First Cup of Coffee - January 20, 2025

Some fun updates, including NEVER THE ROSES in a list of Most Anticipated Romantasy Books of 2025. Also, wrestling the fears many of us have about today and what comes after, fractals, controlling what we can, and how we each can savor our one wild and precious life.

The Paste Magazine article I mention is here https://www.pastemagazine.com/books/fantasy/most-anticipated-romantasy-books-of-2025

Mary Oliver's poem, The Summer Day, is here https://www.loc.gov/programs/poetry-and-literature/poet-laureate/poet-laureate-projects/poetry-180/all-poems/item/poetry-180-133/the-summer-day/

Visit JenniferKLambert.com

RELUCTANT WIZARD is out now and audiobook is live!! https://www.jeffekennedy.com/reluctant-wizard

You can preorder STRANGE FAMILIAR at https://www.jeffekennedy.com/strange-familiar and MAGIC REBORN at https://www.jeffekennedy.com/magic-reborn

The posture-correcting sports bra I love almost more than life itself is here https://forme.therave.co/37FY6Z5MTJAUKQGA

Join my Patreon and Discord for mentoring, coaching, and conversation with me! Find it at https://www.patreon.com/JeffesCloset

You can always buy print copies of my books from my local indie, Beastly Books! https://www.beastlybooks.com/

If you want to support me and the podcast, click on the little heart or follow this link (https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/jeffekennedy).

Sign up for my newsletter here! (https://landing.mailerlite.com/webforms/landing/r2y4b9)

You can watch this podcast on video via YouTube https://youtu.be/Juo8kYj0rFc

Transcript

00:01.38
Jeffe Kennedy
Good morning, everyone. This is Jeffe Kennedy, author of Epic Fantasy Romance. I'm here with my first cup of coffee.

00:11.70
Jeffe Kennedy
Oh, so good. Today is Monday, January 20th, Martin Luther King Day. and We're going to pretend that nothing else is going on today.

00:27.76
Jeffe Kennedy
Seriously, you know, I'm seeing a lot of anxiety out in the world and You know, we don't know we don't know what's gonna come we don't know what's gonna happen um What they're going to manage to do what they're gonna try to do and You know in many ways much of this is beyond our control. And so I want to talk about that a little bit today and feel free to skip if you want. um I could do news first. Let's see what kind of news do I have for those of you oh following things. I did not have a great day on Friday word count wise. I got about a thousand words. I'm up to 27,665

01:14.06
Jeffe Kennedy
and I will be working today more or less on track to finish I'm a little bit less than more but still still there I'm still in the game ah and I told you all about Spanish rights on Never the Roses. There was a lovely write-up in Paste magazine. You all, the hardcover is selling really well. um But they had my book cover up in Paste magazine on most anticipated romantasy books of 2025. Very exciting. I did a couple of

01:58.08
Jeffe Kennedy
marketing publicity things for it over the weekend that Tor had asked me for so that was great and otherwise I had a I had a tiring weekend. I saw a lot of friends over the weekend. And so it was very social, but now I'm tired. Yesterday morning, I stayed out, well, not super late Saturday night, but late for me. um I was out all afternoon and evening. And then on Sunday morning, i'm I'm getting so I just love my Sunday mornings. Saturday morning, I do love getting up and going to my yoga class. And it was a great class this week. I'm sore.

02:36.65
Jeffe Kennedy
ah But yeah, I love getting out and doing that and I like that it's on Saturday morning and all that but Sunday morning is my full lacy morning. I don't have to get up and do anything or go anywhere and Yeah, I love it. It's um, it's the perfect Drenching morning and I sat by the fire and read and drink coffee and It was I think of office space. you know Doing nothing was everything I thought it could be. um It's cold here. well Right now it's like 16 degrees, something like that. Yeah, 16. And it's supposed to get super cold tonight, so it's good hibernation time.

03:26.91
Jeffe Kennedy
If I could only get ahead on this book, I would be allowed to sit by the fire and read more often. but such as not my fate.

03:38.20
Jeffe Kennedy
um

03:41.20
Jeffe Kennedy
Alas. So so yeah, um controlling things we can. I feel like is one of our eternal life struggles. And if you if you zoom out, if you back up and look at Why are we here on this planet? Okay, yeah, it's gonna be that kind of conversation. Why are we here? What is our purpose on Earth? And of course, everybody has different ideas about that. oh My neurophysiology major advisors thought that we were biological machines, that we um don't exist before our brain ticks in. And once the brain dies, we cease to exist.

04:32.32
Jeffe Kennedy
And he actually believed that very firmly. And and yes, he was a a cheerless, dolorous person.

04:45.45
Jeffe Kennedy
um I think that there's any number of ways to to look at who we are and why we're here. And you know of course, many people subscribe to the tenets of various religions. You all know by now, if you don't, maybe you're a first time listener, but that I'm a practicing Taoist. And I believe in the flow of the universe and that we are part of the universe. And by existing, that we are here to help co-create the universe, make it into what we want it to be.

05:25.11
Jeffe Kennedy
ah but also to work on ourselves, to that that's where we start. you know I talk a lot about the idea of, oh, I'm not going to be able to think of the word up for it, fractals. Fractal is the word I'm looking for. It's the idea that very, very small pieces are echoed in larger pieces, all right, so that we have very small building blocks and we put those together and they have the same shape as a larger building block.

05:58.19
Jeffe Kennedy
So if you look at a piece of gravel, a very small piece of sand, a small rock, and you look at a mountain, I'm gesturing out my window at the mountains, you cannot see, ah that they have the same shape, right? They have the same structural integrity in ways. I mean, there's some small variations, right? But that this idea that we build upon very small building blocks and make them into bigger ones. And so the idea of what do we want from our lives? What kind of a life do we want to leave? What do we want to get out of, as Mary Oliver says, our one wildlife?

06:48.19
Jeffe Kennedy
I looked it up to make sure to get it right, because it's a great line. Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

07:01.22
Jeffe Kennedy
I mean, that that's a powerful question, right? What do you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? So even if you believe, like I do, that you might get to live multiple lives, the one you know of, the one you have, is this one. This one wild and precious life. And that's yours. That is your thing to have. It is your thing to do with, right? You can do what whatever you want with your

07:37.67
Jeffe Kennedy
one wild and precious life. It is yours. And there are other people out in the world doing all kinds of things with their lives, but that doesn't change the decisions you make about what you do with your one wild and precious life, right? And this is something I talk to myself about all the time, right? What is it that I want from my life?

08:08.36
Jeffe Kennedy
And making that be the focus, moment to moment, minute to minute, hour by hour, day by day, weeks, months, years, a lifetime. If you shape those moments, those small moments, like fractals, they build. And so each moment you are doing exactly what you want to do with your one wild and precious life.

08:38.51
Jeffe Kennedy
then that builds into the shape of the entire thing at the end, right? So certainly there are things that we do that don't feed into the more glamorous idea, but and yet everything can be.

08:59.93
Jeffe Kennedy
um you know like we have to go to the grocery store and buy food in order to keep our bodies alive, right? But that doesn't mean that going to the grocery store can't be part of what you are doing with your one wild and precious life, right? At the end of your lifetime, there will be a percentage of your life that you will have spent grocery shopping. And so you look at, well, what do you want that to look like?

09:29.10
Jeffe Kennedy
because you can choose that. You can choose, you can be worrying about prices or aggravated at the other shoppers. And certainly those things happen, but you can also enjoy the fact that you get to buy food and you can try new things and you can savor the smells and the colors and the sheer delight of the variety of food we have available to us that you didn't have to go out into a field to pick.

09:59.75
Jeffe Kennedy
you know These are are delightful things when we look at them, right? when you know When we sort of take a step back and see, oh, well, yeah, yeah, i what a gift this is. And even the things that are difficult for us to do that are trials to us that make us unhappy, ah those are still feeding into what we want to do, right? and you know Like yoga class isn't always easy for me.

10:29.12
Jeffe Kennedy
um And for a long time, you I don't know if you all noticed the shift, but long time listeners might know that for a very long time, I refer to this class as and kick my ass yoga because it's so kicked my ass. It was so difficult for me. And I have finally, now I've been doing this class for like eight years.

10:53.16
Jeffe Kennedy
and and aging all the while, and it becomes really interesting to me to have this show up that I have gotten better at it, that I am much stronger, I am more flexible, more fluid, and more capable of it. And my yoga teacher always invites us to, at the beginning of class, to focus on a word or a phrase of, you know, like, what do we want our practice to be like that day?

11:22.66
Jeffe Kennedy
And I chose something entirely different this week, which was um to enjoy and savor, enjoy and savor. And what a difference that made, that even though I am pushing myself and doing things that leave me my muscles sore later, that I could enjoy that, that I could savor being there and being with my teacher and the other students in this place of peacefulness and doing these things with my body to make myself better, to enhance my one wild and precious life, right?

12:04.93
Jeffe Kennedy
so So when we talk about things that we can control, this is what we're talking about. You know that you can control how you feel about doing yoga. And like even when it's difficult, you can remember why it is. Why are you there? why What are you doing this for? Why are you in this world? What are you in this world to do? So when we look at all of the voices talking about politics and worrying about what's going to happen and being afraid because something that can happen is people can, other people, horrible people, can try to take away your one wild and precious life, right? There's outright murder, there's limiting of rights,

12:55.98
Jeffe Kennedy
There is them simply trying to take as much of everything as possible for themselves. And we may see a lot of this in the coming days. so And there are so many conflicting ideas. I'm seeing people saying um we should get off the social media platforms because all we're doing is lining the the pockets of our billionaire oligarchy that's forming.

13:21.38
Jeffe Kennedy
ah I am seeing people saying, no, we should stay on social media and not let them chase off dissenting voices. um I'm seeing people saying, I'm not watching anything on the news. i'm cannot watch the news. i'm I'm actually one of those people. I pay very, very little attention to the news. This is my particular choice. And I argue with my partner David about this from time to time because he says, well, he'll watch it. And then he gets upset and and he's got Parkinson's and I'm always reminding him that the stress is not good for him. But he'll come and start telling me like what Trump did now and

14:02.08
Jeffe Kennedy
And I don't want to hear it. right you know but And he's like, well, I know you don't want to hear it. And I'm like, correct. I do not want to hear it. I don't want this stuff in my head. And he says, well, I don't want to bury my head in the sand. I want to have an idea of what's coming. And there's an implied judgment there, right? Bury your head in the sand.

14:23.41
Jeffe Kennedy
which comes from the kind of running joke. I don't even know if it's true. We should look that up. um Of ostriches burying their heads in the sand and leaving the considerable 98% of the rest of them, because they have tiny heads and big bodies, vulnerable to the world. ah But because they've buried their heads, they think that they are hiding. And it's a joke, right? It's a bury your head in the sand.

14:53.17
Jeffe Kennedy
then you're you're not facing the danger, you're just making yourself this big old target and you can't see the danger coming. So there's a lot of fear in that, right? There's a great deal of fear embedded in that image. And, you know, like when David says he want wants to know what's coming, he wants to be able to prepare,

15:15.12
Jeffe Kennedy
you know a lot of the things that he runs to then sort of come from his formative years of living in northern Wyoming where the way you prepare for things is like with guns and bunkers and

15:29.80
Jeffe Kennedy
It's a certain perspective, right? This idea of, you know, that you must fight for your life, for your one wild and precious life. And that that's a choice, right? That's kind of what I'm circling around here, is that we choose we choose how we want to handle things.

15:48.64
Jeffe Kennedy
um There is also a lot of discussion about privilege. You know, people who are in much more secure positions to face what's coming as opposed to people who are much more vulnerable. We all have friends that those of us who are in more privileged positions have friends who are not. um Here in New Mexico, there's a lot of concern about what kind of attempts might be to deport people, citizens or not.

16:26.69
Jeffe Kennedy
and We talk about, I have friends who are gearing up to engage in legal battles and to help. And there's advice out there on how to help support your neighbors and not to be the good German, right? A lot of people are looking back to the days of the rise of the Third Reich and how that happened. And it's important to pay attention to those things, but also it comes back to your choice, your choice of how you want to live moment to moment, day to day, year to year, right? That even though there are people who can threaten to take away your one wild and precious life, who can try to make you be afraid, who can

17:19.61
Jeffe Kennedy
try to take away the people that you love, take away the things that you love. But in the end, when all is said and done, you still have you. You have you and your one wild and precious life. And if you want to to use that to help defend other people, then Yes, do that. If you want to spend your time making sourdough bread, do that. of I don't think anybody gets to tell anybody else what they should be doing and how they should handle things. We know there are some very bad, terrible, rapacious, selfish and greedy people um poised to be in power. And there will be

18:13.50
Jeffe Kennedy
things that we cannot control about that situation. But there are always, always things that you can control, that we can control, that we can never lose sight of this idea of what will you do with your one wild and precious life. All right, so on that note, what I'm going to do is work on this book.

18:43.55
Jeffe Kennedy
I hope that you all are navigating okay. There's all of us together. um if we all If we all make our little piece of the world our moment to moment, day to day, the time in the grocery store. If we make that as full of joy and compassion as comparing as as possible, compassion as possible, then you know from the small rock we built the mountain and I i really do believe that. All right, um I will talk to you all on Friday. You all take care.

19:21.79
Jeffe Kennedy
but bye