First Cup of Coffee - December 10, 2018

Recap of a busy weekend, along with musings about organize time as a writer to optimize creativity. Also thoughts on Jacqueline Susann and how our partners in life enable us to do extraordinary things. 

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Good morning. This is Jeffy Kennedy. I'm here with my first cup of coffee. Today's Monday. Another Monday, December 10th. We're now in our second full week of the month. Um and things are rolling along very nicely. Yeah. Got a lot done over the weekend. Actually, it was a very busy weekend for me. Uh Saturday I left the house about eight in the morning and got home about eight at night. It was kind of a long day. Uh went down, went, ran some errands around town, did some Christmas shopping, and then went down to Albuquerque and went to the party for the Land of Enchantment romance authors. And then went to uh do more shopping with Minerva Spencer and her husband, Mr. Spencer, and got some good stuff done, got some significant things done. They uh live up in Taos, so there's not a lot of shopping up there, not unless you want to do like boutique touristy shopping. So I was teasing them about being country mice in the big city. I've certainly been that soldier before. But they uh they're great companions and we had a lot of fun. And Brantley helped me figure out uh David's Christmas present. He was tester for me, so that was great to have a guy there to do the testing. And then yesterday I um I was going to put up the luminarias, as I thought about, but it ended up being kind of a gusty day. And because I got back so late on Saturday, I decided, well, I'm not going to um not gonna put together the prelum the luminarias. I'm just gonna call them luminarias for this. I'm not gonna put the luminarias together uh when I got home. I mean I be basically ate some dinner and crashed. I was tired. Um it's hard to have that much fun. So I did a little bit of stuff around the house. I got the laundry going and I cleaned up the kitchen, which really needed it. Um and then I just didn't feel like doing my SFF 7 post. That's why there wasn't one yesterday. I was supposed to do most memorable books of the year, and I started looking through my list of what I'd read and what I would say were the most memorable books of the year. And as happens for me almost all the time, I've almost never read the books that came out that year. In some cases I do, but very often I'm catching up on backlists because I'll go and read all of an author. So, for instance, I read all of Shananne McGuire's uh October Day series. And, you know, while some of those were five stars, some were less, and I thought, well, what would I pick? And it ended up being one of those um almost decision paralysis. I just didn't have a clear thing about what I wanted to say, and so I finally just messaged the group and said uh I came down with a case of the I don't want us. I just um yeah, I thought I was gonna be able to push through and then I didn't feel like it. And then it's funny because I noticed that James Moore, who has Monday, has posted um that he has to finish a book or his editor is going to kill him, so there won't be a post from him today either. So I don't know, this might end up being punting week at SFF 7. Every once in a while things just happen that way, you know, it's ups and downs. So then I thought, well, what I'll do is I'll just start putting the luminarias together. Uh and it's a multi-step process. There's a cord, you screw in the light bulb in the cord, you know, you have to make sure all the lights are, the bulbs are working, there's a fairly high attrition rate on the bulbs from being outside in the cold. It's not like um the old like, you know, strings of Christmas lights where if one wasn't working, the whole string wouldn't work. But with the uh the way the luminarias are lined up on the roof, if one's out, it kind of looks like a bad tooth, you know. So, you know, you put in all of the bulbs and check them, and then you fit together this two-piece frame and clip that onto the bulb, and then you put this plastic sleeve over the top, and then I put a little piece of duct tape around the bottom, because otherwise the wind will blow the sleeve off of the top. So, and you do that ten times for each string. So I was figuring, I was timing myself yesterday, and we actually had fun because David came home, you know, we had lunch, and then we sat and we watched several movies, which we rarely ever do that. We're not really daytime movie watchers, but we watched uh Isn't she great with Beth Midler and Nathan Lane, which was about Jaclyn Suzanne. And I know I saw it once before quite a while ago. It's an older movie. I think what did we say, see it was I think it was like a 91 movie. Uh, but it um was really fun to watch about Jacqueline Suzanne's career and all of the the things that they did uh to push her along. And I think one of the things that was really extraordinary about that story is we often see the story of the successful man and the you know, the wife that he couldn't have done what he did without. And I remember once David and I got into kind of a fight because he said something thoughtlessly to me. Uh he wasn't he was really reading a lot of the success stuff, you know, like Napoleon Hill and Tony Robbins and all that kind of thing. And he was, you know, thinking about things he could implement. And he said, you know, one thing that these guys all say is that the best, you know, the most helpful thing, the key thing for all of them was having their wives help them do this. And I and I was in a snappish mood, and I said, Well, that's fantastic. Where's my wife? I it it wasn't actually a huge fight, but we did end up sort of talking it out. And one of the great things about David is that he listens. I think that's a when people ask us the secrets to our long relationship, that's definitely something I would uh say about him is that if something's not working for me, if I'm not happy about something, he listens and makes actual changes. And I do the same for him, but uh that's not a common quality in a lot of men, I think. He's a very um nurturing person that way. So it was interesting in this movie to see that kind of reverse situation where uh Jacqueline Suzanne could not have done what she did without her husband. Um it's funny how we look at those stories because you know, we could say, well, he was a publicist, and so that he created her, and this is because we we give the uh you know active role always to the men, you know, we're always allowing them to have that. Oh, well, he you know, he created her. Whereas, you know, if you look at someone like uh Henry Ford, you know, it's like, well, his wife he always credited her with being uh the secret to his success. And it's like, do we know what she did? You know, we she cooked great dinners, we don't know. Um maybe, maybe you guys know, maybe she did more than that. I think she gave him good advice too, but um, you know, it's it's not the same kind of active role. But anyway, it was really interesting to see how he enabled her to do this thing, and I think that's what partners do for each other. It really doesn't matter you know, male or female, or female, female, or male-male, or what have you. Um, and sometimes it's a trade-off, you go back and forth. Uh sometimes one person really helps lift up the one who's doing the creative or unusual ambitious thing. So, anyway, that was an interesting movie to watch, and he helped me put together the luminarias. Mostly he just screwed in the light bulbs, he checked the light bulbs and screwed them in, and I assembled those. And I kept track, and it takes me 45 minutes to assemble one string. So when I was figuring that it takes me an hour for each string, putting them up, 45 minutes of that is assembly. So that was interesting. And it was certainly more comfortable to sit inside and watch the movies. And later in the afternoon I broke out the Prosecco and I drank Prosecco's I was watching, and um, I also watched the First Wives Club. I was keeping on my Bet Middler trend, and then went on to watching Burlesque with Christina Aguilera and Cher. And uh not sure why everyone thought that was such a terrible movie. That's actually kind of a good movie. And shockingly enough, Kristen Bell is in that movie. And I think I want to say she was not on my radar then, but this is actually after forgetting Sarah Marshall. But I don't know if they muff the marketing of that movie or the billing or whatever, but I remember everyone was like, oh, it's so terrible. And really it's not bad. Um I was enjoying it. We didn't finish watching it because David was tired and I was tired, and we finally I went and took a bath and read for a while. I had all of my luminarias put together. So this afternoon I'll put them up. And I think uh if my calculations are correct, it should only take me about 15 minutes a string to wire them up. Maybe 10. 10 to 15 minutes a string to wire them up. So I might get them all up there today. That'd be nice. So along those lines, I am trying to make sure to get my word count done earlier in the day. Uh I keep thinking about that. I need to compress my schedule more. I talked about this some last week. Uh I have a tendency to, you know, sort of let time slide and not make it be productive time. And that's a constant back and forth for me because I can like fill my time too tightly and make it too uh balls to the wall. But I also, you know, the internet leads to dithering. It's incredible to me the way the internet leads to dithering. So I do need to find ways to like check in on social media without you know wasting a lot of time. It was interesting to see my pattern last week. I could see it up on the screen. I ended up with um a little shy of 13,000 words, 12,600 something for the week, um, which was not my weekly goal of 15,000 words. I did fine Monday through Wednesday. I hit my 3,000 word count goal. On Thursday, I was just feeling depleted. My mom was giving me a hard time about saying that I said I was tired on Friday several times. So I think I need to use a different word for the word count uh writing depletion. It feels like a tired, but it's a different kind of tired. So it was depleted. Thursday I was feeling depleted, and I did the uh, you know, met that interim goal to keep myself on track, but then on Friday, you know, Friday morning, I said I was feeling depleted, and yeah, I just was. I did not get that many words done on Friday, and there's just some days where I can tell I'm coming up empty. And I think it's because I pushed increasing word count earlier in the week. So we'll see how I do this week. We'll go back to the 3,000 words a day. It definitely helps me to start earlier. I was tracking my start time for the last couple weeks, and my start time tends to be after 10. And that's not that's not good. It doesn't need to be. Um here we are 15 minutes into this podcast, and I am it's about 8.15. So I'm gonna try making sure that I start running by 7 and get my run-in and done, and get this podcast done. And it takes me a little while to get it put up, you know, do all the keywords and description and everything. And then to get my first sprint done starting by 9. Um, yeah. That it's one thing about doing this podcast first thing in the morning is this is writing time. So if the pattern persists into next year, I was doing all right because I started this in August and I was getting good word counts in August. So we'll just see. But that's kind of how these things work, where you're sort of constantly re-jiggering the process. Uh one thing that was funny about watching is it she great. And I do think that uh it's worth watching, especially um if only for the fun of it, because Jacqueline Suzanne had been a uh TV personality, a starlet. And so they were entirely about creating the appearances of being a writer. Um, she kept changing outfits when her editor, who's played by David Hyde Pierce, uh, when he shows up, you know, and she's like, Do I look like a serious writer now? You know, and he's like, We just need to work. Um it plays to a lot of things about the idea of glamour and the uh, you know, sort of playing to the camera. I remember in college becoming very aware of when I was trying to learn to study, because I'd never really had to study before I got to college, because I was had a good enough memory that I could pretty much just remember what I read and what my teachers said in classes. And I liked to read, so I would read the work, uh, the assignments, and I could just pretty much spit that back on the exams. In college, I had to actually develop a study habit. And I remember thinking, you know, like I would choose places that seemed like I would look good studying in them. Not pretty, that sort of thing, but more like so that it would fit the movie montage of the woman studying in college. And I think that's one of the uh downsides of you know growing up as a television generation is that we tend to see ourselves in terms of if I'm going to do this thing, how would the movie montage look? And I think that we all have that in our heads of what is the movie montage of being a writer like. And it's one of the frequent criticisms leveled at uh TV shows or movies that have writer characters like Castle. It was a good one, and I enjoyed Castle a whole lot, but you almost never saw Castle writing. And when he was writing, I mean he he would be writing, and somebody would walk into his office, his mother or his daughter, or Beckett, and they would walk in and he would be cheerful. You know, he wouldn't snarl at them. Um so you know that's not realistic. But I mean, it's obviously sorry, I just spilled my tea a little bit. I was gesturing. I can't gesture. Uh it's one of those things that uh it's not really useful to, or I it's not entertaining. It's it doesn't work well to have uh the camera on the writer as they sit there and type for an hour. You're not gonna put that in your movie or your TV show. So instead you create a montage, right? And the you make the montage of the interesting things, which is both the despair and the glory. Uh and being a writer, there's a whole lot of in-between. There's a whole lot of that typing on the keyboard or writing on the notebook or staring out the window as you let the story evolve in your head. So it was fun to watch Isn't she great? Because so much of that was it makes you realize how much of the idea of being a writer is that movie montage version of it. And I mean, she did create a phenomenon, but part of it was that they went about it like publicizing a movie and based it on her personality in many ways. Uh I wasn't around, uh certainly not as a reader when all of that was going on. Oh, the book was Valley of the Dolls. Sorry, I should have probably said that right off for those of you who don't know. Um which was about actresses in New York who uh had a lot of sex and did drugs and and it was shocking at the time. I've heard people say that if you read it now, that it's less shocking than just really sad. I never saw the movie. They did make a movie of it. So, at any rate, you know, the the thing is is the extraordinary stories are interesting to us because they are extraordinary. But you know, what we strive for as writers is um the evenness, you know, to try to have uh a reproducible and sustainable schedule. Yeah, maybe that's true for everything in life, right? You know, you kind of want to try to minimize those dramatics ups and downs. Dramatics, dramatic up and downs, ups and downs. I cannot say that. Dramatic ups and downs. There we go. Uh you know, so if you are working your day job five days a week, that you have this um evenness to it so that you don't have the whole you know racing through to Friday idea. Just because that's it's hard to live that way. So at any rate, I think I shall get after it now. We'll see how I do starting by nine. I hope you all have a fantastic Monday, and I will talk to you tomorrow and let you know how it went. Bye bye.