First Cup of Coffee - February 5, 2019

Traditional vs. self publishing and how knowing what you want out of being a writer lets you process opinions on how you should be running your career. Also thoughts on seeing The Favourite, why fantasy seems to so often look backwards, and the fine line between fantasy/alternate history/historical fiction.

That's Jeffe's robin in the photo. If you zoom in, you can kind of see the mutant beak. I'll try for a better pic.

Also, here is the article about the Merlin manuscript I mention. (https://www.irishexaminer.com/breakingnews/world/hidden-fragments-of-manuscript-telling-story-of-merlin-unearthed-901145.html?#)

Transcript

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Good morning everyone. This is Jeffy Kennedy here with my first cup of coffee. Today is Tuesday, February 5th. That's my stepson's birthday today. Happy birthday, Michael. Not that he listens, but uh he's up in Montana with his wife and son and a baby on the way. So exciting time in their lives. I have to confess to you all, hold my feet to the fire. This is not actually my first cup of coffee. Or it is the first cup and not my first sip. Because I was hungry this morning. I woke up hungry. Um the uh all that exercise, right? And yesterday I ate fairly lightly. David made this really terrific meal in the instant pot, um, meatballs, and served it with meshed cauliflower, which I think is exactly like mashed potatoes. So it was a nicely low-carb meal and very satisfying. And then in the evening I went to the movie with Megan Mori. And we went to the 520 showing of the favorite, which I will talk about. And then after the movie, Megan and I went over to um 2nd Street Brewery and ate dinner. And she influenced me heavily, and I had the um steamed mussels and beer broth. So even though it was served with a couple of slices of French bread to sop up the juice, which I felt entitled to have, it was a very light meal. And uh my weight's down more today, which is fantastic. I'm so happy, and even better, I got my weight, I'm down um about two pounds of body fat more than that, since I started um really getting serious about building muscle again. But uh two pounds in the last week or so. Well, last two weeks. And um yeah, my uh body is feeling a lot better, and the best part is my scale is one of those that gives you the um you know the body fat percentage and muscle percentage, and it also gives you this. I think I mentioned this back in the summer, it gives you this uh metabolic age, and the metabolic age is very sufficient, is very effective at motivating me. What this says about me, we could speculate. Uh, but my uh metabolic age is has been still well like over the holidays, it was as high. I think I tapped out at 57, uh, which is kind of scary. And I was stuck at 56 for a long time, and then at 55 for a long time, and today I went down to 54 for the first time in in quite a while. And with my real age being just between us and the podcast universe, my real age is 52. I would really like to get my metabolic age to match at least my actual age, or perhaps lower. Then I could do reverse aging like Merlin. Did you guys see that article I posted to Facebook yesterday? I should try to link on the blog on the podcast page too, that uh some researchers in a library in Dublin found um an old manuscript with tales, appears to be tales of Merlin, that predates uh La Morte d'Arthur, which uh is the foundation of considered to be the foundation of most Arthurian stories. And this predates that. It's probably where um was that Cromwell, Crowell. I forget who wrote La Mort d'Arthur, but you guys can check me on that. Um anyway, it's probably where it may have been one of his sources. So it's super cool. It's super cool how they're uh and they were talking about some of the techniques for digging that out. And I posted it to the Sephiroth chat room because they're always posting things about like advances in technology and stuff about the Mars rover and um spaceships and that sort of thing, and it's all I mean, it's interesting, but they get they really get into talking tech because of the all the sci-fi writers. And I um I posted that and people weren't terribly interested. I didn't get many replies, but I was like, you know, folks, this is what fantasy writers get excited about. And I kind of wonder if there's something to that that um you know, like that science fiction writers tend to be very interested in news related to advances in technology, whereas the fantasy writers get really excited about stuff that's um like unearthing magical history. It's uh an ongoing question, and I've been on a panel before to talk about that is why is so much fantasy set in a non-tech world? And and there is sometimes a fine line between um alternate fantasy and historical fiction. I'm sorry, alternate history. Historical fiction and fantasy. Getting ahead of myself there. Uh yeah, that's it's I don't think it has to be, but fantasy very often has uh archaic or historical feel. So are we always looking backward? I don't know. It's it's interesting to contemplate. So let's see, what was I starting to tell you guys? Oh, I was gonna tell you about the favorite. So it was a a lovely time with Megan. Uh, for those of you who may not know her, Megan um is also a writer, though she has gotten much more into publishing these days, working for radius books here in Santa Fe. And we had had lunch last week and we were talking about the Oscar-nominated movies, and neither one of us had seen that one yet. And it was funny because from the trailers, we had both been excited to see it individually. We hadn't had this conversation before, but then people kept talking about saying, oh, that it was so weird and they didn't like it and all of this. And so I had she and I both independently had to say, well, I mean, I don't want to see it. And one of my friends uh in Cepha, Kelly Robson, who I know I mention frequently, she said, No, you would love this movie. She said, You really should go see this movie. But she said it it is different, it is not your standard historical drama, and it has to do, but she said it has to do so much with the women. And wow, wow, it really does. And it makes you realize when you see a movie like that, how very rarely is the story primarily about the women, and the men are very peripheral to the story. And in this movie, the men are very deliberately peripheral, even visually, they are peripheral very often, and it was fascinating for that reason. And after the movie, I looked up some of the history, and it is based on a lot of historical fact with Queen Anne, who was the last of the Stuart queens, um, who then gave over to the we just lost my British knowledge. Anyway, she uh because she died childless, uh, they ended that ended the Stuart line. And she had this lifetime friendship with Sarah Marlborough, who is the ancestor of both Winston Churchill and Diana Spencer, which I found interesting. And the movie portrayed it as an intense lesbian love affair. And then Emma Stone, oh, and Sarah Marlborough is played by Rachel Rice, and I thought she was brilliant and gorgeous, and played with um wearing uh pants and masculine clothes at times for writing and shooting, but she was fantastic. And then Emma Stone is Abigail, who is sort of penniless, and her father has destroyed her uh well, burned down their house, and she got sold off to, or you know, like gambled away, actually, to another man. And so she's arrived and she's a cousin of Sarah Marlborough, and gradually becomes Queen Anne's favorite, and it's a lesbian love triangle. So I could see why people thought it was weird. It's also very often not pretty, which I found enthralling. I mean, absolutely enthralling. Uh, being in this castle that's lit only by fires and candlelight. And I read that the um filmmaker did not use artificial lighting whenever possible. So it's dark, and you realize that it would have been really dark inside those castles. And it reframed for me some of the stuff I was thinking about for some of my fantasy stories that I set in non-tech worlds, you know, that in my mind they're always brightly lit. And and this is probably not the case, especially inside a castle at night. Um, you know, firelight and candlelight don't penetrate that far. You know, and and people be we're accustomed to it in the stories, and we just sort of envision it like we envision things now with our bright electric lights, but that's not how it was. And there's a lot of ugliness involved. Um, Queen Anne, it's ironic that they call her the childless queen because she was pregnant at least 18 times, and um one son lived past infancy, and the rest all either died in infancy or were stillborn or were miscarried, and the one son who lived past infancy died as a child, so it shows you know sort of the magnitude of Queen Anne's grief and how little she is able to deal with um, you know, that this you know that these intense relationships with these other women are what are basically the core of her life. They are her support and her her joy, the only joy that she has. So I I really do recommend it. It's a fascinating movie, and they do a lot of things to turn around um historical expectations, like the fabrics. At one point, a woman is wearing a you know, a sort of a period accurate gown in style, except it's polka dot fabric. And I was gonna look it up, but I'm sure that polka dots came in in like I don't know, the 30s or 40s, something like that. I don't know if if they were before that, but certainly not in that era, and it's funny, and there's some funny things with dancing, you know, incorporating modern dance moves, and it kind of reminds me of some of the things that they did in A Knight's Tale with um Heath Ledger, we hardly knew you, and Paul Betney, loved him. Um that the you know, they used modern music in a knight's tale. And you know, like at um the big tournament, the crowd is singing, we will rock you. And it works really well. And I remember reading about that sometime back that the director chose to use modern music instead of the standard um Renaissance music, because you know, you you know, think about it, you know, like the spinette, you know, the little bach or something like that. But he said historically the Renaissance was farther from the medieval era time-wise than we are from the Renaissance now. So if you're gonna choose music that's you know centuries out of sync with the historical story that you're portraying, why not add a couple more centuries? And what does it really matter? So it's an interesting choice, and I think that this um the favorite did a lot of that too. And then it was very fun to talk about it with uh Megan because both of us coming from a writer's perspective, we did have trouble with some of the character arc, and I won't go into that too much because I don't want to spoiler it, but um, that is something that gets left out of movies. But Megan test texted me last night saying she liked going to movies with me because I actually care about character development, which I thought was very sweet and flattering. Um, I got my word count yesterday, so things are purring right along with Lonan's Rain coming along well. And I did want to talk about a quick thing with um oops. Okay. I thought I canceled it. I shouldn't, I should like put the phone, if I could put it on the other room, but I'm tethered on the other side of the room, but I'm tethered by the microphone. Uh I did want to talk about that um an author, Michael J. Sullivan, who I don't know. I I actually I'd never heard of this guy. And people were saying, oh, you know, he's like one of the best selling fantasy authors there is. I was like, okay. Best selling indie authors, whatever. Anyway, he posted a thing to Reddit that everybody's been talking about where he's saying that he thinks um, well, he's opining on whether authors can make it as a career, and that he thinks that nobody should be signing trad deals anymore, and blah blah blah. And you know, he has opinions about audiobooks and all of this. And I don't really care too much what he said, but I've seen a lot of people talking about it, and a lot of people being very concerned, you know, and saying, Oh, well, you know, he says that you know, we shouldn't sign trad deals because they keep the audio rights and all of this. And um, and one of the things he says in there is that the reversion uh rights, the reversion uh terms where you can get your rights back and self-publish from a traditionally published book are so unfavorable. And he says, and his agent has said that he has one of the best reversion deals that he's ever seen. And he mentioned a couple things about it. And the first thing I thought was, well, my reversion terms are better than that, so I don't know who your agent is, but maybe he needs to look at more. And and to me, that's at the core of it. You know, like when you see people opining and saying, Oh, here's what I see coming down the road, and and this is how things are, you know, you don't have to necessarily believe them. First of all, when somebody says uh for an author to make a living, people have vastly, vastly different ideas of what making a living uh, what that means, what how much money you need. In fact, um Megan brought up something last night talking about a friend who was concerned about their child because they were going to be making less than 85,000 a year, and she didn't see how they could possibly live on that. And it was something like that. But you know, and this is someone who has a very a much more high-end lifestyle, and it's like, well, you know, it depends on how you want to live. Uh, and then also, you know, it's we go round and round and round about this, but it's not always about the money, and it's not always about the immediate money. That um a reason to go with traditional publishing is because they can open doors for you and build audience for you that self-publishing doesn't necessarily do. And so if you focus entirely on the money, especially the immediate money, then yeah, things don't necessarily uh stack up the same way. But you really have to, and I I've gone over this with my CEPOM mentees too. In fact, with all three of them, we kind of had to go back to what do you want out of being a writer? Because if your goal is to get rich quick, being a writer is not the way to do it. If your goal is to have a stable income, being a writer is definitely not it, it's a fluctuating income like crazy. Um, if you love to write and you want to tell stories and you want to have as much time as possible to tell your stories, then looking at being a full-time writer is a decent goal. Um but and then there's like what do you want to get out of it on the other end? You know, let's say that you love to tell your stories, you love to write, but then you're looking at the other end of it, and it's like, well, do you want awards? Do you want a lot of readers? Do you want everybody to say nice things about you? Which, you know, those are some of those are ego things. Do you want to make as much money as possible? Uh, do you want to, you know, go down in history as the you know, next as the Jane Austen of the early 2000s? Uh, you know, it's it it you really have to define those things for yourself. And once you know what you're trying to do, what you believe in, and what you're working toward, then a lot of this other chatter falls away. And you read people like this guy opining about what authors should be doing, and he's like, I keep telling my friends they've got to stop signing trad deals, and it's like, well, okay, but you don't know why they're signing trad deals, and you don't know what their deals are, and different authors get different deals. So, anyway, that's my my um I don't know, don't listen to people on the internet because people like this, their main goal is to get people to listen to them and to get attention, and obviously it worked because like I didn't know who this guy was, and now I do, sort of. I don't really care, but there you are. All right, so now I'm going to get to work so I can uh work towards fame and fortune, right? And I hope you all have a wonderful Tuesday. I will probably post a blog post tomorrow and we will just see. And I will certainly talk to you on Thursday, if not sooner. Take care, bye bye.