouth and how they breathe as they are um actually being tormented by it. Restricted breath. Um so yes, revision of Sorceress Queen and the Pirate Rogue is very nearly done. That reminds me I should close this lest Corrine pop in, close my Hangouts tab, uh, in case she asks me where some things are. I have to write the BCC, which I've put off until the very last moment. Cover reveal is Monday. So uh cover should be beautiful. Uh I think you well, I think it is beautiful. You guys should think so too. Uh but I need to write the BCC, which shouldn't be a problem because I've written the book, it's just I don't have a whole lot of brains left. Brains. But the revision is almost complete. I only have 25 pages left. So I um yeah, I have to be careful not to fall into the fugue spa fugue state of thinking about it. Uh I do have a tired. Um very excited to just spend my weekend relaxing, thinking thank you you guys who sent best wishes. Um yeah, a little vacation. I think arguably the first vacation we have had in I couldn't even tell you because you know, like if you don't count going to visit family, which I think doesn't always count, maybe it's since we went to Ireland in August of 2019, that might be the last vacation, and even that was partly a working vacation for me. So um, yeah, this little weekend getaway and uh with some friends and just vaccinated friends. And uh yeah, I I don't want to rub it in people's faces because I know a lot of you are still waiting on first shots, although um I'm hearing a lot of my friends now around my age are getting their first shots now. So so finally everybody's getting the vaccine. Um but but yeah, it's it's um it's really nice. I'm glad I got this revision done. I could send this off to the proofreader, send that BCC to Corine. Um the cover reveal will happen without me on Monday, so that's always nice. Should be should be great, right? Should be really super fun. Um, and I'm happy with this revision. Uh Dorinda says it's her new favorite. I think that Dorinda just whatever is in front of Dorinda is her new favorite. And I do not mean that in a bad way, Dorinda, because I think you are delightful that way. But this one is more action-packed. And she um she finished reading it last night and sent me an email saying um that the flew by and there was never a dull moment, and she and then she said, not that you ever do have boring moments, and it's like I I know I probably have boring moments. You could tell me. So yeah. So, yes, yesterday I did another big push. I don't know if I could tell you how many pages I made it through yesterday. Let's see, I could oh, I probably can tell you because this is open. Um I guess did I just make it through 65 pages yesterday? That seems not right. Oh, no, I made it through more than that. Well, I didn't update the formula. Let's see. So I went from page 330 to page 209. So doing the quick math. 21, 121 pages. Yeah, so I made it through 121 pages yesterday. Five one-hour sessions, which is pretty much my max. I seem to really tap out after that. So, so yeah, just 25 left today. I've added almost 5,000 words this week. Mostly just weaving in stuff, layering in things. Um, my revisions are always, always, always adding. Um, although usually on my considering that that was a first draft, and I really didn't go back and noodle with it much at all. And and then this revision is really my second pass. I don't often have this smooth of a process. Knock on wood, right? Uh, but for some reason, you know, even coming back over it, it it looked really tight. Um, and I was happy with it. The Jay agrees. Um and I ended up, I think I have only cut, I you know, because I keep my outtakes document, I've only cut less than 200 words, which is odd too. So who knows? I mean, that's one of the things about the writing is that you know, some books write easier than others, and there's no reason for it. It doesn't mean anything. There is no um I it's tempting to assign a formula to it because we always want to assign formulas to things that like and and we particularly want the ones that are harder to write to be better and more valuable to justify all of the torment, and that's not necessarily the case. Sometimes I don't know, I don't know what it is. It's a mystery to quote Shakespeare and love. Neighbor with her German Shepherd. Her German Shepherd always stops to look over here looking for cats. But she keeps him on a leash, but she's a very responsible neighbor. So yeah, I've got quite a few things to do this morning to get ready to go, get that stuff finished out and sent off. Uh, but I think it's all pretty doable. And I'm I'm feeling reasonably good about it. Yeah, but a little bit brain-empty. Okay, so let's see. What we're at nine minutes. Let's see if I can get in the story of how we ended up in Santa Fe. Um I'm all out of latte now. It's probably not even that long of a story. So we've been living in Laramie, Wyoming, for over 20 years. David is from Wyoming, and he was working for Game and Fish as a fish pathologist, and the winters in Laramie are long and brutal. Uh and they last until like June. No lie. They start in around Labor Day and last all the way through May. You get some nice weather in there, but it's it's rough and it's very windy. And um so there was it was, I think, the fall. We were starting into the fall, and David was stressed about work. He'd been at the job for a long time and wasn't happy. And he, you know, was like, Oh, I don't know what I'm gonna do. And it was a job he had fallen into when the kids were little before I met him, uh, and it had been good living for a long time, but it wasn't what he'd chosen. And I said, Well, I know what I think you should do. I said, You turn 50 next July, and you have your 20 years of service. They were doing that whole encouraging people, y'all like, I don't know, the like the 70, 80, 20 rule, something like that. It's whatever how it works out. Anyway, with the years that he had on the job plus his age, maybe it was like 70, 30. I don't know. Uh doesn't matter. So, anyway, he could take early retirement from his job. And I said, I think you should take early retirement and go to school to be an acupuncturist. And he was flabbergasted, and he said, Why? And I said, Because you love acupuncture, you've been wanting to do acupuncture for a long time, it would be your chosen career, and this hasn't been, and you've been doing this job for 20 years, and that's long enough. And I said, We I said you could pick a school in a place that we actually want to live, and because we were tired of living in Laramie, and I said, let's move and you can go to acupuncture school. And and he said, Well, but I'm too young to retire. And I said, Well, that's entirely the point. I said, thinking of it as uh, you know, you're taking early retirement, yes, but you're not retiring, you're you're quitting your job and still getting paid. So it's a beautiful thing. I mean, not a lot, but he, you know, has his retirement stipend. And, you know, had his insurance covered. Now we've switched it over because the state of Wyoming is really screwed up, and he was actually going to have to pay more than he was getting from his stipend just to cover the monthly premium. And they didn't even cover that much. That's another story. So uh I said, pick where you want to go. So he started looking at all these different acupuncture colleges, and we checked out a bunch. We looked at um Austin, and we went up and toured a couple in on Vancouver Island around Victoria in British Columbia. Uh, we looked at one in Portland, Oregon. We actually did that on one trip. We went up to the northwest and we went and looked at the one in Portland and got the whole tour and everything, and then we went over and spent a few days on Vancouver Island to Victoria, which we really loved up there. We'd been there on vacation, and he looked at those schools. Um, he looked at the one in like Denver or Boulder. I checked out the one in Austin for him because I was down there working for the day job. I still had the day job in environmental consulting then, but I worked from home, so that was part of the deal that I said, you know, I can work from anywhere. So I said, let's let's pick a where we want to be. So, and he applied to the ones that he liked, and he got in and we settled on the one in Victoria. We really liked the one in Victoria, and we decided and we went up again later. He he went he applied and everything, and then we went up again. I I may be telling it out of order. He may have applied, I think he went ahead and applied, and then we went up and toured the school and settled on it. Maybe it was two trips because we went up again and we went house hunting because our house in Laramie had appreciated substantially, and so I was like, you know, let's buy a new house. And we found a house that we loved in Victoria, it was up on this hill, had a view of the ocean, something I'd always wanted. And this was all in the early spring, and David was turning 50 in July, he'd put in his notice. We'd told everyone at our big Christmas party that we were moving away, and we, you know, were sort of gradually putting things together. And meanwhile, I was traveling all the time for the day job. I was traveling like two weeks out of every month, it was crazy, and and it ended up being so hard to get the Victoria thing to happen. Um, the Canadians were incredibly difficult about visas. Um, David could have one as a student. For me, they they kept refusing. Well, actually, they gave David a hard time too. Um, they made it difficult for us to buy the house. They wanted us to put 40% down, um, 40% down on this house, which we even if we sold the Laramie house, we I don't know, we I don't know if we could have afforded it. It would have been very, very tight. And besides, which everyone was like, this is bad, makes bad financial sense. So we kept wrangling with them about that. David kept applying for uh the you know the visa and stuff, and I had applied, and they'd basically told me that I would just have to be, since I had a U.S. employer, that I would just have to deal with um like going through customs every time I return to the country. And and I was really kind of dreading that because I thought, well, you know, the last thing I'm gonna want is coming back from a week of working somewhere in the U.S. and you know, trying to get home late at night on a Friday night or something, and having them say, no, they're on a whim, not gonna let me in the country tonight. Not gonna let me go home. Uh so fast forward to now it's on also we couldn't sell the house because this was 2009 and the house had dropped out of the, the bottom had dropped out of the housing market. And even though we had a very desirable house right close to university, beautiful old 1913 arts and crafts house built by one of the founders of the university, really neat house. Spring is here. Thank you. Um we we were not getting offers on the house. And you know, it was just people couldn't get the financing together, it was bad risk, all this kind of thing. And of course, our Victoria house that we'd put the offer on, that was contingent on the sale of the Laramie House. But it was June and getting down to the wire, um, you know, we would have to move in August. Classes started in August, and nothing was settled. None of this was in place. And I was working here in Santa Fe uh for the day job. We were at because Santa Fe is the capital of New Mexico. I was always in the capitals of states, was which was interesting because they're not always like the the city that you think of as being the most glamorous, you know, like Springfield, Illinois, or Jefferson City, Missouri. So I was here in Santa Fe at Fort Marcy, for those of you who know it, and I was talking on my cell phone, standing outside in the evening, done with work for the day, and looking at the lights of Santa Fe below, and talking to David, and he had just gotten another stupid, I mean, weird, weird refusals on the visa. I mean, like they kept telling him he was missing stuff he wasn't missing. And he had just gotten another one and he was depressed and flu, and I was kind of talking him through it, and he said, um, you know, this just feels like it's not gonna happen. It's it's so difficult, it feels like maybe this is not what's supposed to happen. And I said, Well, maybe we should consider some other options. Maybe we should knock on some other doors and see what opens. If if you really feel like there's so much resistance from the universe for us doing this, let's let's knock on some other doors. And he said, Well, like what? And I said, Well, looking at the lights below me, I said, What about Santa Fe? We've always loved Santa Fe too. We would, you know, we'd love everything about Santa Fe. Is there an acupuncture college here? And he said, Well, I think there is. So the next day I'm at work and he texts me, you know, because I'm online, and he says, Um, messages me. I don't even remember, we might have been using Yahoo! Messenger then. And he says, There is an acupuncture college there, and it's a really good one. And so at lunchtime, my colleagues, we you know, because we traveled together all the time, we were all friends, um, they went with me to the acupuncture college, and we got a chore and checked it out, and they did have openings in the fall class, and and you know, it was like, well, he could do this, and and it, and they had exactly the kind of program that he wanted, and we didn't know why we hadn't really looked at it before, but he hadn't. And so then, because we were in Laramie, it's a straight shot on the interstate up through the front range, New Mexico to Colorado to Wyoming. So I was driving back with my friend and colleague, and the real estate agent called from Victoria, and she said, Okay, well, tomorrow is the drop-dead date for um, you know, make or break on this house. What do you guys want to do? And I said, Well, what happens if we walk away now? And she said, Absolutely nothing. She said, This is this is your opportunity. You can walk away now. And I said, You know what? I think we're gonna walk away now. And she said, Okay, you know, and I she said, I'm sorry to hear it. And I'm like, Yeah, me too, but uh, it's just not gonna happen. And and my colleague and I stopped at this rest area, uh, you know, P, and came out, and there were hundreds of dragonflies swirling around in the air over me. And I was like, there's a sign. And and then I swear you guys, then the next day we got three offers on the Laramie House. Three offers on the same day. Uh so then um on David's birthday, July 21st, we came down to Santa Fe and we did a whirlwind house shopping, and we found this house and put in an offer on it, and we had already um had the solid contract on the Laramie house, and we moved down here on August 19th, and David started classes, and we all lived happily ever after. So, so that's our story of how we ended up in Santa Fe, and we thought we'd only be here for the three years he went to school, but then when we considered moving somewhere else, we're like, yeah, we love it here, we want to stay, and stay we have, and that's and that's the story of my best beloved. So, I hope you all have a wonderful weekend, as I intend to do. Uh, I'll remind you that first cup of coffee, now empty 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 on Tuesday. Take care. Bye bye.