First Cup of Coffee - January 11, 2019

On the home stretch of finishing Oria's Enchantment today - also random thoughts on editing, revision, Irish harps and day job stress. 

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Good morning everyone. This is Jeffy Kennedy. Here was my first cup of coffee on a snowy Friday morning in Santa Fe. It is January 11th. The end of our first full work week. First full week of 2019. How'd y'all do? Did you make it through okay? Wasn't too bad. It's been kind of a crazy week for me. I mean, feels like a lot of ups and downs, um, just sort of attention-wise. Uh I have two chapters to finish on Ariah's enchantment, and uh fabulous copy editor Rebecca Criminese is standing by waiting to do the line and copy edits on it. Um so I think we'll be on target to get this up before the end of January. Um I did not end up doing a you know, like a full content edit on this one since I went back to the beginning and edited from there. It just depends on the book. I I do this on some books and not on others, but at this point I'm pretty satisfied with how the story works. I got feedback from Corrine, and I'm not feeling the need to really get a whole lot of feedback from other people. Some books I really want that content editing, um, others not so much, especially so late in the series like this. I feel like I need a lot more content editing at the beginning of a series, beginning of a world, establishing characters and stakes and the overall plot. Um, but lately, I if I really know the characters well and the world well, and I get to spend some time on them, then a little bit of feedback has lately been enough for me. And it's an expense I can skip. Content editing tends to be expensive. I know that goes against something that I always say where I say that everybody needs to be edited. Um, and that I think often the authors who say nobody edits me are the ones who really need to be edited. Um, so it's a delicate line to walk, but I don't think I'm doing that at this point. Um yeah. It it's just a you know, it it's one of those things that's very difficult to explain that you learn how to do, and that's just you learn how to assess a story and assess your own feelings about it. Um to know, like you know, people ask sometimes, how do you know when you're done? How do you know when the story's done? And it's it's an acquired skill. That's one of those things you just have to kind of learn how to figure out, how learn how to detect. Um, you know what what content editing does is it helps shape a story. And some stories need more outside assistance than others. Um this one actually has a deceptively simple plot arc. All of the um, well, you guys will see when you read it, all of the difficulty has been in sort of portraying this big pivotal moment, mainly for Ariah. But I think I've got it now. Yep, it's uh so now I just have to write out these last couple of chapters and go back over them maybe. But everything else has been tightened up, so it's looking good, looking good to finish today. It's funny, um, I forgot to fast yesterday. I just maybe that was part of my being muzzy headed. I just sort of went and did my usual breakfast routine and forgot. So I thought, well, maybe I should do a makeup fast day today, but I am not gonna do that. Um, not with trying to finish uh two chapters, which will probably come in somewhere around 5,000 words. That's a big push day for me. Uh I think it'll be fine so far as resources, because you know, I've been doing so much revising all week that my actual word count has been, you know, fairly minimal for the week. I think I've only written like 5,000 words so far this week, but I've revised 180 pages twice. So, well, yeah, it's by the time I was done, I've I'm up to like 186 pages. That's um double spaced Times in Roman 12 point font. So, and it's um I'm sitting right at about 50,000 words. So, you know, these are short novels. So soon as I finish that, I plan to do a little bit of celebrating. Um might go buy a nice bottle of wine, and then I'm gonna go on the teetotaling for a couple of months. Woe is me. Uh get serious about taking some of this weight off. Um not drinking wine helps a whole bunch. But tomorrow will be uh a fun day. I get to have breakfast with my aunt, who is in town for a meeting. And then I'm gonna go down to Lyra, Land of Enchantment Romance Authors, where we will uh hang out and get to ride down with Minerva Spencer, who's been on this podcast. And then afterwards we'll go have drinks with um Katie Lane. Uh I haven't been able to get together with her for some time now, so I'm looking forward to that. And uh Minerva's husband, apparently, will drive us home, so it's nice to have the designated driver. And then come Sunday, it'll be sober Sunday, and uh a very serious effort on this weight loss. Twenty pounds. I want to lose twenty pounds, which seems like a lot. But so it goes. Let's see, what else? We're getting ready to move the website and then we should have a new website soon. Uh next week I'll do copy edits on Orchid Throne. Depending on my friskiness, I might do those on Sunday. Uh it's supposed to be very snowy here on Sunday, so that might be a good day to simply settle in and work on those. Yeah, it's funny, my podcasts get shorter as I uh get deeper into finishing the book, right? I thought about not even podcasting today, but I did want to check in and tell you guys, for those of you sort of tracking the progress, the overall progress of working on a book. And so once I get those copy edits done, then it will be into book six. Get that finished out. Yeah. I I'm trying to think. I haven't been doing much else. The the book I've been reading is kind of semi-secret. It's a book by a new debut author that I've been asked to blurb, and I'm still making up my mind about it. Um, I have been liking it. I just haven't been wanting to talk about it too much. I'm expecting my RWA Books for Rita judging soon, which will be uh I won't be able to talk about those either. Yeah, and then in the evenings we've sort of been doing our two episodes of Game of Thrones on HBO. We've gotten through uh the first season and started into the second season. I'm paying so much more attention this time. I I'm not exactly sure what that's about. I think it used to be I used to have this habit of keeping my laptop on my lap, and I would do a lot of social media stuff in the evenings while we were watching movies. And I don't do that anymore because I've been trying to reduce my time uh on the computer overall, and I kind of felt like that wasn't that great for me to be doing that. Of course, back then, when you know we watched Game of Thrones as it aired, so it was once a week, and and I was still doing the day job then. And even though I sometimes question on here, you know, if if I couldn't be doing another job as well as writing, it's it is very interesting to look back and have very little memory of of things like this, of shows that we watched and so forth. I think that I kind of um white noised out a lot, you know. Went to the blue screen, the mental blue screen. Yeah. I know that I'm much less stressed than I was then. So that's certainly a consideration. Yeah. The other thing I'm thinking about is I think I might sell my harp. I have an Irish harp, a lover harp, a Celtic harp, uh, that I bought when we lived back in Wyoming and I was taking lessons then. And since we moved to Santa Fe, which will be ten years in August, uh I have not played it. I just um I'm not good at at playing music. I'm not good at playing the harp. And that was part of why I wanted to do that, was to see if I could get better at something for which I have zero talent. And in fact, quite a bit of um, I want to say, negative ability. Um, music just does not come easily to me. You know, words, words come easily to me. Music is hard for me to understand. So I really did try for several years to learn how to play the harp, and I was I'm still I was really bad at it. Uh you know, it'd be funny because people would say, oh, well, let's hear you play. You know how, like in um I love this scene in Pride and Prejudice when um oh, I'm not gonna be able to think of her name. Judy Dinch plays her. Anyway, the the awful lady who the minister just loves. She where she gets uh Lizzie to play for them, play the harpsichord, I think it is, or but um, you know, and and Lizzie does the oh, but I really when I say I don't play well, when I say I play badly, I mean it. And she says, nonsense, nonsense, plays, and so she goes and she plays. And it's obviously not virtuoso playing, but it's still kind of strung together. For me, you know, people would say, Oh, we want to hear you play the harp, and I would say, I'm really not good at it. I'd be Lizzie bennetting it out, and they would say, Oh no, we're sure you're better than that. And I so I would like try to pick out a song, and they would get these kind of looks on their faces, you know, trying to sit there politely, but I'm really not good at it. Uh so I've kept my harp all this time, and I like having it, but um, an instrument deserves to be played, I think. And might as well put the money towards something else. I was looking up how much it might be worth, and it's actually worth a substantial amount of money. So I think I'm going to look into doing that. That's kind of what's on my mind right now. So, yeah. I hope you all had a good week. I hope you have a good Friday. Uh, I hope that you get to have a fun weekend also. And I shall um be popping in on Monday, where hopefully I'll be all bright eyed and wishy tailed, and saying yes, that book is done and ready to move on to the next. And talk to you all later. Bye bye.