First Cup of Coffee - December 6, 2018

Talking today about XKCD and watching creator's work evolve - how it's akin to a writer producing a million words to refine voice. Also dealing with fragmented days, catching up wordcount, Sorcerous Moons being translated into French, and the delights of nail polish.

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Good morning everyone. This is Jeffy Kennedy. And I am back here with my first cup of coffee. Today it is detox tea, yeah, because today is a Thursday. So it's fasting day, December 6th. Getting closer to the holidays. Hope you all are getting ready for it. This yogi detox tea is actually pretty good. It's got a nice spicy flavor to it. And I think that the intermittent fasting really is making a big difference for me. I'm feeling much better, um, just lighter and cleaner. And um and I'm not relentlessly gaining weight like I was there for a while. In fact, I'm losing a little bit gradually, which is my goal. So that's good. And I'm not going to really extraordinary measures. Um just trying to eat fewer refined carbs, basically, more grains, and trying to do that 40 to 50 percent of my diet is carbs and no more. Okay, I I should figure out what is it is syllogism? Maybe syllogism is the word I'm looking for. So the the tag on the yogi tea today says, when you become part of the universe, the universe becomes part of you. Yeah, see, it's that same thing where they just sort of flip the words around in an attempt to sound profound and wise. Uh you know who uh did a brilliant send-up of that is uh Mike Myers, who did the movie that was called like the Yogi or something, uh, where he would say things like that. Or he would also make um acronyms of bizarre things, and then he would always add that little TM with the little sparkle noise at the end. T M. It was a great satire of this very thing. So I appreciate uh the comments that all cat wrangling, whether wild or domesticated, semi-domesticated, is welcome. Uh that's what you get as part of my trademark is the uh feline interference. Uh just part of the many services we offer here at first cup of coffee. Yesterday was um a little bit of an uneven day. The the happy ending is that I did get my word count. Uh I spent more time, but it took some doing. Um I spent more time doing uh SAFWA business stuff than I had, than I would have liked. And I while I try to uh segregate that stuff to some extent, you know, not look at it at email at all until later in the day. If there's something going on that I feel like needs more immediate attention, then maybe if I were more disciplined, I would still stay away. But um I start thinking about it, and then I feel like, well, I need to weigh in and respond so that I can sort of get it out of my mind and focus on the writing. So I didn't have great focus yesterday, and then I had an afternoon manicure appointment. Um, incredibly important, nanny petty, but now my nails are are all sparkly Christmas red and my tozies are done. So that's one of my uh indulgences. Every once in a while I feel like I should probably not spend the money on that, but it's um something that makes me happy, and I don't really, you know, otherwise don't spend a whole lot of time on grooming anymore unless I'm going out. Uh, you know, at home I'm pretty schleppy, but it makes me happy to have my nails pretty and you know what price happiness, right? Um, and it gives a little bit of structure that sometimes I do have to leave the house by a particular time, which I can begrudge as I did yesterday with my 3 p.m. appointment. So the upshot was is I had 200, I was 248 words shy of my 3,000-word word count goal. And when I dashed off to my appointment, I did that kind of final hour, and I was hoping that that final hour I might have a 1200-word hour, and it ended up being like a 900-something hour, which you know wasn't shabby, and I try to appreciate what I get. So when I got back to the house around five, a little after five, I did those last 248 words, which I don't often do. And it took me 11 minutes to get my 248 words, and I was happy. So I'm on track to get my 15,000 words this week. I've got two more days to go, but so I don't want to oversell uh the probability, but I've got over 9,000 words. I have passed 26,000 on the book. Um we're it's probably gonna end up being about 56,000 according to my predictions, where scene one and act one came out. Um so, and then I'll hit midpoint today. I've only got about a little like 1,100 words to go to meet that midpoint. Um although that's calculating the midpoint off of 55,000. I'm and like I said, I think I'm gonna end up at 56,000, a little over 56, but you know, six one half dozen. So at any rate, midpoint might end up being closer to twenty-eight thousand words than the twenty-seven thousand five hundred. But so it goes. And I know what's gonna happen today, um, pretty much. And you guys, I think it's gonna be kind of cool. This is a scene I've been hoping to get to for a very long time. So probably from the very beginning. So that's cool. I've been mulling titles more. We've been the cover is almost final. We're just doing some final tweaks, and then she's gonna have to hold it for the cover. And I keep thinking about this trajectory of titles, and I'm not happy with my thoughts. Uh sometimes titles can be difficult. And I'm kind of thinking about backing it out the other direction. Since the first book was Lonan's War, then Oriah's Gambit, then the Tides of Bara and The Forests of Drew, that showed their trajectory as they sort of moved through their personal life stories. And now I'm thinking about backing it out again and having the fifth book be Oriah's Something and the sixth book Lonan's Something. Um, that resonates. That's got a nice, I feel more there's a certain click when I come up with what something will be. And I felt it when I figured out who will be the POV character of the final Uncharted Realms book. Uh the one that comes after the arrows of the heart. People had been asking about it and saying, well, who is it going to be? Because there is no obvious very character. Very often at the ends of previous books, there are one or several people where people would say to me, you know, like after the original Twelve Kingdoms trilogy, they said, Are we getting Daphne's story? Um, and this time there is no obvious POV character. Some people have asked, and I'm keeping it close to the vest because I figured out who it was, and you get this little, I get this little uh internal click. It's like maybe it's like that little trademark, right? The TM Ting. Only it feels more like a click. Where it's like, oh yeah, this is right, that's it. And amusingly, I was telling at RWA in July uh I was having wine with Lexi Chantal, which is uh appropriate since she does the reading between the wines blog. And I told her what I thought that the final uh POV character would be, and she got this look in her eyes, and she says, I literally just got a chill. I said, Yay, cool, okay, good sign. So anyway, that Oriah Something, Alone and Something resonates for me, and I think that's what I will do. Uh it also means that I can more easily think of the title for book six and get that going. Um, if you all see on social media, saw on social media, you may or may not. There's a few things that I should have mentioned that are going on. One, it was amusing. On Tuesday, I think it was, I mentioned that um I talked about the the Czech translation deal for Chronicles of Desneria, and then I said that there was another one coming uh that I couldn't announce yet. And then when I logged onto social media, I saw that it had been announced. So I was like, oh, somebody read my mind. It's funny being an author that way because uh people don't tell you before they announce things. Publishers just sort of do stuff and then afterwards say, Oh yeah, did you know? Or they don't even say, Did you know? You just see it somewhere. Well, okay. So anyway, um Sorceress Moons is going to be translated into French. Uh yay, that's very exciting, huh? So this is the first time I've had a self-published work translated. All of my other translations have been through uh traditional publishers. Uh I have had books translated into French before, but those were the uh the falling under series that I did with Karina. Uh those were translated into French and also Italian. I think only the one was translated into Italian. I think that's right. I'm looking up on my bookshelf. And if the others were translated into Italian, they didn't tell me. I think it was just that first one. But uh all three uh falling underbooks were translated into French, going under his touch and under contract, and actually made kind of decent money too, prompting me to say, as I love to say, I always knew I'd be big in France. Uh I'd like to be bigger in France. Bring me over to because I want to see Paris. So and I'll give signings and workshops and everything. So um, so yeah, I believe that we will be doing all six books. I haven't seen the contract yet. It's still going through the agency. I do have my agent negotiate for him rights deals for uh self-published works also. Well, all the better for me not to have to do that. But uh the announcements from Ultra Real, who is the French publisher, has been mentioning that uh book five of this series is coming out in December, which is probably not true, it's gonna be January. I'm I'm set to finish December 19th, and so I theoretically could get it out in December, but not and have it edited. And I just don't like to put out stuff that hasn't been properly edited. It's gonna be January. Uh so but I decide not to correct them on social media. The books will be done. Uh they it sounds like they're planning to produce the books in the first quarter of huh. Well, I'm not going to commit to that because now I know they keep saying the date March 2019, but I think that's when the contract will be finalized. And maybe they're saying 2020 for the books to come out in French. Uh, but that'll be fun, huh? And I guess it means that I really can't muff uh books five and six, right? That would be introducing to see what happens if I like totally screwed them up and made dumb things happen. I'm I'm sort of contemplating what that even would be. Yeah, well, don't worry, I'm not gonna do that. Something that I have been doing lately, part of this was the switch over to the Android phone uh and reloading apps and so forth. Because my old phone died, I don't really remember everything I had on it. So it's interesting to see what I miss. And I'm only adding things back on as it occurs to me that oh, I used to like to look at that, and where did that go? So one of them is the app for XKCD, the cartoon of a comic of math and science, I think is what he says. And I've been following XKCD for a long time, although apparently not for as long as it's been going, and certainly not with tremendous faithfulness. I I don't I used to follow a bunch of cartoons. I had like a things that I looked at every day, along with like some opinion columns and stuff, and it just became too much to keep up with, and they fell away, and and I didn't miss them. Uh XKCD is one that I've just always been amused by, so I'm always happy when I remember to look. And I'm often prompted when someone else shares one, which is what reminded me because someone in the Sephua chat room shared the one from the other day where uh they were talking about visiting Alpha Centauri, and somebody replies, Oh, we shouldn't go there. I checked on the internet and they only have three stars. Ha ha ha, because it's only a three-star system. Uh it would it's a pretty good joke, and of course, the science fiction people liked it. So I re-added the app on my phone, and I saw that there was an option on it to go back to the very beginning and read them all in order. And so this would be the comic uh version of reading an author's entire backlist, which is something I often enjoy doing. I I really like reading an author's backlist or ulvre, their entire set of works, uh, from beginning to current. It's I enjoy seeing how how they change and refine their art. So right now I am up to comic number 198. Uh he does an interesting job of or an interesting uh convention, I guess, in that he doesn't date his comics, which I find occasionally aggravating, but you know, uh hey, it's his artistic choice. And instead the comics are all numbered. And so 198 is in 2006. And I know this mainly because there's also an option to click explain comic, which I really love because sometimes, you know, his more arcane, especially when he starts getting into the math equations, uh, I just did not get that much higher education in math. And what I did get, I think I core dumped as soon as I didn't need it anymore. So um I'll get, and I also don't understand some of his more arcane physics or space type science. A lot of stuff I'll get right away, and so I I I and I know it's funny, and so I always want to know what it is that I'm not getting. Uh, so it's great to do the explain comic function, and on there you can see what date it came out. So I'm just to 2006, which means that I've got you know becoming up on 13 years of catching up to do, but it's very interesting to uh at this point now I can see where his style is gelling. Um, the comics now look very much the same as they are today. Um, and I did not look to see what year they started. I should look at that and see uh how long that took. Maybe I'll do that at the end, so just in case I mess up the podcast. Yeah, I'm I'm tempted to look now, but I shouldn't. So anyway, uh, but I some of the the very earliest ones that are on there are ones from like his high school notebook. So that tells you something. But anyway, it's very interesting to watch that that evolution of style. And it put me in mind of the thing that I have talked about and people have asked about, which is this whole um that you need to write a million words before you get the pipe sufficiently clear, uh, or a million words to refine your voice. And I do think that there's quite a lot to be said for that. I think a million is a semi-arbitrary number. It's almost like to me, it's like the uh the Taoist 10,000 steps, right? You know, 10,000 steps means you know, the journey of 10,000 steps begins with a single, or 10,000 miles begins with a single step, something like that. Anyway, they always say, you know, the 10,000 things, and it just means a whole lot. You know, you just have to write a whole lot. And so for this, you know, it's like he had to do a whole lot, you know, at least you're coming up on 200, where I recognize it as being the refined thing. And who knows how many drafts that represents. Those are the the published ones. So, some food for thought there. All right. I'm going to go ahead and say goodbye. Thank you all for listening. I hope you have a wonderful Thursday. I hope you head into your Friday revving. For those of you, I understand that a lot of you uh binge listen on the weekend. So, you know, I hope you're having a great weekend. All right, so I'm gonna look at this. And so just in case I get cut off, I'll keep talking through this here. Oh, except I don't want to mess up where I am in the slides. Hmm. Okay, I'm not gonna look because I don't want to mess up. I don't want to lose my place. And so you'll just have to look yourselves or endlessly wonder. It's good to wonder things. Hope you all have a good one. I will talk to you tomorrow. Bye bye.