First Cup of Coffee - February 26, 2019

I got to be outside today! Talking about my initial steps in starting a book and my template document. Also a cool dream I had, thoughts on SFWA elections, and balancing writing with other activities.

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Good morning everyone. This is Jeffy Kennedy, and I'm here with my first cup of coffee. Guess what? I'm outside. Yay! Today's Tuesday, February 26th. I checked this time before I started. And I am trying it outside, and I think it's gonna work. I put on my sweats and everything, but I don't have on a coat, just a heavy sweatshirt. Sitting on the east side of the house in the sun here. You all can hear the birds singing. The birds are going crazy, having a great time. Oh good. I'm glad I I gave this a try, because this is um nice to be outside. Isabel's out here too, now she's talking to me. Yeah, hi. I'm not talking to you. Our cats always think we're talking to them. But she's happy to be outside too. We're all ready for a little bit of springtime. So I got started on the fiery citadel yesterday. Got a couple thousand words on it, which is a a good start. Um when I start a book like that, I have a blank document that I have that I keep that's just called template. I've been doing that since my early word processing days. And it has essentially the first three chapters set up, although people who've looked at them laugh because I just have placeholders for the to set up the paragraph styles, and it just says stuff like burp blah blah blah de blah, yada yada, which is I don't know, template-y for a novel, right? So I have my headers in there, I have my title page in there with my contact information. So it's always kind of a fun thing. Uh it's um without changing anything, it's four pages and twenty four. So I get to add, I get to go from zero to zero pages, zero words to four and twenty four just by opening the document. I know that's silly, but it's satisfying. And then I add in uh my titles and stuff. I usually put in uh a working title. In this case, I think we're fairly well set on the fiery citadel. I have to make the story actually match that title, but you know, hey. I think I will. Uh oh, I just got an idea. I think I know what's gonna happen in two versus three. That works. Hi, you don't need to come up here. I'm sitting on this high stool next to a table that my mom mosaic the top of and then gave to me. So what do you call these? I know she had a word for it. Like a bistro table. So it's one of those high stools. So Isabel's like up on her hind legs with her paws next to my knee. I wonder if I could get a picture for her. We've determined in the past this doesn't work well, but let's try it. Well, of course, now she goes. Isabel. That one looks like I kept recording. This app is so much better. So so yeah, then I um, you know, did a lot of stuff to figure out where my major beats were gonna be, how many words I think I've I'm going for 95,000 words. That's about where my first draft of Orchid Throat came out. So we'll see about that. And um, you know, so got everything all set up and wrote a couple thousand words on it, working my way back into the character voices, feeling good, feeling good. So, yeah. That's nice to get back into that particular world again. I had an interesting dream last night. I hope you guys don't mind the uh talking about dreams. One of my recurring dreams is having bought a house with David and discovering there is much more to it than I knew. That there's like all of these rooms and wings to the house that I had not previously explored. And there's often some regrets to it because it's like I haven't been paying attention, or I would have realized that we could have this, you know, like sometimes I'll discover, like last night, I'll discover this entire um extra wing that's like a master bedroom wing that's absolutely beautiful, you know, like with hot tubs and skylights, and I'll think, why have we haven't had our room in here? And you know, why why have I been so busy? I haven't bothered to look at all of the houses that we bought. But I find it an interesting dream because standard dream analysis says that when we dream of houses, that that's a a symbol for ourselves, and the rooms are different parts of ourselves. So, in that extended analogy, I guess, it makes much more sense that I am finding whole sections of myself that I have not yet explored, that in some ways I've been too busy to do. Last night I was found one of these wonderful master bedroom suites, which was great, but then I also found that in the downstairs of the house there was a theater, like a full um stage with a backstage and a rudimentary fly system and seats for an audience. And I thought, oh, we should be using this theater. What a great thing this is. And I was on some sort of mission or quest, which I almost always am in my dreams, and we were supposed to be putting on a play, as one does, that was a very well-known standard play, like a Christmas Carol or something like that. And the town had been expecting to come to this play. And I had to go do, and I was starring in the play, of course, and I had to go do something. I don't remember now what I had to go get, but it was like I had to go fight off monsters or something. And so I went out from the bottom of the house near this theater and found that there were stairs that led out from the theater and an old gate sort of set in the stone wall, which I unlocked and opened up. And you know, and then it turned out that this house was kind of like the castle at Edinburgh where it was like built into the mountainside, which I've used in books before because I find that absolutely fascinating. And uh so I left the gate open and I said to somebody, or thought, you know how those things go in dreams, I said, you know, we should really do the play here. We should take advantage of this theater because there was something wrong with the other one. I don't remember what, but it was uh it was part of our travail so there was something wrong with this other theater. And uh sorry, I'm doing the and uh a lot, aren't I? Thinking about the dream as I talk. But everybody was like, oh, well, it's way too late, way too late to pull that off, Jeffy. And I and I conceded the point. You know, we were supposed to do the play that night, you know, how would we tell everyone? Theater needed to be cleaned up, all these things. So I went off to fight my monsters, went into a whole nother segment of dream stuff that I don't recall terribly well, just fragments of that. And then I came back and I was hurrying back and I was late, and I got to the house so I could change clothes, and I saw that they had that that gate was still open, and that they'd lit it up and there were people going in. And so I went in that way, and the theater was full with people, and they'd like magically cleaned it up in my absence. And the gal who had been standing in for me came running up to me and shucked out of the gown and said, Here, quick, put this on, you're about to go on. And then I went on, and I of course didn't know my lines because it wouldn't be a dream if we didn't have that aspect. But I brazened it through anyway, and I was having fun because I was so happy about my theater. So I thought that that was really cool symbolically. I thought it turned out that the you know that there was this thing for entertaining people, and the whole place was full, and everybody was there and happy, and it was all in this lower part of the house that I hadn't explored before. And you know, usually subterranean stuff means the subconscious. So yeah, I thought that was um pretty neat, huh? Pretty neat dream. A good uh good what a good omen type dream. You know, now I'm actually getting kind of hot in my sweatshirt with the sun streaming on me, which is okay, but well, I'm glad that I came out here. You know, you kind of get in the habit of being stuck inside, right? You know, and and it looks much colder outside than it actually is when you go out there. You're like, oh well, I don't know why I thought it was that bad. With working at home, I do get in that habit of not leaving the house and having some resistance to doing so because yeah, it takes effort, right? Yeah. I might go run some errands this afternoon, depending. I've got uh tax stuff to put together and end-of-month financials to put together, and a bunch of Safwest stuff to put together. Uh where I'm up for election again for my position as director at large, and there's a forum thread that's questions for candidates. And I thought I was checking it regularly, and there wasn't anything, and wasn't anything, and wasn't anything. And then apparently questions started going up last Wednesday. Oops, I've been occupied, right? Uh questions went up last Wednesday, and now there's like three pages worth and almost 500 views, and I haven't said anything yet, so I guess I'd better get on there and answer some questions. I've been working on a couple of big projects for SUFA, so that's sort of been I try to allot my time every day. I guess that would be something when people ask about balance. I don't really worry too much about work-life balance, but I try to balance out the different things I do, and I try to allot, you know, only a certain amount of time a day to CEFA-related volunteer activities. And because I've been working on these other projects, those have been sort of sucking up that daily allotment. It's just how things are going right now. And everybody knows I'm working on them, which is probably why nobody has poked me and said, hey, Jeffy, are you good answer any of these questions for candidates? It's like, well, yeah, eventually. I'll get on there. So I don't know that I have much else to say. Yeah. Still reading Connections in Death, make it farther on that, still enjoying it. Although it slowed down a little now. But um that could be my attention too, since I started working on the book and thinking about that. The birds are really nest building. So we're definitely kicking into spring. I suspect we'll have some storms yet to come, and there is still snow on the ground. But hi Isabel. She just came trotting by. Heading back inside. She has a lovely little uh delicate prance. Jackson sort of is a heavy-footed, swaggering cat, and Isabel is much lighter, uh almost balletic in the way she points her toes. Alright, I guess I'm out of stuff to say, so I won't drag this on. I hope you all have a wonderful Tuesday. Um, I always think of the Mickey Mouse Club that's ingrained in my consciousness now. Today is Tuesday. You know what that means. We're gonna have a special guest. Uh no special guest for you, however, podcast listeners. Tomorrow I'll probably blog. I have no idea what I'm gonna say, but you know, it could happen. So I hope you all have a lovely Tuesday. I hope your week is going well, and I will talk at you later. Bye bye.