First Cup of Coffee - December 7, 2018

Low wordcount day yesterday, so I'm musing on that - and various assorted ideas like language drift, holidays in the Southwest, and the prospect of snow.
Here's the article from The Mary Sue that I mention. 

Transcript

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Good morning everyone. This is Jeffy Kennedy, and I'm here with my first cup of coffee. And I saved the first sip for you. See how much I care about. Today is Friday, December 7th. And a cold and frosty morning here in Santa Fe. We got some snow last night. Nothing like the one to three inches they had predicted, alas. Mostly just the powder sugar dusting. But it's quite overcast and supposed to remain overcast today. I understand the southern portions of the state and uh across Texas Panhandle are predicted to get a great deal of snow today and tomorrow. Um Dorinda Jones, my good friend. I I I don't mean it sound like I hesitated. I was about to be more uh gushy than that, and I was thought I should probably not squee up out, call her my darling friend or something. So but then it ended up sounding like maybe she wasn't such a good friend. Uh Dorinda, who is a good friend of mine, uh, lives down uh near Portales Clovis, which is almost Texas, Panhandle. It's almost more Texas than New Mexico. And we have our holiday party tomorrow for Lyra, the land of enchantment romance authors. And she texted me yesterday and said that she might not make the party because she's supposed to get 11 inches in her town. 11 inches of snow. Stop that, you people. Although Dorinda would be the first one to waggle her eyebrows and say, I hope I get 11 inches. Hey, it's Friday. What did you expect? So, um, yeah, which would be too bad. Well, I really enjoy our holiday party. It's uh a nice, relaxed event. We have food and we have wine and we everybody brings some inspirational thing that they learned about writing from the year or a quote to offer. And we do a gift exchange. It's uh a white elephant gift exchange where you can steal gifts, and there are, I'll tell you what, there are people in our chapter who are incredibly strategic about planning their uh stealing attempts. You a gift can be stolen three times, the third time it stays with the person. So there really is a strategy to it. You don't want to um steal too early. If it's a particularly juicy gift, you want other people to steal it uh first and then get in for that third steal. Uh if somebody steals your gift, then you can go back for another one. But someone might steal that too. So anyway, it's fun. It's an entertaining day and a good time spent with fellow writers. And I don't think I'll have any problem getting down there. I'll be writing down with Minerva Spencer. So that'll be fun. I think she's made some noises about her husband's going to chauffeur us and we're going to have drinks on the way down, so that could be entertaining. Um yesterday was a funny day. I did not get my 3,000 words yesterday. I did hit my interim word count to keep me on track to finish, but uh a little bit past that. I think I got about 2,000 words. And I was happy to get those 2,000 words. I don't know if it was because I was fasting and so I felt a little muzzy-headed, and also I was dealing with that safwa business, which hopefully will settle down a bit now. And um yeah, I just wasn't getting the high word counts during the hour. And sometimes the story just slows down, even though I thought I knew what was going to happen. It just wasn't really um sizzling along. And some days are like that. But that said, I have passed the midpoint, and often I speed up at this point, so that's good. I think um get that done today and then maybe see about doing a few errands, perhaps. Uh depends. With it being kind of a cold and snowy day that makes me not want to go out even more than I normally don't want to leave my house. I didn't make it to yoga yesterday. I did have that choice that I thought, well, I could stay and push through to get the rest of the word count, or I could go to yoga, and I was really, really wanting to get to yoga. And so I barely made it and got there right in time and sort of grabbed the last spot on the floor. I thought maybe it wouldn't be too crowded, the class wouldn't be too crowded with it being Christmas season, but it was the most crowded I've ever seen it. So that was my theory there. Maybe we're all thinking the same thing that we need with the cold setting in and doing unaccustomed activity. I'm amazed at uh how climbing up on the step ladder and the step stool and so forth, uh putting up decorations, unaccustomed activity for my body, and I can really feel it. Sunday I'm hoping to get up on the roof and put up the luminarias. That's a little bit of a funny thing. The luminarias are a plastic bag. Well, okay, well, in their original form, they were the paper bag with sand in the bottom and a lit candle, and the candle would glow through the bag. So if you look at pictures of uh Southwest Mexico, New Mexico, uh of the you know, holiday decorations, having these lit up bags um along the roofs and walls is traditional. And I love the look of them. So on the box that you can buy of the electric version of these, it says luminarias. However, locals here insist that luminarias are the bonfires that they build around Christmas, and that the lights on the bags are called ferolitos. And then some people call the electric version electrolitos. So for a long time I've tried to be very good and called them ferolitos to be accurate to my local culture, but nobody knows what a ferrolito is, and everybody calls them luminarias. So um, you know, migration of language is an interesting thing. You can cling to the correct word, but if you're not communicating, which is the primary purpose of language, then after a while it becomes um, you know, it's like what what are you dying for? What what are you really trying to win in this case? Uh you know, one of my I have a couple of pet peeves. Um nauseous. Uh anytime somebody says that they feel nauseous, it makes me wince because nauseous actually means something that induces nausea. So a smell might be nauseous, and then you feel nausea, but everybody uses it wrong. Um the one that I find the most ironic is factoid, which Norman Mailer coined, and I think it was in Norma Jean the Termite Queen, uh, the book about Marilyn Marilyn Monroe. I think I have all my facts straight there. But factoid was a word that he coined to mean uh a piece of information that was presented as being a fact, but that was not true. And then somehow in the internet era, the word drifted, and now everybody uses factoid to mean a small fact. Uh and I when I was working in environmental consulting, EPA had a thing where, you know, like anytime we would do a report for them or something for their website, they would also ask us for factoids to put on the website. And I wanted to say, no, you don't want factoids. But you know, the irony there is of course deeply felt because uh being a government organization, sometimes things are factoids, right? So anyway, luminarias. I'm gonna try to put luminarias on the roof on Sunday. I'm going to uh they just take a long time to do. It's uh they they take a fair amount of assembly. I haven't figured out a way to store to store them assembled, which would be the ideal. Um, I take them apart and put them together every year, and then I have to attach them to the roof so that they don't blow off. So one string of 10 takes me about an hour to assemble and attach. And I do about 10 strings. So that's a long day. So this year, what I'm gonna try to do is when I get back from the Lyra party on Saturday, I think I'm gonna camp out in the living room uh with some movies and try assembling the strings and get them all assembled and then just put them up on Sunday. This is the grand experiment this year. We'll see how it works. Um at some point, if I still want to have luminarias on my roof, I'm probably going to have to hire some stalwart young people to do it for me. Because it is um, even though it's not as bad as you sound as it sounds roof-wise, because we have flat roofs here, so it's very easy to walk around on the roof. Uh, climbing up and down the ladder takes a fair amount of work. But um, yeah, there's a lot of bending over and so forth. So, anyway, I needed that yoga. Um, I will need more yoga before we are done. So, I'm trying to think of what else do I have to tell you all. I did mean to mention that uh there was a great Mary Sue article listing uh seven female-led fantasies that uh Exile of the Seas, or female written and female-led, something like that. Um, and Exile of the Seas was the first one listed, so that was very nice. Uh, there's going to be a great giveaway that I will put up. I will add to the blog post and share of uh Rebel Base books. It's gonna start like this go through December 21st to January 8th. So keep your eyes open for that. Uh Rebel Base is the imprint of Kensington, the sci-fi fantasy imprint of Kensington that did my Chronicles of Desneria trilogy, and who negotiated that foreign rights deal with the Czechs. So so far they're doing a very nice job by me. Um I've been I've been happy with the with this end of it, with the marketing and the um, you know, selling it at Frankfurt Book Fair and doing all of that stuff and the various things that they've been coming up with. So yeah, that's that's great to see. And what else? What else do I have to tell you? I must uh I think I'm a little bit uh a little tired out. I've written a lot of words so far this week. Um, I probably won't hit my 15,000-word goal, but I am going to hit more words this week than I have in uh well, better part of a month, probably six weeks maybe. So I I do think that uh that tiredness plays into it. And I could tell that yesterday. That was one reason why I decided not to keep pushing because I could tell that I was just kind of running out, that I was tired. And which which happens, you know, it's that's uh we can't forget the ways in which um thinking and creative draw pulls on the energy just as much as uh climbing up ladders and doing physical labor, even if it is for Christmas decorations. So yeah, I okay. I guess I'll just end it there. I don't have a whole lot else to say today. I hope you all have a lovely weekend. I hope you enjoy being cozy or being in whatever kind of lovely weather you have, and that your holiday season is going well. And I will talk to you all on Monday. Bye bye.