First Cup of Coffee - November 6, 2018

Thoughts today on starting the story in the right place, how to weave in backstory without bogging down the velocity of the opening, and how this is never easy. I'm giving a specific example with the TWINSTAR collaboration and how we've ended up doing a scrape and rebuild with the concept. Also a review of the movie A Star Is Born, which spoils the ending, so beware. However, on this fourth remake, I think I was *the only person in the world" who didn't know how it ended. But if you're like me and don't want to know, beware of spoilers. 

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Good morning everyone. This is Jeffy Kennedy and I've got my first cup of coffee. I'm actually back to London fog today. I had coffee the last couple days and it tasted good, but I noticed a little bit of burning in my stomach again, so back to the gentle Earl Grey it is. I wonder if Picard had stomach issues. I mean, command of a sp of a spaceship like that, of the space vessel, the Enterprise, would be a stressful job, right? Maybe that's why you always drink tea. It's Tuesday, November 6th, election day here in the US. Uh if nothing else, no matter how the elections turn out, at least we can all take a break for a bit from the signs and the phone calls and the text messages and the emails. And boy, has there been a lot of it. I tend to be fairly insulated from that sort of thing because I don't watch the news and I live in a place where big signs are not allowed. That's one of the wonderful things about Santa Fe. But even here there have been like the little, I don't know what you call them, like the little lawn signs cropping up alongside of the road almost entirely from one of the independent candidates, uh, which you know, I just feel like says so much. It's like, oh yeah, you care about our quality of life in the environment. You're gonna put your signs everywhere. But that's me being cynical. One thing, one plus about the whole, well, another plus since I just listed one, right? But one thing that's very interesting about this election here in the US, the midterm elections, is that in all my life, which is getting to be substantial now, I have never seen so much interest in the midterm elections. Um, those are the two years in between the four-year presidential elections. And normally they are considered to be not that big of a deal. Um, I freely confess there are many times that I've not voted in the midterm elections simply because I didn't have any investment in what was going on. Uh so it was interesting to get the letter this year. For the first time, we've all received uh these letters telling us how what our voting record looks like. Uh and it's interesting to see people commenting on it and calling it vote shaming, because it is a little shocking to see. Uh because it is private, it is secret, how you voted, but whether or not you voted is a matter of public record. You know, you have to go check in and tell them who you are and that you voted. Uh and those letters that we get give us a table and they show us which elections we voted in. Uh mine was only for New Mexico, so it only shows since we've moved to New Mexico. Jackson's being very bad this morning, so we have to go collar him up. Come on back. Go to your weed spot. Go on down. At least he goes when I tell him to do that. I confess I started the podcast once already, and then he was such a brat that he messed it up, so I'm not happy with him this morning. Isabel is the good kitty. She's just lying here. That was another phone call from the old area code. Spam call, probably health insurance. Isabel's the good kitty, aren't you? Yeah. So quiet. Jackson's just full of mischief, which it can be entertaining, but also it can be a little much. So anyway, before Jackson interrupted us, what were we saying? Oh, uh, about these letters that we get, and they show us and uh so in New Mexico I have voted um I did not vote in the 2010 midterm election. We moved here in 209, and I just felt like I didn't know enough about local politics. I didn't have a feel for the place yet. Um, and so I didn't feel right voting. Um however, being totally honest with myself, I have not voted in a lot of midterm elections. I think I've voted in every single presidential election. I'd gone to some effort or to do that, and then of course made all of my votes on the other ones. But midterms, yeah, I know I've blown it off more than once, which is bad. And, you know, so it's like, well, the you know, people are saying, well, there shouldn't be vote shaming, and it's like, well, but it is good to call attention to it. Um, certainly called my attention to it, and I was a little shocked to see that I was average, said that I was the average in in my voting record, which made me mad because of course I have to be above average in all things. I mean, shouldn't I be above average in all things? But clearly I'm not. Um it would be interesting to see my entire life voting record, but I'm I'm probably at average or below average given all of that. We did vote in the 2014 midterm elections because there were local issues that we were invested in. Uh there were some things that we really wanted to to vote for. And and now I'm glad because you know, New Mexico is is very thoroughly uh a democratic state in our national representation, but you know, perhaps those midterm elections helped ensure that because our senators and representatives have been doing all they can to fight some of the depredations going on. So um all good thoughts for things to turn out well. I was going to talk about A Stars Born, uh, which I went to see on Saturday night, and and I am gonna get spoilery, but just about the ending, which you know I mean just, but um, if you have not seen the new version with Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga, or any of the three previous versions, because this is the fourth time they've made this movie, uh-uh, 1937, 19 like 50, 45 or 50 with Judy Garland, and then again in the 70s with Barbara Streisand and Chris Christofferson, and now this one. And they all in the same, and apparently I've never seen any of them, and I did not know like this basic thing about how a star is born in. So if you don't know and don't want to know, stop listening. Because I feel like I'm that was plenty of time to click off, right? I feel like I went to see the Titanic, and I'm the only person, or I would see Titanic, and I'm the only person in the world who didn't know that the ship sinks. So a star is born ends with him dying. And I didn't know that it was gonna be a sad ending. And you know how I feel about sad endings. And I felt terribly betrayed that absolutely no one had warned me. Uh you know, and then I realized, you know, it's like, well, if somebody says they're going to go see Titanic, do you warn them that the ship sinks? And it's like, well, maybe not. Maybe not. Maybe I'm just uh I don't know. I don't know how I missed this. Apparently, it's like a key element of A Star is Born is that, you know, here he's this um older man, and it's it changed through the various movies. Um, in the original ones, um, he's an actor in Hollywood, and she is the young ingenue, and he takes her under his wing, and they have a love affair, and he helps launch her career, but he's on his way down. And uh in all of the I guess in the first two movies, he um swims into the ocean, essentially, you know, wades into the ocean or swims out into the ocean and uh with the intention of not coming back. And in the 70s version, Chris Christofferson, he uh drunkenly drives his car off a canyon road. You know, sort of the um accidental on-purpose suicide. In this one, the suicide is much more deliberate, I would say, in a way, much more measured. Um, and it's really well done. I mean, it was a really good movie, and I was weeping and sobbing and all of this. Um, but I thought it was gonna have a happy ending. And well, you know how that goes. But it's it's very well done. Lady Gaga was amazing. I didn't realize that Bradley Cooper himself had dealt with uh drugs and alcohol. So I think the first two versions of the movie were about Hollywood and acting, and then the Chris Christofferson, Barbara Streisand one, and then this one were about the music industry. But um, so I guess Bradley Cooper, this was his directorial debut too, and he did an amazing job directing the movie, and I think it was kind of uh he has publicly said, I didn't know this, I read it afterwards, that um sobriety saved his career and his life. So he really brought that to the performance. You could really see um the elements in him of that he could have been this guy, that if he had not gotten sober, uh that he would have gone this way. But you know, it's so painful to watch. And it was very funny because the woman sitting next to me who I didn't know um kept making these sounds of distress and kind of squirming in her seat as he you know, like made one bad choice after another, and she'd be like, Oh no. You know, and I I kind of wanted to pat her and say, Oh, I know. So it's it's incredibly well done that way. It addresses those issues, um, it's moving, just be prepared for the emotional hangover, right? Um, so let's see. So I had that on my notes, and I don't know what else I have to say. Um yeah. So yesterday I ended up doing a lot of reading and researching for Sorcerer's Wounds. I'm also doing a little bit more on the collaboration. Don't kill me. I'm I'll be on track for Sorcerer's Moons, I really will. I'll just uh the collaboration, we kind of need to get that off of our desks. But I'm so excited about it, you guys. It's we've kind of done this scrape and rebuild. And I'll talk about that a little bit for um, well, I don't know if the readers will be interested, but the writers might be. Um Jim and I had come up with a concept and we'd written, oh, what did we write? Oh, good 50 pages of it, and went back and forth with Agent Sarah on it a few times. Let's see. Well, we did about 17,000 words previously. I'm trying to see if I have a note of how many pages that is where we could figure it out with a simple average. I keep track of how many words per page I typically have, which is usually somewhere between 250 and 300 words a page, depending on how much dialogue there is, right? If you have a lot of dialogue, there's a lot of blank space and uh no, you know, fewer, fewer words. Um, so yeah, that was coming out at like 68 pages. So that probably sounds about right. 68, 69 pages, at least at the current uh word count per page average for this book. So, anyway, what happened was we'd written all of this, we'd gone back and forth with Sarah several times, we'd talked about the concept, um, and it just wasn't working. Uh, we would get on one iteration of it, we would hear that there was too much jargon, too much world building, uh, and it was bogging down the pace of the story, and we needed to pull that out and make it snapper, snappier and faster. Um, which, you know, this kind of goes back to my thing about the writer saying how it was unfair for a published author to be told that her story started in the wrong place. Um, this is something it doesn't matter how many books you've read. Figuring out where to start the story and how to open the story is a huge part of uh of every project. And it's even though you get better at it and you know that this is something that you need to learn how to do or that you need to address, it's not like it ever gets easy. Um it's never uh a simple solution. So so if you are an author who is struggling with um pulling out backstory from the from the opening. If people keep telling you that there's too much backstory in the opening, know that you are in good company because it's a delicate balance. You have to give the reader enough information, especially if you're writing science fiction and fantasy and you're introducing a whole new world and a whole new universe. You have to give them enough information to ground them so that they know what the heck is going on without bogging down the forward momentum of the story. Um, movies handle this kind of thing. This is why science fiction and fantasy movies very often open with like a huge panning shot where they like show you the world and they show you what things are going on what kinds of things are going on. Sometimes there are scenes at the beginning of science fiction and fantasy movies that have very little to do with the actual story, but are instead establishing the world rules for you and something to pay attention to. In books, we can't always get away with that because, first of all, in fact, David asked me that the other day. I can't remember what movie we were watching. We'll have to uh maybe I'll think of it, but it was something where they kind of like did a big panning shot and showed people doing things. And he said, How do you do that in a book? And I said, It's really freaking hard. Because in a book, if you do that, and we all know fantasy novels who've done that, right? Where they what you'd have to do is you'd have to describe everything. You know, so you'd have to say, Well, the sun is rising over the gilded domes of the city, and there's the the cries of the faithful, you know, the bells calling the faithful to prayer, and there's the river with the ships on it. And I mean, that's why some fantasy novels spend like the first chapter describing the landscape and the people and the politics, which in a movie you can do with like one big, long, pretty panning shot. Uh, it goes back to that, like a picture is worth a thousand words, right? Um, if you spend a thousand words at the beginning of a story describing the landscape, uh, your reader is going to get restless. It you could get away with it in the past. Um, not so much with modern stories. You have to have the story. You have to give them the plot and what's going on. So, so that would be one version where they'd be like, oh, there's just too much, too much description, too much backstory, too much of the world rules, you need to pull it out. So we would. We would strip all that out and kind of bring it down to the trajectory of the story, and then they would say, We don't understand anything that's going on. We don't understand anything about this world. And we'd be like, Well, yeah, because she made us take it all out. Um, and finally, um, and it was last spring, so it's been a little while, Jim and I sat down and looked at what we had, and I said, I think that our universe is too complex. Uh, we had a really clever idea, but it was very difficult for us to explain the situation that our characters were in because it was so very alien and different to uh to our current world, to our modern world. And we had to, I said, I think to get this off the ground, we need to simplify everything. So I I was thinking of it in terms of, you know, like where you I think the foundation is good, you know, I think our characters are great, I think we've got a fantastic lot to build on, but basically we just scraped off the house, and now we are building a new one. And I'm really excited about it because I think it's very good. Um, it and it's got all of that trajectory and momentum and snappiness that the previous version was lacking. So I know that you guys want more sorceress wounds, you will get it. Um I am making notes and so forth, but you'll be very happy when we get this project to you. I think that it's going to be really great. So excuse me. I like swigged the last of my London fog there in preparation for saying goodbye and choked on it. May you choke on it. So I hope that you all have a marvelous Tuesday. Uh, I hope that good things happen. Uh oh, I should mention that today they're having the marketing meeting at St. Martin's for the orchid throne. So I think good thoughts for that. But I my editor told me that one of the other marketing people had read the book in preparation for this meeting and loved it. So, yay, yay on that. All right, I'm gonna go get to work. Um working on both Twin Star and Sorcerer's Wounds today, and it'll all get done, I promise. Have a great day, you guys. I'll talk to you tomorrow. Bye bye.