First Cup of Coffee - December 14, 2018

On working through the rough periods in writing a book, setting stretch goals, and learning to value failures as much as successes. Also tips on learning three-act structure by watching favorite movies and timing the beats. And tiny rant on THAT guy who thinks it's funny to joke about my name. 

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Good morning everyone. This is Jeffy Kennedy, and I'm here with my first cup of coffee. Today is Friday, December 14th. Hitting the Ides of December. Tomorrow anyway. And yeah, um still in the middle of Sorcerer's Moons, I'm still in the upper 30,000. It's just been a freaking slow week on this book. Um so here you have it. This is the the dregs of the writer pushing through this story. This part's just going so damn slow. But the good news is I only have about 20,000 words left. So I should be still done by the end of next week. So that's my whole plan. If I can be done by the end of next week, and then I'm just gonna take off um the whole following week through January 2nd and have a a bit of a break. I took a break in writing over Thanksgiving, and I think that helped. Um, but I'm feeling like I need more. I'm sorry that it didn't work out that I finished both um Ariah's Enchantment and the final book, as I had hoped by this week. But you know, that was a stretch goal. It had seemed so possible back in the uh rosy light of October. When so many things seem so bright and shiny. This is something that I do all the time. I'm forever having to revise my goals backward. Um, however, I feel like I was having a conversation with a gal that I'm mentoring, um, and I may have mentioned it before, but she had said when I suggested that she should practice writing to deadline, she said that she didn't want to set herself up for a failure, that if she discovered she could not write to a particular deadline, then she would fail and then have bad feelings. And I can understand that to an extent, but I think that it's really important to learn not to not to read a failure or a miss as an emotional thing. You don't uh beat yourself up for that sort of thing. Uh I remember learning that with knife throwing when I was learning knife throwing, and I was learning it with uh a Taoist school, and one of the pieces of advice was to try not to get too attached to the thrill of sticking the knife in the target, to take equal pleasure in the knife missing the target as the knife hitting the target. And that's an interesting thing to practice. Uh and knife throwing is a good way to do it because sometimes you miss the target. And when you do stick the knife in the target, it's exciting and fun. And trying to teach yourself to enjoy missing as much as hitting is a real exercise. But it's important because we learn probably more from missing than from hitting. Um hitting is great, but we don't necessarily learn much from it, right? Uh it's the missing where you think, uh, well, I released too late, or I didn't let my arm flow, and all of this. So I think it's important with all things in life to look at missing a goal or a milestone or a target as a learning experience. So I when I set up my goals, when I set my word count goals and my annual goals and all of that sort of thing, because I am the spreadsheet queen, so I have lots and lots of goals, uh, I build in room for the contractual deadlines so that if I don't uh meet the deadline I have set, I still have room to make the contractual deadline. But then I also set my goals pretty ambitiously and think, okay, you know, in the best of all possible worlds, it could happen this way. So I had shared with uh Lira, my local romance author's chapter, my goals for the year, last January, that I had hoped to write 11 books during the year. Um and some of that's fuzzy because it's not releasing 11 books, you know, like one of them was turning in Orchid Throne, um, which you know still needs to have copy edits and so forth. But, you know, so it's at whatever stage it was that I needed to get it done. Some things were book releases, others were just finishing out the edits, um, a couple of projects I just wanted to move forward. So I I did nine, and it looks like it's gonna end up being nine. And it would have been nice to hit eleven, but you know, eleven wasn't a bit ambitious goal to set for myself. So uh yeah, that's that's um you know how it goes. So it's uh I I'm sitting here with my in my office because it's cold out. It's only like 14 degrees out, although it's nice and sunny. Oh, there's a ladderbeck woodpecker on the portal post. They're really pretty. They've got that uh black and white hash mark pattern on their bodies and then a bright red head. Yeah, pretty bird. I'd get a picture of them for you. But actually I have an old one. Maybe I can dig it out. I'll see if I can find one. Uh sorry, fatally distracted by the bird life. We've got the um, I don't think I mentioned yesterday I posted a picture of the fountain uh that we have out front, a little water fountain, and David got me a heater to put in it to keep it going because I had let it go dry and pulled the pump out because it was so cold and the water was freezing, and I didn't want the pump to die. And uh the bluebirds were coming and landing on the dry basin and pecking at it, and it was so pitiful that David took pity on me and on the birds. I think he was moved by it too, and he went and got a heater and we put that in the base of the fountain. So now it's bubbling away, and the birds are loving it. So between the bird seed and the water, we've got all kinds of birds around here, and that's um it's really great. And sit here in my office chair and looking out the window down the basin, down Galistale basin to the mountains, and all the birds are swirling around outside. And it's quite lovely. And I'm thinking that it would have been super cool to have both of those books finished. I thought maybe I would have Oriah's Enchantment out this month. Um, and that was just an overly ambitious goal. Uh but I should have it out in January, and I appreciate you all being patient on that. But I'm still going to my my whole idea had been that I would finish those two books and clear them off the decks, and then I would take these, you know, like week and a half over Christmas to do enjoy the holidays and do family stuff, and then to uh study up for writing the sequel to the Orchid Throne, the Fiery Citadel. But it occurred to me that the studying I want to do for Fiery Citadel will dovetail nicely with what I want to do for book six of Sorcerer's Wounds, which will be Lone and Something. Actually, I'm trying to think of what it'll be, because we have Oriah's Enchantment and then Lone and Something. Uh, and the obvious titles that come to my mind, I feel like, are too spoilery. Even though you know that I will provide you guys with a happy ending, we don't want to like totally telegraph that. Um, if I one of the things about that is when we say that the Act III climax takes place at 90%, and the last 10% is denouement wrap up how they are after, um very rarely is it an actual full 10%. And I hear people talk about this um all the time, even the ones who really live and die by this uh method. If you one thing you could do is you can apply this to movies, and it's fun, just set a timer. Look at it's easy these days because you can stream it, you can look at the overall length of the movie. So if it's like an hour and 30 minutes, then you can figure out where your 25, 50%, 75, 90% beats are. And it's a really good way to learn story structure, especially if you pick um like a blockbuster movie, one that's done really well. There are some movies where I'll feel like you know, you start watching it and you think, God, I have no idea what this movie is doing, where is it going, and I'll look at the time on the movie and we'll be at like 30 or 40 percent, and they still haven't set up all the stakes. And that's one of the rules that for by the end of Act One, by the end of the first 25%, you should have set all the stakes. And we just instinctively look for this in storytelling. So if you pick uh a real classic movie, a very popular movie, uh maybe even your favorite movie, and watch it and follow those beats. Sorry, I reached across the microphone there to pull up my sleeve. Um it's it can be really entertaining. There'll be times we'll be watching a movie and I'll think, huh, well, that was a midpoint pivot, and I'll look and we'll be like right at 50%. And that's like when the whole story changes. It's like, oh, though you'll see there's a sort of a big rotation in what happens. It's like when a twist kicks in, or something else comes in to raise the stakes, or it's the now it's personal. Um it's kind of interesting to watch. So, anyway, if you look for that 90% mark, um, very rarely does the final climax occur at 90%, particularly in modern stuff. More and more and more we push that 90% climax until almost the end. I've noticed that um JD Robbs, Nora Roberts Pseudonym, in a lot of her books, her final climax happens in the last couple of pages. And sometimes for a while there, you weren't getting any at all. I know she started adding back some back in because it really was a little much. Not to have any at all. Uh it's funny with um The Dragons of Summer, Evergreen commented that uh that the ending left her hanging, and she came to complain about it and saw that I'd been talking about endings on the podcast, so which was funny. Um and that was interesting because between The Arrows of the Heart, The Dragons of Summer, and Warrior of the World, which is coming out in January, I had to really juggle how each of those fit into this final climactic book, which we'll put out in the spring sometime. Um, and because I wrote them all at different times too. I wrote Warrior of the World way back in spring, and then did Arrows of the Heart and then Dragons of Summer. So I had to kind of layer them in with each other. That was an interesting challenge. And I and they're all interconnected, and you all, you know, someone like Evergreen, you're all seeing how the story is building, I'm I'm moving all of these players into position, as it were. So it'll be uh it'll be entertaining to see if hopefully it works out the way I have it planned. All of that was a little bit of a diversion uh because I was starting to talk about the beats and that 90% mark. If I look at the overall series arc for Sorcerer's Moons, book six would be almost the act three climax of the entire series would occur in like the first um 30, 25% of the sixth book, and then all the rest of it would be Des Nouvelles and Wrap Up and How They Are After, which I don't think would provide for a very uh interesting book. So oh, but what I would the reason I was thinking about Dragons of Summer on those lines was that one of my critique partners said, um, Jim Sorensen, who's also my collaborator, had read it, and he said that he felt like there was um climax stuff happening in that final scene, which I think I even put in as an epilogue. And and he has a valid point, uh, that, you know, because there is that big uh reveal, which is a little much for totally wrapping up a story, which is probably part of what Evergreen is talking about because she it left her wanting more. But I really wanted to drop that information into this novella rather than have it happen off screen, which would have been my other option. So, you know, sometimes you make these choices to put in things. Um, I wasn't going to add a whole bunch of more after that in the novella because partly I was at length and I didn't want to make it a lot longer, and it would have disrupted the structure of the rest of the story to have a whole long tail on it. And um, you know, and if you're just sort of adding things just to add words, that's not serving the story, right? And you always want to serve the story first. So yeah, so we'll see. Uh I think if I can get book five finished next week and then take some time off and then maybe come back to it and revise. I mean, you're just gonna see how I feel when I finish it. I might uh send it off to an editor. I might start writing book six as we talked about. And um yeah, I don't I don't know that I'm gonna have to uh come back to book five a whole lot from book six. I think it's gonna fall into place. So we'll just see. So um I guess I'd better get to work. I uh I guess I'll tell you guys this. I was annoyed because I went out and socialized last night, and I did have fun. I ended up staying at the party a few hours, my neighbor's party. But um, there is always that guy, that one guy who thinks it's funny to make fun of my name. And you know, and that's you guys all know this guy, right? And it's always, you know, like this baby boomer age white guy. And he just thought he was so funny, and he said, Oh, your name is Jeff. He said, then you should be friends with Chuck. This is Chuck. And he says, Isn't that funny? You're both girls with boys' names. And I'm and he says, Maybe it's Chuck, Chuck and Jeff, or Chucky and Jeffy. And so I talked to this gal, and it turns out her name is Sheris. And she said, but a lot of her friends thought that it was Charles, and then they started calling her Chuck. And I said, Well, you know, Sheris is a gorgeous name that has nothing to do with Charles, and she said, I know. And and we did have fun talking to each other, but um, you know, it's like this guy thinks that he's like the only person to ever say anything, you know, and why does about you know, make jokes about my name, you know, and why does he even think that's okay to riff on my name? Uh he was also the woman with him, was a very beautiful blonde woman wearing these great um gold chandelier earrings. I never did ask her about them, I wanted to, and with beautiful blonde hair, and he kept uh making references to the product shoes on her hair, like how she shouldn't get too close to the candles because of the product. And I was um, I don't know, by the end of the evening, I was really longing to kick him in the shins. But otherwise, I had fun. I talked to a lot of people. It's funny because my neighbor is an artist, and so most everybody at the party were artists of one sort or another. And um, you know, and so when they ask me if I'm an artist, I say, no, I'm a writer, and they're like, Oh, you know, it's like, yeah, I'm sort of the uh odd man out in the artist world of Santa Fe. But um, then so it goes. All right, I'm gonna get to work. I hope you all have a terrific weekend and think good thoughts for next week or even today, being bang up word count days for me. And uh, I hope you all have a wonderful time dealing with holidays and so forth. And I will talk to you on Monday. Bye bye.