First Cup of Coffee - October 31, 2018

With the veil thin between worlds today, I'm thinking about sending and receiving messages, imagination, and transforming ourselves into something else. Also the reverse face of that, becoming moribund and inflexible, losing that childhood openness. 

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Good morning everyone and happy Halloween. Woo! Uh I thought about like trying to find some scary music to play, but um you know hey, this is a low rent operation. So it's Wednesday for sip. Um October 31st. Ah I'm bobbling my London pog here. Hang on. There I'll drink it down a little bit. Um, where was I? Wednesday, October 31st. Uh it's about nine in the morning. A very brisk and cool 34 degrees rained all night. Yet again. Okay, we will have a real moist winter. Boy, that would be great. Oh, I'm sorry, I forgot some of you hate the word moist. A very wet winter. Um with uh precipitation turning to snow. Supposed to happen anytime now, hasn't yet, although the rain has started to get that kind of silvery look. You know how it starts to look a little bit silvery and dense, the first ice crystals in it. Um they'd said maybe we're gonna get one to three inches, which would be great. Um, not so good for the kids trick-or-treating, but I tend to be somewhat remorseless about that because um I spent many, many a Halloween in my Denver childhood slogging through snow, usually in costumes that were not intended for snow. I don't know why we didn't just sort of plan around the fact that I'd be tromping through cold weather. I remember a couple of Halloweens when it was dry, but um very pointedly, I remember the year that I was a Hawaiian hula girl, and my mother made me wear a parka over my costume, and I was so upset. Uh, because of course hula girls did not wear parkas. But uh you know, of course, with the judgment of a child, I'd what I was going to just go out wearing my bare feet and hula skirt and my little skimpy top and my seashells. It's funny how when you're a kid that you believe so utterly in the costume, you know. I remember um oh, I think I was like four because it was from the uh um photographs they were it was at the apartment that my mom and I lived in after my dad died, but before we moved to the house that uh she ended up having for many, many years, 40 years, almost 40 years. Uh she's probably gonna be correcting me, 30 something maybe. Uh but anyway, for mo for most of my life, at any rate. Uh but we were in that apartment for I think like two years, two and a half years. But anyway, I was a uh princess, as of course, and I remember being so thrilled to be that beautiful golden-haired princess in her gorgeous pink gown. And so much so that I remember it vividly in my mind's eye. I remember being that princess. And when I look at the photographs, you know, it was one of those um store-bought cheap ass costumes. Sorry, Mom, but you know, I mean, it probably was, right? You know, with those um, and the dress was sort of like a Pepto Bismal pink sack with a Rick Rec gold belt. Although with Rick Rec, maybe my grandmother made it for me. But it anyway, it was not the pink ball gown that I envisioned in my head. And then I had the mask, which was one of those horrible plastic masks of the early 70s, with sort of this person, they all looked the same. They all sort of the same features and sort of in this rickedus of a smile with the blonde hair like being part of the edges of the molded mask. Absolutely nothing like how I saw myself in my head. And very much the same with the hula girl that I believed in being that hula girl like the ones that I saw on TV or in the movies. Uh you know, and in some ways it's you know, people talk about children having such great imaginations. Maybe that's part of the developing brain uh that we could imagine those things so vividly because I have a similar imagination when I write now that I can become very, very involved in the world and know what it feels like to fly as a dragon or swim as a mermaid. I can be so immersed in that, but it's still through the filter of my character. I don't ever feel like it's me. And on Saturday night when we went to the Sam Hain party, sewing party, I say it like the publisher now, I should go back to someone sewing party. Uh and I dressed up as kind of a fairy queen, and it was a reprise of a costume that I had done um ten years ago before we moved away from Wyoming. And since we moved to Santa Fe, I am we have not been to any kind of Halloween party. Um the we I don't know, we just never got invited to any Halloween parties after we moved here. Um occasionally I dressed up in costume at conferences for various things. And and I used pieces of that fairy princess kind of conversation, sorry. But um so anyway, when I redid this costume for the party on Saturday, and part of it was because I knew I had a lot of the pieces, and I thought, well, I could embroider on it. And I one of my um high school friends uh commented that my costume looked like my book covers, which I thought was cool because I had kind of been thinking about like some of my different heroines and creating some of that same feel. But even though I really enjoyed this costume and I felt like it was really cool and it was fun to put on, and I loved the pictures, when I was wearing it, I was mostly aware of maintaining it. Um, you know, like my wings kept hitting people, my fairy wings kept hitting people. And um, you know, and just sort of the sort of the costume maintenance thing, you know, like with the wings on, strapped on, you know, I moved differently. And so I just had to be careful, you know, and I was wearing big skirts that I don't normally wear. Um but I never had that same feeling of that I had become the fairy queen. I, in fact, I would kind of otherwise forget that I was wearing a costume, and people would look at me and then do a double take and say, Jeffy, is that you? And uh and I'd be like, oh right, because I have on this makeup and all of this stuff. So it's an interesting thing. Perhaps as we get older, we become so much more firmly rooted in who we are that it becomes difficult to sort of imagine ourselves as anything but that. Maybe that comes back to some of those things about habit and muscle memory. Now I just have to say muscle memory in that in a macho way because I find that just so amusing. It's not habit, it's muscle memory. Uh I think that we do sort of get um ingrained into patterns and locked into things. And maybe not necessarily in a good way. It's uh I I miss that feeling. I miss that feeling that I had when I was four years old and was utterly convinced that I had transformed into that princess. So there we are. There we are then. So let's see. Umdates. I'm probably in that you guys are gonna learn to recognize this, those of you who listen frequently. I'm in my somewhat empty-minded phase. I sent off the Dragons of Summer to the copy editor yesterday. Um it did not take me an hour to edit it. Um that was really kind of foolishly hopeful, wasn't it? What ends up happening was I did, you know, I read through the beginning, and I think it does work okay. I hope it works okay because we're we're going with it. Um I trimmed out a fair amount. Um, I did some tweaking, but then I did a complete read-through of the whole thing. So I spent the whole day on it and did a full read-through, um, which it probably needed, uh, smoothing and glossing. Uh, I'm not able to uh I think not do that at some level. And enough time had passed that um I don't need that much time, and I had been like a week since I'd read most of it. So that was good to do a full read beginning to end and smooth it out and um yeah, find those things that were information's repeated. That happens a fair amount in writing, I think, you know, where you say things um you know, you you want to be sure to get something in the story, and when then when you go back and you think, oh, well, I need to be sure to mention this. And then when you go back, you find out that you mentioned this like 17 times. It's like, okay, I think they know. I ended up pulling out a lot of the stuff that was spoilery for the arrows of the heart, too. Um originally I'd felt like it was very important to the stakes to this story to have it in there. And Corrine had asked me that one of the reviewers for seasons of Sorcery, the anthology, or this story, The Dragons of Summer, uh, had asked if it would spoiler Arrows of the Heart if she had not read it yet. And Corrine asked me, and we decided that it was vaguely spoilery, not hugely spoilery, but a little bit spoilery. But I ended up pulling out really everything that was spoilery, mostly because it just ended up being unnecessary information. Uh my collaborator, Jim Sorensen, was one of the readers for it, and so he was a good person too. Um he noted very specific instances, because I'd asked. I'd said, anything that I can pull out would be good. You know, and he had noted some of these things he's like, because he had not read Arrows of the Heart, too, so that made a difference. Um so he's like, I have no idea what this is about, and do I even need to know? And when I came back and looked at it again, I was like, eh, no, you don't need to know that. Zone. Yeah. Yeah, and it was a funny thing uh discovering in this story that no, actually, I won't tell you that because that'll spoil the story. Never mind. Reel that back. So anyway, it's off with the copy editor. Um, I have read Jennifer's story for the anthology. I have Amanda's story. I'm going to read it. I've been reading um book four in Sorcerer's Moons, The Forests of Drew, to get my head back into that. And then I will read Amanda's story. And Grace is still finishing hers, but we should have those all into the formatter next week. Very exciting. Um I know that this will seem unrelated at all, but I'm also looking forward to the time change on Saturday. You notice I've been getting later and later every morning. This morning I didn't open my eyes until 7. And it was still dark. So I'm very excited for uh the clocks to go back to normal time, to real time instead of fake daylight savings time. Um, not that it makes any difference from my schedule, but it's just uh nicer. I feel like I get more stuff done earlier in the day. And and it's real time, uh, not this stupid fake time that I think really does nothing. I have feelings. I have feelings about daylight savings time. So that'll be fun, and that's part of it, I guess I was thinking of next week. Next week I will be on real time again, and it will be November. Wow. The year is coming to a close. Uh November and elections, and hopefully things will turn around. We're all crossing our fingers for the big turnaround in Fortune. So today, then I will spend some time on Twinstar, on the collaboration. Uh see if I can get some things done on that. And then tomorrow we will kick into Sorcerer's Moons. Almost certainly. I think I will have finished reading the fourth book, Force of Drew by then. I'm halfway through now. And you know, it's kind of fun to read a book that I haven't looked at in almost two years. Uh it's not a bad book. It's actually kind of a good story. I'm I'm enjoying the story. It's always interesting to read one's own book and be drawn in and uh reading raptly and wondering what will happen next because I don't remember. Funny thing. And other than that, I don't think I have much else to tell you all. Settling in for the winter. I think we'll have a fire tonight. And I love I I think I love gray days like this because I don't we don't get that many of them, though we've had more lately for sure. Uh but yes, it feels like a very cozy wintry day, and the cats are cuddled up and sleeping, and the lights are on in the house because it's dark and it's very cozy and comfortable and of an excellent day for writing. So I hope you all have a wonderful and cozy Halloween or a sunny Halloween, depending on where you are. Uh I hope that you either gain or distribute treats with abandon and that the tricks are few. And I wish you all a wonderful uh interface with uh with the unseen world. That's what today's about, right? That this time of year is when the veil between the seen and the unseen is very thin. And it's a good time for inspiration, for communicating with those we've lost who've passed on to the other side. It's a good opportunity to receive messages. Give and send and receive messages just as you uh distribute and receive candy. So all of you have a wonderful day, and I will talk to you tomorrow. Bye bye.