First Cup of Coffee - November 14, 2018

Excited that Seasons of Sorcery is #1 in Fantasy Anthologies! Otherwise I'm talking about dyslexia, technical trials of self-publishing, and rebuilding writing habits. 

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Good morning everyone. This is Jeff Kennedy and I'm here with my first cup of coffee. Today is Wednesday, November 14th. And I got my microphone sort of weirdly. Let's fix that. Oh my god. Wednesday, November 14th, try that again. It's about eight in the morning. I have really had grand plans of getting back into my writing routine this morning of avoiding email, which I always say I do, and then I don't always. Unfortunately, I tried very hard to blame that on other people, but it was ultimately my fault. My assistant Corrine had sent me the email that very clearly says 490 pages. And I blithely told the cover designer 409 pages. And you know, who would have thought, but it turns out 81 pages makes a significant difference in the size that the cover has to be. And now Amazon has spit it back again saying that they're, you know, it's like they have these algorithms that check this stuff, but they say the language of the cover doesn't match the language that I selected. And I can only think that it's because our cover designer, Raven, is in the UK and that somewhere in her file metadata it says UK English and not US English, which you know, like only a machine would get this wrong, right? So at any rate, then we have to fix that. But the print version is still not available. It's still processing at Barnes and Noble, still processing at Ingram. I think that the holiday on Monday slowed things down. So, but otherwise, the book is doing great. Um, I would call it fantastically successful. This morning we are number one in fantasy anthologies. And that uh, yeah, woohoo! That's happy dance. Um, we even knocked out the Kindle Unlimited ones that are otherwise, you know, like the whole row is otherwise all Kindle Unlimited. Um it's very difficult to knock the Kindle Unlimited books out of the top positions because you know, those are books that people read if they have the subscription to Kindle Unlimited, and they can uh read as much as they like for a subscription price. And then the authors are paid out of a pool of money, however much money there is, it gets divided among all the Kindle Unlimited authors according to their page reads. Well, uh, it's it's hard to sell enough copies to match those that are sort of squatting in the top positions. And and I I am not charitable about this because um those people are um very rarely serious authors. Occasionally they are, if you're doing it, yeah, that's fine. But for the most part, it's these people who've gotten um involved in the whole get rich quick thing, and they'll stuff the books with nonsense content and um all these links so that there's like very little words per page and a lot of it irrelevant. Um, and then they'll set up links in the book so that if you want to find out something, you'll skip all the way to the end of the book and then go back again. Because every time you skip to the end of the book, that counts as page reads according to Amazon's algorithms. So, you know, they'll put together five or six books for uh and you know, and throw it in Kindle and Limited, so it comes out to like a thousand pages. So, you know, our 490 well-earned pages. Um well, we're not in KU anyway, so we don't care about page reads so much, but you know, it's just um it's chalk and cheese. It's it's an entirely different uh system of payment and of reading, and arguably of readers. Uh, a lot of the readers in KU will only read books in KU and they don't want to buy books. Um and you know, and some of them, you know, and every once in a while I'll hear people complain, you know, and they'll say, oh, well, you know, the the quality of books in in Kindle Unlimited just isn't very good, you know, and I want to go, you think. So at any rate, any time that we can knock those book stuffers out of the top of the category. And anthology tends to be one of those categories because they call something that's like a box set and anthology, which it's not, um, but they call it that, so they sort of dominate the subcategory. But we have knocked them from their throne for the moment. And we have screen captures to prove it. So excuse me. That's God punishing me for being uh smug and self-satisfied, right? Can you tell I come from a Catholic family? So, at any rate, you know, we'll still be tying up some N's and so forth. Persuading them to get the print versions live. And what else do I have to tell you guys? Well, and I worked on Sorcerer's Wounds yesterday, but um I'm still not in the flow yet. I need to get in the flow. Unfortunately, I keep well, it's fortunate and unfortunate, but I keep having ideas for this final book for Uncharted Realms, especially because people are reading uh the story in Seasons of Sorcery, the Dragons of Summer, Ursula and Harlan story, excuse me, which um really does set up a number of things for this final book, which I had wanted it to do. Um so it's generating excitement um in you guys, which is cool, but also in myself, and I keep thinking of little snippets of conversation and things I need to put in there, and it makes it harder to get my head into sorceress moons. But um, I'm hoping to get a lot of words done on that today. I'll try to stay offline and away from things. And um, you know, I talk about this a whole lot, the you know, building the writing habit, and I know that we can make that sound easy, you know, like, oh well, you know, just write at the same time every day and set your word count and fence off the time, you know, make sure that your family respects it and um all of that kind of thing. But the simple truth is that it is not easy. Um, and it's not even easy when so for someone like me, when I've had a a good writing habit for a very long time, as soon as I break that writing habit, as I've done for well, several weeks now, I could look back and see, you know, pretty much when I finished drafting the Dragons of Summer, I fell out of my intense writing habit mode because I was working on um edits and revisions, which is not the same for me. I don't work on it the same way. Um, and then I worked a little bit on the twin star collaboration, and then I was reading. I was doing a lot of reading to catch up on sorcerer's moons and all of that, and then uh doing other kinds of businessy things, and all in all, I am not back at my 4,000 words a day habit by any stretch, and it's a little difficult to, you know, I have to ramp back up into it. It's a little difficult to do when I'm dealing with all of this other business, you know, and doing the promo for seasons, but then also knowing that I'll be gone for Thanksgiving next week, um, which I'm looking forward to. I'm going to go see family, and that will be lovely, but it'll be a disrupted week. Um, Monday we have a couple of doctor's appointments, things that we have to get done, go down to Albuquerque for David's um movement disorder specialist. That's an appointment we have like every six months, although it's actually been longer than that. It's been like 18 months this time for various reasons. And then Tuesday we'll travel. Um, you know, so really I'll start getting back into this heavy-duty drafting uh after Thanksgiving. So I know it's um one of those, the downside of being a full-time writer, when you're this is a positive for those of you who have day jobs and can only work right part of the time. Um when you can only write, sometimes you get very good at wedging intense work into small pieces of time that you have available. So, and I remember uh Ron Carlson, short story writer, talking about this a lot because he used to be a high school teacher and a coach, and he would often write in like his 30 minutes of off between classes. He would sit and he would write very intensely then. And when he finally quit his job and went to being a full-time writer, and something he and his wife discussed, you know, and she said, you know, she was working and she said, Okay, you need to do this. And suddenly he had these vast open empty days to write in, and he got nothing done. And it it's a funny thing how that works. So, you know, there was a time when I would have, if I'd had a day off of the day job, and I'd only had like a couple of doctor's appointments, I would have seen like those free four hours or so in the middle of the day as a great gift, and I probably would have gotten a lot written. And now to me, I look at it and I think, ah, well, that day's just a loss. It's kind of um a luxurious way to look at it. Uh it's also it's not good, but I I I do know this about myself. Um, and I'm having lunch with uh my collaborator Jim and friend Sage tomorrow, and lunch with my friend Kathy on Friday afternoon. So today, today I'm hoping I'll get into it and at least get some good inroads. If I can get the book flowing, then I can uh do some, you know, grab like a thousand words here or there during Thanksgiving, and that'll help. Um, let's see, what else? Oh, I know I was gonna say something about that whole 490-409 thing that could have been just a um me being careless, but I I also have a slight bit of dyslexia um because I very I could have sworn, I was so certain that this was Corrine's fault because I could picture her email, and I and I do have a fairly idetic memory that way. I I can see things, and if I'm trying to remember something, I can see the email, and I remembered very clearly her email saying 409 pages, and I went back to the email to prove it to her, and lo and behold, it says 490. And it's like, huh. I just mentally flipped it, and it's I know that um I probably had trouble with this early on. I was never diagnosed or anything. I was always a very good reader, but I'm also a very good word descrambler, you know, like those um those games, you know, where you figure out what the word is from the descrambling. So I think I have part of my brain that's like always descrambling words. And so I'm fortunate to have that ability. But um, I remember being like in preschool pulled out for special tutoring on how to tie my shoes and how to tell time. Um, you children of the modern era don't have that problem nearly so much, but back in the day we only had analog clocks. Um, and if I would always get the time backwards, I would flip the analog clock face. I seem to do it more with um symmetrical things. Um, I was also bad in sports because I never knew which way the goal was. I would run for the wrong goal. So there are these funny little ways that I tend to flip stuff, and it shows up every once in a while. Um if I'm tired in particular, or if I'm multitasking, if I'm doing too many things at once, I'm liable to flip that stuff. But you know, so it goes. Um, it would be nice if I had not made that mistake, but I did. And we move on. So yeah. Yeah, I don't think I have anything else very interesting to say. So I'm going to call it good. Um wish me luck at getting back into my habit. I may have to um go so far as to turn on freedom, which I haven't used in so long, I wonder if I even still have it. But it turns off the internet, and so that way I can't compulsively go check to see, you know, like if something is uploaded or not. Um I don't I almost never do it anymore. But my attention, I you know, I just need to retrain myself, get my attention focused again and concentrate. So we'll see if I can do that today. Uh, I hope you all have a wonderful Wednesday that you are able to concentrate on the things that you wish to and are not distracted. Thank you for sharing my first hot beverage of the day. And I will talk to you all tomorrow. Bye bye.