First Cup of Coffee - July 5, 2021

On the majesty of nature and her omens, a peculiar episode with my green man and woman, and how I learned from teaching Tai Chi that it's a bad idea to have family members edit your writing.

Minon Faget is here (https://www.mignonfaget.com/).

You can watch the You Tube video of the podcast here (https://youtu.be/Oe3oRIQfgDM).

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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 better. I got new milk. That I think was that Trader Joe's milk. It was wasn't bad. It was just funky. It was dissatisfying in some ways. And you know, I cannot have less than stellar products here on first cup of coffee. It's um a dampish, though sunny, morning here in the Great Barber. Uh, we got a huge downpour last night. Actually, it woke me up, you know, and like nothing wakes me up, but the lightning was really flashing. So I um you know where my priorities are. The lightning was enough to wake me up and think, oh chip, quit and unplugged my laptop and my phone. And closed the window that the rain was sheeting in. Priorities. You guys know that I'm a big one on, you know, like you said, your priorities, you fence off your boundaries. You take care of what's important. Ah. So it's funny. This morning um Zencaster is not showing my wavelength on the speaking, which I'm not gonna let it fool me again this time into checking and doing the splicing, although it worked out fine. But um, it's weird that it doesn't do that sometimes. So, yes, my um my tukas is damp because even though I did um cleverly set the patio cushions up on end, it was enough of a downpour that it drenched even that. And so you guys want to know something weird. This morning, as I came out to the grape arbor, both my green man and my green woman had fallen. And I could show you. Here's the green man. I hung him up again, but here's green man. And he had fallen down onto the there's like a little flagstone patio here under the arbor, um, and and broke some, but at least, I mean, he's still okay, so it's not a huge deal. And I thought, well, that's odd. It must have been that storm that knocked him down. But the green woman, who's over there, I won't get up to get her, she's on the other post. She was also down on the ground. Is that weird? I mean, maybe there was just like a I mean it did come from the west, so it was coming in, so and they're both facing west, so maybe it was just enough to um both of their screws pointed down, hung down, inclined down, probably because the wood got wet enough or something. So maybe it's just coincidence, but um, doesn't that seem like an omen? The green man and the green woman. So I'll have to say an incantation over them to put them up warding again. So yeah, that was that was my strangeness. So it is, I didn't even say, did I? It's Monday, July 5th, which is a federal holiday here in the U.S. It's funny because the calendar says um 4th of July or Independence Day observed, which is kind of funny because it should say something else, like, I know that's standard speak, right? When the holiday is observed, meaning when do you get it off work? When does your employer have to give it to you? But it was observed yesterday. Independence day in the U.S., 4th of July was yesterday. Um, that was when it was observed. It was still um a little bit uh I don't half-assed here because people didn't have time to plan, even though New Mexico is now totally open. So, like they were gonna go ahead and do the parade, the Fourth of July parade, which is one of my favorite things. They were gonna do that here in our community, and they'd even put it in the newsletter, and then they sent out an email saying, well, that for safety reasons, that they decided to just have the parade circle the community center parking lot. I was like, oh, we I was like, which which safety reasons? I don't know, maybe it's because they like couldn't get enough safety people there. I don't know. So we did not go watch people circle a parking lot. Uh we did go out last night, um, just outside, because we're we're up on a rise, you know, so you've probably seen from some of my other photos, you know, I've we've got a pretty good view of the whole valley. And so we went out there and we watched um, we could see fireworks all the way down, all the way down to Albuquerque and around the ones down uh that the city put on. So it was fun to get to see those. But it there was also this big storm over Sandia and the Ortiz Mountains, and so there was this fantastic lightning, and we could see the lightning coming down and striking the mountain and lighting up the clouds, so it kind of put the fireworks to shame. It was like, oh, nature. See? Nature. There's a theme here, and then you guys, I saw a shooting star. So I figure those are all good omens. That's right, that's all good omen stuff. Um, maybe green man and green woman are just bringing my attention to to nature because that was definitely the the lesson last night. It was like the power and glory of nature um completely dwarfed the fireworks. Getting some sunshine on the sparkly gold cup here. Um, so to it's a work day for me. Um I did a lot of hanging out this weekend. I got some more things off of my to-do list. It's like finally, it's finally getting down, it's finally diminishing. Um I was just thinking of one. This is like a stray thought. You know, like I almost never look at my reviews, but for some reason I was looking at um Dark Wizard, I was trying to find something out, and I saw that there was a review that like 11 people had marked helpful that was all about um that it was about oppressing our daughters, our daughters being in uh a subjugated position and that they didn't need to be reading that. No, thank you. And uh it's one of those things where you know, like I'm almost never tempted to reply, but I kind of wanted to reply and say actually it's it's not gender specific. Um, but this person clearly hadn't read it. But we have to let these things go. And and you know, if people found that helpful, okay. I wanted to say it's not actually helpful because it's not accurate, but whatever makes you guys happy. So, but Bright Familiar coming out Friday. Uh I did not do any writing last week at all. Um, which you guys knew if you've been listening. And it was good, it was good to have that break. Um I even took a nap yesterday afternoon. I tease my mom because my mom's always like insists that she doesn't nap, but she does. And then she'll she'll she'll always say, Oh, I took a nap and I don't nap. Um like, yeah, except when you do nap. She's she's conceding that maybe that has changed. But yesterday afternoon I took a I was sleepy, and David's like, Why don't you take a nap? I well, maybe I will, because I I really rarely nap. Well, I won't say I don't nap, but I'm not a regular napper by any stretch. And uh boy, I slept for two hours, you know, that really deep afternoon nap where you like wake up all disoriented. But it was good, it was rejuvenating. And David's like, well, you've been working very intensely, you've been working very hard, and maybe that's um what it comes down to. And and that could be. It's just um putting this focused effort into the books. That could be. And um what was that? Oh, I also finished crunching all the royalty statements for for June and so forth. They're not completely in, there'll be holiday weekend. Some of the stuff from the agencies might still straggle in this week, but I have officially so far in the first half of 21, I've made as much money writing as I made in all of 2020. Yeah, that deserves a little hooray. Um it's it just makes me feel so much better. And I was going to, well, I didn't look up the percentage. I had it in mind I was going to do it, but I'm not gonna sit here and calculate it. But uh it's it's largely, largely indie. It's it's from the self-publishing. Um, at least it's it's hard to tell because the trad money, a whole lot of it comes in in December. They do a lot of reconciling at the end of the year, so I won't really know, but I think that um I often say that my Indian Trad income goes back and forth 60, 40, 40, 60, depending on the year. And I think this year it's gonna be heavily skewed indie. Um Trad is just not paying all that well, which is unfortunate, but there we are. So um, so today I am I'm going to try a new thing. We'll see how this works. Uh, you guys know I normally do 3,000 words a day, five days a week. And I was looking at my schedule. I need to start writing The Dragon's Daughter and the Winter Mage. Um, for those of you waiting for wanting gray magic to come next, I'm sorry. I'm I'm trying to keep to this schedule. Uh I already uh was scolded by one person who's like, I have to wait till December. One of the early readers of Bright Familiar, she was texting me yesterday um with all of her love and joy, which is great. Thrasher, curved bill thrasher coming to visit. Coming to get grapes, probably. You're raiding the grapes before they're even ripe. That's hardly fair. But that's what she's doing too. Oh well. It's not like we eat them ourselves. Oh, you know what? She's actually visiting a big spider web and stealing an insect out of it. That's smart. Yeah. Yeah. Make those spiders work for you. Uh anyway, uh this uh reader was texting me wonderful things about Bright Familiar. She said that she didn't text me the night before because she was feeling stabby about having to wait until December for the next book. But so it goes. Can only write so fast, and I am trying to do multiple things. So, anyway, I looked at my schedule, and what I'm going to try to do, because I do want to do this V project, um, I think that that could be it's something I want to write, and I think it could be a good moneymaker. Um and, you know, like in another week, I'll tell you guys what it is. Um, I just want to make sure I'm actually gonna do it. So I'm thinking what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna do 2,500 words a day on Dragon's Daughter and the Winter Mage and 500 on the V Project. So I'm not gonna go over my 3,000 word a day limit, but see if I can divide it between two things. Um, if I do that, I should have no problem getting Dragon's Daughter done on time, uh, if I stay on schedule, and and I can also do V Project. So, and if as long, and that way I would be able to keep up with V Project if I do that. Even if I do um just like a thousand words a week on the V project, you guys might be able to guess what this is, then I would be able to keep up with it. So uh there's that. Let's do earrings, and then I have a little bit of advice to share. These earrings um were also my mom's, and they are mignon fajet, who is a New Orleans jeweler, and these are wonderful little silver seashells, aren't they pretty? And these are real silver, so that means I can actually wear them all day, even the posts, and they come with I didn't put on the other jewelry, but they come with really pretty um black seed pearl jewelry strands with little tiny silver shells, and I really love these. I think I got the jeweler name right. Um, I might try to look her up and put the link in the notes. Tohe agrees. Is that an agree or disagree? I don't know. So, one thing I want to talk about is I spoke with a new client, a new author coaching client. And so, you know, like not somebody I'd ever met before. And we did sort of our introductory, we did the um build your own package deal. So we just did the um introductory phone call where I had gone and I looked at everything she was doing and gave her some opinions on where because she's her career is not going the way she wants it to go. It's not um books aren't selling, you know, and so she's doing the thing where she says, Um, I've tried everything and you know, I'm I'm following all of the advice and nothing's working. And so I I was sort of giving her the overview of all the things that I thought that she could do, uh, what would be most important. But one thing that stood out to me, and this is something I want to mention, I probably have mentioned it before, but I hear this a lot from various writers, especially newer writers. And I'm sure that there are a few people out there that this works for. But in general, I think this is bad a bad practice. And this is having family edit your stuff. Bear with me, because I know you're all those of you who are doing this, I know that you're gonna say, but yeah. Um, she mentioned that her husband um edits all of her stuff for her, and that he's an engineer who doesn't read fiction, but he has um a very exacting and analytical mind that he brings to the process. Does anyone detect a problem here? Setting that aside, let me tell you a little story. Um, as you may or may not know, I studied martial arts for many, many years, and we taught Tai Chi classes. We taught weekly Tai Chi classes. Um, we had a several different ones. Um one was a regular class that was also our training class that we would occasionally have new people come into, and then we also did outreach classes through the university, and particularly in the outreach classes, they would go for six, seven weeks during the semester, and you know, like on Wednesday evenings, and so we would get people who we would often get families, uh, we would get friends, but we would get couples or um mothers and you know, parents and children, you know, of a certain age. I think that we had a rule that they had to be at least 15 or something. But, you know, people who are like, oh, well, let's do something fun this winter, let's let's take Tai Chi, which is great. But we would do stuff where we would work as a group, and then we would also pair people off to do exercises. And we were always telling people when they paired off, we're like, please work with someone that you don't know, which was really hard to get people to do. People don't like doing that, but there was a good reason for this because I mean, inevitably, people I'm talking like you could you could win money betting on this. That every time, like a husband and wife, or a parent and child, or sibling and sibling paired off, this family dynamic would kick in where they would start instructing each other on how to do it. Um, they would be critical of each other, and they would be like, no, no, you have to do it this way, and all of this. And this is not something that happened with people who didn't know each other. It didn't even happen with people who were friends. It was always if there was some sort of family relation. It's it's a thing, you guys. It's this dynamic that kicks in. And we did this for for years, you know, we taught this class probably for 10 years, and it was like clockwork. And and we would even, we would even have to intervene, especially between spouses, um, where we would like mix up spouses and say, okay, everybody switch and work with someone else because they were getting nothing done. It was totally unproductive. Um, this dynamic was completely counterproductive. I think that this same kind of thing happens when you have family or spouse, which is the same thing, right? Found family, acquired family, um, edit your work. It's not that they don't have wonderful brains. It's not that even if you have someone who loves to read exactly in your genre and they have wonderful, insightful things to say, they are not reading you, they're not reading your work with an objective eye. They're reading it as their spouse or their parent or their child or their sibling who wrote this thing. And there are other factors that come into play, and I don't think it's productive. I really don't. And whenever I talk about this, I inevitably get someone arguing with me and saying, Well, my husband, my wife, my sister is my first reader, and that's been true all along, and they are wonderful. And it's like, okay, you know, if if you really believe that, um that's great. Maybe it's working, but I don't see many instances where it is. And when I see someone who is struggling with their work not being where they want it to be, almost always they mention that their first reader is a family member. So this is my advice, and I know it is unpopular advice, but if you are trying to get your writing up to the next level and you have someone who is in your family, my straps are falling down here. If you have someone in your family who is your first reader or who is your editor, I I know that's really hard to get let go of, but I would suggest at least trying once, skipping that step and just see what happens. Find somebody else, find someone who is not related to you. Um it's just um, I think it makes all the difference in the world, I really do. And I'm I'm speaking of this as an advocate for you and for your work. Uh I know that family dynamics can be tricky, but seriously, this is some of the best advice I have to give. On that note, I will remind you all that first cup of coffee is part of the Frolic Media Podcast Network. You will find more podcasts you love at frolic.media slash podcasts. I will talk to you all tomorrow. Take care. Bye bye.