First Cup of Coffee - February 18, 2019

Acknowledging (yet again) that I slow down as I reach the end of writing a book - and planning for that. Also a bit of weekend recap, thoughts on conversational French, Facebook, and spring agues.* (Though it turns out I should've been pronouncing it "AY-gyu." Now we know.)

From Merriam-Webster: (https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/illnesses-ailments-diseases-history-names/ague)

Ague is the term for an infectious fever marked by regular paroxysms of chills and sweating.

Oliver's ailings were neither slight nor few. In addition to the pain and delay attendant on a broken limb, his exposure to the wet and cold had brought on fever and ague: which hung about him for many weeks, and reduced him sadly.
— Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist, 1839

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:00

Good morning everyone. This is Jeffy Kennedy. Here with my first cup of coffee. Had to do the double sip there. Bracing! Today is Monday, February 18th. It's President's Day here in the U.S. Um, a day off for many people. And it's apparently also a holiday in Canada, though I'm not sure what it would be. Maybe they're celebrating our presidents. I only know this because I asked my friend Kelly Robson to help me with a busywork task for Sephi. And she's always very happy because she has a day job where she is sometimes uh you know waiting on things from people and otherwise twiddling her thumbs, and she's happy to do little tedious things for us, you know, that she can insert in between tasks, so which is really a wonderful thing at times. Um because I would just like take a big block of time to do it, and she can do it while she's doing other stuff. So, but she said, could it wait till Tuesday? Because tomorrow's a holiday. And I was like, Oh, sure, sure, you know what what is this holiday you speak of? Uh I know I mentioned that before, but it is funny, you know, even though I do keep to my five-day work week. Um I was gonna say for no good reason in particular, but I think I do have a reason. I don't observe federal holidays, especially the ones that don't have any meaning to them. Uh I'm reaching up behind me to close the latch on the window because there's a cold breeze coming in. Yeah, that's a little better. It is um very cold today. Um, do I know the actual temperature? I probably don't. Let's see what this says. Um, it's 18 and it says it feels like 18. I'm not sure I believe that because there's a significant wind blowing, so I think there's got to be a a good wind chill. Let's see what this one says. Because this is uh feels like so right now it is 815. It feels like eight according to Dark Sky, yeah. Dark Sky is usually a lot more accurate than the other weather apps. It's one of my favorite ones. Tells you when it's gonna rain. We used it in New Orleans. We could see that uh I would say, oh well, Dark Sky says the rain will be taping off in 20 minutes. So we would go into a bar and have a drink, and 20 minutes later we'd come out and it wouldn't be raining anymore. It was the best thing ever. All right, so let's see what was I on before I got distracted by the uh oh holidays. Yeah. So the reason that I did try changing up my schedule, and I could try to change it again because it does seem to work well for me to work to write for five days and take two days off. Taking one day off isn't enough. I've discovered that. Uh I need to have the two days off to really sustain productivity. With David driving for Uber, he frequently um does better on the weekends than on weekdays. So I've considered trying to alter my schedule so that I'm off when he's off, especially come summertime. Um, you know, so we could go out to the lakes and stuff. I like doing that. So I've thought about like working Wednesday through Sunday and taking off Monday and Tuesday. Uh, when I tried it before, it did not work. And I think maybe it didn't work because I wasn't doing the solid two days off. I think also I would have to do it for a while. I would really have to build in that um that habit, you know, like they say the 30 days they say to build a habit. Um I don't know, maybe you'd have to do like figure you're longer than 30 days, you know, because you'd have to have 30 repetitions, so maybe 30 weeks of doing that that way, which would be most of a year. Yeah, well, so I would really have to, I think if I were gonna do it, I'd have to really commit to it. Maybe David and I should talk about it again. If I can um certainly not it it it takes getting rid of certain ideas that I'm attached to, which are that Saturdays and Sundays are days off. And oh and that's a thing that's gotten in the way before I'm sort of remembering this now, you know, like that my Lyra meetings are on Saturdays. So I'm I would have to take a work day to go down to Lyra, and that would yeah, not work. I don't know. I don't know. Always always in motion is the future. So I had a pretty laid back weekend. Um still wasn't feeling wonderful. I'm not feeling wonderful still. Um I think it's just sort of that, you know, like in the historical novels, they always talk about the spring og. She came down with a spring og I think that's you know, it's just with the damp, chilly weather and the wild sweets in temperature. Um you know, you sort of get these little respiratory things in you. I don't feel terrible either, so there's that. I'm not fully sick, just not uh at peak peak wellness. How's that? Um but I got some things done. Um I had an unexpected, I was sort of just gonna take it easy on Saturday, hang out, finish my Rita reading, do that kind of thing since I wasn't feeling terribly spunky. And uh my local friend Cheryl, who is a Jungian therapist, interesting gal, messaged me and said, um, my plans have changed. Do you want to have lunch at Arable today? Arable's a local restaurant, kind of a farm-to-table place. We really like it. So yeah, we went and um, I thought, at first I was like, oh no, I'm just gonna stay in, because it was a very blustery day on Saturday, too. And uh I thought, eh, why not? Why not go? And so it was fun. We ended up staying there for a couple hours talking, and it was a good thing to do for a otherwise um non-productive Saturday. And then yesterday I worked a lot on tax stuff, taxes and some SUFWA stuff. Seems like Sufwa things are very busy at the moment. Put up a blog post with the cover of Orchid Throne. I think most of you have seen it so far. I'll put it on here too. So I think um everybody loves it. That's a you know, it's one of those things because very rarely will anybody say, oh no, that cover sucks, which sometimes we say it among ourselves. We're like, oh, did you see such and so's cover? That's that awful. Um but I think in this case people genuinely mean that's it's a pretty cover, an evocative cover. The gross beaks are really flying around out there. They don't mind the spring weather, although they have been showing down on the on the seed. And it's gonna be like this all week. We're supposed to just keep having blizzard after blizzard. We did have rain one night. When was that, like Friday or Saturday? And now it's gotten cold again. Feels like eight. Um it's my story and I'm sticking to it. I got caught up on some social media stuff over the weekend too. That was good to get done. It's kind of funny because since I made the deal with Ultra Royale, Rayal, Ultra Royale, the French publisher who's doing the first three Sorceress Moons books, uh, they friended me on Facebook and they did the cover reveal and all of that. And a bunch of French authors and readers sent me Facebook friend requests. So I was like, okay, sure, why not? So then, amusingly enough, I was like looking through my Facebook timeline, which I really don't do very often. I look at my notifications, but I don't scroll through Facebook much anymore because I mostly get aggravated by it. So I was scrolling through Facebook and just seeing what was on there. And there were, I kept seeing like cartoons in French. There was this one cartoon in French, and I was looking for the translation, and there wasn't one. I was thinking, well, why would one of my friends put up a cartoon in French and not explain it, not say anything about it? And and I do have some French because I studied in high school and college. Je l'etudie au lycée à l'université. I actually read Sartre in French, Le Sans Fait. That was fun, but that was also a long time ago. And my French is not what it was then. So I was like puzzling my way through this French cartoon, wondering why I was looking at it, as one so often does when one scrolls through Facebook, having that realization of why am I looking at this? Why am I thinking about this? And I realized that this was one of the French people who had friended me. And so of course she didn't bother to explain because she's French and she understood it. And I ended up having to look up one of the words so I could understand the joke, which was a very simple joke and I guess kind of funny, but it was um probably not worth the time that I spent on it. But I figure it'll be good for me to see. I'll start working on my French and see how well I can uh interpret some of these things without, you know, it's kids these days, right? Don't know how hard it was when you didn't used to be able to just Google the word or put it into Google Translate. I remember back in graduate school, I was no longer studying French because I was in a zoology and physiology program, but one of the gals in the who was getting a graduate degree in wildlife had um done had been in the Peace Corps in French Guyana. And she wanted to not lose her French speaking skills. So she had rounded up a bunch of people who had conversational French, and she would host a party at her house, like I don't know, once a month or something, and we would drink wine and eat snacks and have conversations in French. And it was fun, you know, and it was a good way to, you know, sort of keep up on our conversational French, which I was much better at than the idea of doing that now is a little bit intimidating. But for one reason or another, and we could probably speculate on the reasons for this, everyone in this group was female. Um, you know, maybe the women in a zoology and physiology department are more likely to have studied French than the guys. I think most of the guys hadn't studied a second language. Uh and this was the University of Wyoming, so a lot of the, you know, people, a lot of the guys there were in either a molecular biology program or a wildlife program. And I don't know, they um we just didn't have any guys who had like knew conversational French really well. If at all, I don't think any any of them had stayed French. And we were a pretty convivial group of um, you know, the professors, the faculty, and the grad students and so forth, and we would have, you know, barbecues and potlucks and that kind of thing. But this French club, I think we called it French Club, ended up being all female. And a couple of the guys that just drove them up the wall. They kept asking us what we did at this. And and we were like, we'd sit around and drink wine and talk in French. And they're like, yeah, but real, what are you really doing? It was a funny thing. We're like, well, you could come, but you'd have to talk and listen in French, you know. And they're like, eh, yeah. So I don't funny to remember that. They were just um one guy in particular was certain that we were getting up to some sort of sexual perversions. And it was like, you know, really, but no, you know, your fantasies are off the charts for mostly we just don't want to lose our conversational French. And maybe that comes back around to the idea that um some guys, not all men, uh don't really conceive of women having something that they want to do that's not like related to their degree or their work or to sexy times. It's like, no, we we put a lot of work into learning French and we want to keep our French going. So it's too bad I don't have that still. So this week we'll see the end of Lonan's Rain. I've only got uh 8,000 words left. I did go back and from the beginning, I got more words on Friday, although not 3,000. I think I ended up with something like 1600. And um and I realized, and I probably will continually realize this, but those of you who have been listening long enough will perceive the cycle, that I always slow down at the end. And I even went and looked, now that I'm keeping detailed charts of my daily word count over the course of drafting a book, um, I always slow down at the end. And I I slow down to about 500 to a thousand words a day for the last couple of weeks for whatever reason. It's I work the same amount of time, um, and it feels like intense work, but it's apparently just something that I do where I kind of circle around the end, and I think I'm just gonna have to build this into my schedule and give myself time to slow down and figure that out. Um very often when I have a deadline, a trad deadline, I will send it without the ending fully fleshed out or there at all. You know, and I'll say, I need to write one or two more chapters. And that's where I'm right now. I need to write one or two more chapters. And it's funny that that just takes a while to come for me. So I've gone back and started um revising some from the beginning, so I will do that, and I expect I will be done by Wednesday. Wednesday is the plan. And I don't need to start Fiery Citadel till next week. So if I can, I'm gonna take a few days off. We might go up to Denver. I'm on my last read a book, and then I'm going to read some things that will start. I should have that, the read a book finished today. That was six that I read this year. Um, and then I'm gonna switch over to some things that I really want to read that I think will help fill the well for Fiery Citadel. So you hear Jackson crying. I don't know what that's about. Oh, maybe David's home. He gets in the window and does that meowing when he sees David in the driveway. All right. I'm gonna call good if you have today off. I hope that you enjoy your day off. If you're working, I hope you're working on something that you feel is good and important and that you feel satisfaction in getting it done. And I will talk to you all tomorrow. Bye bye.