First Cup of Coffee - May 3, 2021

Craft is heavy on my mind - with thoughts inspired by a talk on making design excellent and weighing that against cost-benefit-risk paradigms from my science background. What does it mean that God is in the details?

The video on design that I mention is here (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdH8Kuku9tA).

You can watch the You Tube video of the podcast here (https://youtu.be/JShMTSy_8no).

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 0:01

Good morning everyone. This is Jeffy Kennedy, author of Fantasy Romance and Romantic Fantasy. I'm here with my first cup of coffee. Which is actually a lie. Today is Monday, May 3rd. It's already May. How is it already May? I don't know. So this is actually a um cup of Earl Grey tea. Um and is follows my first cup of coffee. Because, although actually this is tasting really good. I recorded my first recorded my podcast out in the Great Barber, and the internet connection's just not good out there. And I've gotten it to work before, but this time Zencaster did that same thing where it wouldn't stop recording, and I couldn't make it stop recording. And even after I brought in inside, it wouldn't ever stop. And then when it finally I had to reload the page to make it stop, and then it like totally ate the video. So either I have to start just record inside or uh out on the maybe on the front patio, I could do that, or just do it inside. So it goes. David is talking about getting a booster and putting it in the garage, which might be nice because I like to work out in the Great Barber sometime. Um, but then I think, do I really need internet out there? So I don't know. We shall see. So it's like all the things I had to say, I've already said. But it wasn't a great podcast anyway. I was kind of feeling like I was a little too rambly. My allergies are really bothering me. So I even only had uh an espresso this morning. I didn't have my latte, which is sad, but I have to knock off the dairy for a little bit until my allergies settle down. Which is when I'm gulping the Earl Grey tea. So um, I will show you guys this. This was not on the first version, but look, got print copies of the Sorceress Queen and the Pirate Rogue. Isn't it pretty? I think it's so pretty. Look at Jack's expression, that just kills me every time. So that arrived over the weekend. I need to get those shipped out. It's on my list of about 10,000 things I have to do. Um, it was a busy weekend. Uh, I did move all of my plants outside. So, and they're not very happy with me at the moment, but they're all moved outside. I nearly finished painting the guest bathroom. Though it's um not quite there yet. I didn't get as far as I wanted to on that. It's funny doing this twice because it's like, do I want to really say all the things that I said before? They're they're still on my mind. Um and I did spend most of the time talking about it. I'm going to talk about something else first that I never did get to, and then we can see if I can make the rest of it be a little less rambly. Um and I was trying to rem I'm I was thinking about this as I was painting the guest bathroom, and it was prompted by this uh talk that I was listening to on design. It's called Becoming Leonardo, but I don't remember the name of the guy who gave the talk. It was at a design conference. And now I'm totally going into the thing. I clearly this is what's on my mind. Uh and it was I was given this assignment to watch this by uh Cephwa's CFO, Nathan Lowell. Uh Nathan, I always want to call him Nathan Brazil because that uh was my first Nathan. Uh if you know that one, I'll be impressed because I think like I'm the only person who read those books. Sometimes I think that anyway. Nathan Brazil. So the the talk is on design and the heuristics of great designers. And so this guy uh put together, he analyzed all of these people, like Coco Chanel and Frank Lloyd Wright and Ford, you know, all of the people he could find that seemed to be have been called great designers. And he looked for things that they had talked about as like their principles for design. And he came up with, he looked for frequency that they mentioned it, and ran all these analyses, and he found that there were certain things that he isolated down to 10 heuristics that they would all come back to as principles for design. And his contention was that if you pay attention to those 10 principles, that it will make you a better designer. And Nathan's been wanting us to think about applying that to some of the stuff that we're doing with trying to uh improve Cepwa and improve the infrastructure of Cepha. Finding the dust bunny there. Uh so it was very interesting to listen to, and and I will put that link in the show notes because I think it's it's a little over an hour. I mostly listened and occasionally peeked at the pictures, um, but I think it's worth your time. It it provoked a lot of thought. And I'm probably still never going to talk about this, about the Jaguar thing. I'll have to make a note to talk about tomorrow because it did prompt what I would listening to the design thing. Um, it was a good talk in that it made me think about a lot of things I don't normally think about. Uh, I am not a designer, but a lot of it seemed to be applicable to creativity in general. And I was thinking about how, well, I moved, like I said, I moved all the plants outside, and I just did it in one fell swoop. Whereas I used to harden them off, which means that you would take your um take them out for like an hour one day, bring them back in, take them out for a couple hours the next day, bring them in. It was like a four-day process, and it's to uh help the plants adjust to being outdoors because the outdoor environment is so different, and it allows them to develop like um a kind of internal sunblock and to change how much they're uh transpirating through their leaves. So my plants are the ones I moved outside in the and that are in the grape barber. Oh, the clematis is officially back, it's growing all along the length, so it must have just been it's just a delayed spring. So the the plants are not happy, especially my patients. There's a couple that are looking pretty bedraggled. But what I had found over time was that moving, doing the hardening off process was a took a lot of effort. It required a great deal of, especially for stuff like the big potted bougain villa. You know, we have to get the hand cart, and David would help me do it, but it's like in and out with all of the plants for four days. Um was a true just took a lot of doing. Sounded like someone was pulling into our driveway, but I think they're just on the road outside of my window open a bit. Although we have a storm coming in. We're supposed to have some rain today. So, yay, rain. Yay, rain. Uh yeah, I'm a little scatterbrained this morning. That's why I was kind of wondering if I should just ditch the previous podcast. So it's a lot of effort to take those plants outside. And I felt like for not a lot of return. If it made all the difference in the world, I would probably keep doing it. But the plants would be negatively impacted by moving outside anyway. And they would all do the same thing where they would, you know, lose some leaves and look bedraggled for a week or so, and then they'd recover and they'd be fine. And I've tested it both ways, and there's a little bit more impact by not hardening them off, but it's not dramatic enough to require the effort. And so, and you guys know I talk about this that you don't have to give everything 110%. That, and maybe this comes from my science background. In fact, I know a lot of it does because I used to work in environmental consulting, and we were always doing um cost benefit risk analyses. So, you know, one thing about environmental restoration is that you have to choose where you're gonna put your money, right? Where you're gonna put your effort because you can't can't save everything. And some things are more worth saving than others, which is, I know, a different approach than some people think about. But what we're looking at is, for example, you know, like we put a lot of money in North America into saving an endangered species. I'm gonna check on Jackson, I'll be right back. I think he leapt in the air to try to get a bird, but he's fine. There was a coyote out there this morning, he ran the coyote off. So I was just making sure there weren't further uh altercations. Jackson thinks he's much bigger than he is. So what was I saying? Oh, about choosing where you put your effort. Oh yeah. North America, we put a lot of money into saving an endangered species like the black-footed ferret. And if you run the some of that's sentiment, some of it's there, it it can be complicated, probably more complicated than I want to explain. But if you pick one species that people can grab onto and say, oh, look at the cute little black-footed ferrets, then they're much more willing to uh save the entire habitat. Because that's what you want to do is save the entire habitat, including for the species that people don't get excited about. But um if you look at the diversity of species, for instance, you know, like in the Amazon rainforest, that's where we should be putting our money globally thinking, because that's going to make the biggest difference. So cost-benefit risk is something that I'm accustomed to thinking about. And I feel like everything comes with you know a cost. And it's like, well, how much benefit am I really getting for putting this extra effort into a thing? So one of the heuristics that this guy was talking about, and a lot of what he said really resonated with me, but this is one that I've been chewing on ever since, chewing on ever since, is that he was talking about craftsmanship and doing the utmost to make something be as good as you can make it be. And he was referencing uh Mac computers, Apple, and how if you open them up, they're beautifully designed inside. And he was also using an example, uh, a table that he had had a woodworker craft for him, and how he had said that he wanted that he wanted to be able to not feel the joints. And the craftsman had said they like went through nine or ten prototypes and refining it each time. But you know, it got to the point where the craftsman said, you can't see the joins, and and the guy giving the talk said, Yes, but I want to not feel them. And so he was talking about holding something to this sort of utmost degree of craftsmanship, and and that's kind of different than what I'm talking about. And I was thinking about with my books, I definitely am a huge believer in craft and refining craft and in making the book or your your chops, your writing chops, as good as they possibly can be. That said, you do reach a point of vanishing returns. You know, that asymptotic line where you are approaching perfection, approaching some desired goal, but you will never actually quite reach it because it's impossible. Uh, there's always going to be a flaw. There's always going to be something more you could have done. There's always going to be a mistake. There's kind of a saw about um quilters always including an error in their quilts, and that that this is supposed to be a sign that uh only God is perfect. I you know, it probably comes out of like Mennonite or Amish quilting communities, that that there's always going to be a flaw included in the quilt, because only God is perfect. And I kind of imagine some very sharp and slightly sarcastic uh quilter out there coming up with this line because the real truth is that there's just always going to be a mistake in there because that's how the world works. That you are always going to have some kind of error in there. So I was coaching uh an author, a very successful author the other day, who's trying to be more productive. She is trying to come up with um ways that she can write more books each year. She has a lot of books she wants to write. I think we're all in that position. We always want to be able to write more than we do. And I was looking at, I was going over the something that I'll do, you know, like I was analyzing her work habits and what she spends her time doing. And one thing I found is that she goes over her books five or six times, uh looking uh basically a polishing run. And she does it at each stage of her drafting where she goes through and she looks for errors. And even with her traditionally published books, where they provide a proofreader and copy editor for her. And I'd said, you know, especially on those books where they have a professional doing it for you, you know, maybe you should whittle this down and just save it for one and do one final pass, or maybe even two, but you know, if that'll satisfy you, you know, so that you're not doing this on repeated drafts. I especially think that it's not productive to look for errors on early drafts of something. You know, wait until you're done with the more major changes, because you know, you might be still you might be rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic, right? You know, like you're fixing paint chips on the deck chairs on the Titanic, and meanwhile you still haven't fixed that big hole in the hole. You know, it's like, wait, you know, once you have the the boat ship shape again, then you you know can put the deck chairs where they ought to be and fix the paint chips. And she said, Well, you don't understand. I am I always find errors. She said, and and some still make it through the publication. She said, and they drive me crazy. And inevitably, some reader will email me about them, and it'll be like, and then it's too late. And I said, Well, yeah, listen to yourself, you know. And this is with you making these multiple passes. There's always going to be a mistake that makes it through. And I'm going to acknowledge that I'm not sure this is the same thing as what he's talking about with craftsmanship. But, you know, I said, it there are just going to be errors, and if you resign yourself to that, then you know, focus your effort where you want it to be. So I'm I'm absolutely a believer in making your thing, whatever you're creating, as excellent as you can make it. And his contention was, you know, that by paying attention to the design and the layout of the internal workings of an Apple computer, that that creates a hole that is perfect. And obviously, these are heuristics for great designers. And maybe I am not that kind of person because I do think there is a point where it's like, does it really matter? And so his contention, and he was talking about like those houses, he was showing a photo of a house in Houston where they have like the brick front, but then the sides are and the back are just siding. And he says it's an indication of what else have they done shoddily, that the the plumbing is shoddy or the electrical wiring is shoddy. So he thinks that by having this attention to every detail of craftsmanship, that that will make the difference in that it reflects attention to the whole. By by giving some parts of it only 80%, then you can give 100% to other parts. And I I realize that's a different kind of approach, but I'm not gonna say 110 because it's physically impossible. You can't give 110%. So, yeah, that's what I'm mulling over. I'm still trying to decide what I think about this. Um you know, people talk about that God is in the details, right? And I think what they're saying is that you reach that state of the numinous, of the divine, of that perfectly glowing, beautiful creation with by paying attention to detail. And I think sometimes people think that is the personity details, that it's the minute, you know, like the typos. The typos that your proofreader didn't get. And you guys have heard me bitch about uh mistakes. And I do think that there's something to be said for that, that if there is a book that I read which has a lot of homonym errors and where the I read the one this weekend where the hero's beard kept appearing and disappearing. Sometimes he had one, sometimes he didn't. And and there was a general lack of world building overall. The the world building did not make sense. I think that's the kind of detail that's important. So maybe that's what he's talking about. You know, like if you have the the brick front, but then the vinyl siding on the rest of the house, that maybe that is indicative that uh, you know, the hero's beard keeps appearing and disappearing. That's indicative that there was not much attention paid to the other kinds of world building. But people like this book, that's done well. So I think it depends on what you're trying to do. But I think more than that, when when we say that God is in the details, I do think it means paying attention to the parts that you think that are the most important to the, I don't know, the to the small character details or to the logic of the world building. I think that those kinds of details, not typos. So that's probably more coherent than I was the first time. So maybe it was good that I did the re record. Um, but I'm gonna go on my way. I will remind you all that first cup of coffee is part of the Follic Media Podcast Network, and you will find more podcasts you love at Frollic.media slash podcasts. And I will talk to you all tomorrow. Remind me to talk about the Jaguar thing. You all take care. Bye bye.