First Cup of Coffee - February 10, 2025

Why I'm participating in VOW for Girls to stop child marriage, thoughts on donating (& why you don't have to), joy, best ways to build and refine craft, why I don't journal, and how I'm a Swiftie forever. 

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Transcript

00:01.44
Jeffe Kennedy
Good morning, everyone. This is Jeffe Kennedy, author of Epic Fantasy Romance. I'm here with my first cup of coffee.

00:12.09
Jeffe Kennedy
Ah, delicious. Today is Monday, February 10th. And I heard from some of you that you can hear the noise of the casita building in the background. Hopefully it's not too distracting. I swear there are like 20 guys out there. And it's all guys. It's interesting. It is all guys. Unless my girl bus contractor is here, it's all guys. And they are just working away, swarming over that thing. It's looking great. It's fantastic.

00:51.39
Jeffe Kennedy
um they did work on Saturday, although they knocked off at about three o'clock. And then there was nothing all day Sunday. And it was so peaceful. It was so nice. I play with this in my books sometimes, we you know where you don't You become accustomed to things, you know like the frog in the boiling water analogy is a little bit tired um to the point of being cliche, but it's a good one. and it And it's actually physiologically true that if you put a frog in cool water and gradually heat it um and it will but until it boils, um

01:33.86
Jeffe Kennedy
It's not entirely accurate. It's supposed to be that, um you know, like if you throw a frog in boiling water, it'll immediately leap out. And if instead you gradually increase it, it'll boil and kill it. But it's because the heat will kill it before that. and That's why it doesn't leap out by the time you're boiling. Not that I've experimented on this. I haven't. I just know physiology. And we use frogs a lot in physiology lab. Anyway,

02:02.94
Jeffe Kennedy
total aside there. um So, but one thing I like to play with in my books is, you know, like not being aware of how much pain you're in until the pain goes away. That it's that feeling of surcease ah because you do become accustomed to things. And I'm used to the noise now, at least it's not so distracting as it was. But boy, when it stopped Saturday afternoon, it was like,

02:32.02
Jeffe Kennedy
like the angels sang and the sun broke through the clouds and they didn't work at all on Sunday and so it was just really nice and you know hearing him get started this morning it was like okay here we go I mean good thing it's like still mostly winter although I did get some spring things out I can't imagine if we had to have the windows open you know because we really don't run the AC much maybe we would have them closed and run the AC if it was warm weather So anyway, um once they left on Saturday, we went out there and we were able to take some photos and it was a beautiful afternoon. So it was really nice being out on that portal and in nice weather, it's going to be incredible. It's just going to be gorgeous.

03:20.97
Jeffe Kennedy
Yeah, I'm really excited. It's neat to see it coming together. We did take photos. I will share those eventually. Although today I really need to share some graphics on the Vow for Girls stuff. um to you know To stop child marriage, which is a huge problem worldwide. So I will be sharing those. We'll be doing a giveaway this week.

03:45.54
Jeffe Kennedy
for the Chronicles of Dasnaria trilogy signed in print. um and you you know Or you can just donate. There will be plenty of opportunities to donate. um And please only donate if you feel like you can. ah I always feel this way too, you know, like when they say, you know, even $5 makes a difference. um And I'm sure it does.

04:11.81
Jeffe Kennedy
but For people who are thinking about whether or not to donate $5, these things are not aimed at you. um If you would rather spend your $5 on the latte that is like the thing that gives you joy, then please do that. Don't worry about this. ah As I have progressed in life, I've become much more aware of um fundraising and how this kind of thing works

04:43.32
Jeffe Kennedy
And I have a friend who does a lot of fundraising. I have several friends who are very well off and donate lots of money to things. And ah my friend who does fundraising, you know, like she'll go to lunch with a potential donor and talk about her, you know, program, and they'll say, Oh, that sounds great. And they'll write a check for $10,000. These are the people that fundraising is in debt. Not it, not it you,

05:13.48
Jeffe Kennedy
um you know, clutching your $5 and contemplating whether to give up your latte that is your one bright spot of joy. ah Please don't worry about that. yeah Leave it to the people who can write a check for $10,000 over lunch. Have your latte. Hopefully it's not your only spot of joy, but you know, take your joy where you can. And if a latte gives you joy,

05:41.18
Jeffe Kennedy
Spend your five bucks on that or your seven bucks or whatever they're costing.

05:47.49
Jeffe Kennedy
ah It often makes me think of, you know, like every once in a while someone on the internet will say, like, what's an obscure quote from a movie that only you will recognize? And we all have a raft of those. But I think about the ah movie Home for the Holidays from the mid 90s with Holly Hunter and Robert Downey Jr.

06:07.59
Jeffe Kennedy
um Dylan McDermott, I think is in it. And yes, Steve Guttenberg, Claire Danes. I mean, it's really a great cast and I just love that movie. It's a great Thanksgiving movie. I didn't watch it this year and I probably should have. ah But Cynthia Stevenson plays Joanne, the incredibly uptight sister who is you know constantly trying to lose weight. And there's a point at which Holly Hunter goes over to her sister's house after the debacle of a Thanksgiving dinner.

06:43.38
Jeffe Kennedy
um to talk to her, to partly to apologize. And Joanne is on her stair master and she um doesn't want to talk to her sister, doesn't want to talk to Holly. And finally she says, um could you please leave because being on the stair master is the only thing that gives me joy these days.

07:05.33
Jeffe Kennedy
And it's, it's such a great line and I'm paraphrasing, but it's just like, wow, this woman who is ah obsessed with weight loss and obsessed with exercising and she's already rail thin and like being on the Stairmaster is the one thing that gives her joy. So hopefully ah you have more joy than your $5 latte, but regardless, please, please enjoy that.

07:31.85
Jeffe Kennedy
Um, other things, uh, we did watch the Superbowl yesterday. Poor chiefs. Um, just could not, I, I'm not a football person. I'm not a sports scenes person. Uh, David wanted to watch it. I sat there and signed tipping sheets. I'm officially 25% through my tip in sheets for the Owlcrate books. Woo. Um, and I've still got five weeks to finish. However, they're sending me 3000 more.

08:01.48
Jeffe Kennedy
melt emoji. yeah So ah i I probably need to go a little bit faster than I have been going. I haven't been doing them every day. I've been shooting for doing two inches a day and I haven't. But I feel like i'm I'm going at a pretty good rate. i you know Of course I set up a calculation for this. I've got my formula And I have to do 1.4 inches every day ah to finish in time. And I'm trying to remember if that includes the extra 3,000. I think it does, actually. Oh, no, it doesn't. No, it doesn't. So that's to finish the ones I've got. So I'm going pretty fast. I mean, it's getting pretty automatic that I can sit there watching a movie or the Super Bowl and just sign those.

08:58.19
Jeffe Kennedy
Um, I had a great work count day on Friday. Oh, ah the one thing I was going to say about Superbowl is in honor of Taylor, I am drinking out of my Swifty mug this morning. I don't know what the deal was on them, like supposedly booing her on the jumbotron. Um, Trump was there. Trump hates Taylor Swift. They're trying to make it into a thing that people cheered for.

09:22.74
Jeffe Kennedy
Trump and booed Taylor Swift and I don't know it just smacks of the usual to truth-twisting that that gang of criminals ah regularly engages in so but anyway Because I am a true Swiftie. I Pay full forever, right? But yeah it Yeah, it it wasn't a very good game that the Chiefs just couldn't get it together. It seemed like so at least they, at least it wasn't a shutout. Is that what they call it? Right. You know, at least it wasn't to zero. They still got 22 points. Um, I thought they might do the second half rally like they did last year and no. yeah So ah alas, alas for that.

10:18.32
Jeffe Kennedy
so So yeah, I thought I was not going to have a good day on Friday. And then I rallied and it ended up being my best word count day of the week. Go figure. um And interestingly, I got 2,222 words, oh which tells you that it wasn't a great week. I thought that was as many as I got. But it was still a decent week. i got um almost 8,000 words for the week. So I am still on track to get Strange Familiar drafted in time so that I can complete my revision on A Rose of the Mirror.

11:02.32
Jeffe Kennedy
oh I probably won't be ahead of schedule, but you never know. I also did some work yesterday morning, actually almost 3,000 words, amazingly enough. Something like Let's look and see, like 2,700 words. Yeah, a little over 2,700 words on this nonfiction project I'm working on. That's um kind of like a memoir-ish kind of thing, which is super secret. I guess I probably shouldn't talk about it at all. if I don't know that I'll ever publish it. I am not a journaler because to me,

11:47.20
Jeffe Kennedy
journaling is the same energy that goes into writing and I don't want to spend it on journaling. ah And I feel like i you know I am a believer that the unexamined life is not worth living, ah but I am an introspective person and I feel like I'm pretty in touch with how I feel about things and of talking to people and so forth.

12:11.30
Jeffe Kennedy
But this is something where I wanted to talk about like what this time in my life is. And if I ever publish it, which I may not, um it'll probably be under a deep pseudonym.

12:26.75
Jeffe Kennedy
so ah I probably shouldn't have mentioned it at all but I was interested that I wrote so many words on it yesterday about something that I was thinking about and I enjoyed putting it down so I'm interested to see if that helps with the word flow this week or If that like came out of the same well, it was kind of fun to write a nonfiction thing too. um Some of you may know That I am started out as an essayist. And so, which is a handy skill to have. My first book was an essay collection, Wyoming Trucks True Love and the Weather Channel. um And a lot of my early career was publishing essays in magazines back when you could get paid to do that. oh But it comes in handy now because like when I was having the meeting with the tour publicity and marketing team,

13:27.23
Jeffe Kennedy
It's really marketing and publicity. They do M&P. You know, they asked me if I had questions and I kind of wanted to ask what's the difference between marketing and publicity, but I didn't. I felt like, I don't know, I'm usually a fan of the, art there are no stupid questions, but I felt like with all of these very bright, enthusiastic, lovely people who would introduce themselves to me and their jobs and what they were going to be doing to promote my book and all of this. that I didn't feel like I could ask that question.

14:03.08
Jeffe Kennedy
ah Marketing and publicity. Yeah. Anyway, when we had the meeting with them, they were asking about different things that they could do could they hit me up to do podcasts and I was like why yes I think I'm actually a pretty good podcast guest um oh I said something along the lines I've always happy to shoot off my mouth which you know it's true and

14:35.18
Jeffe Kennedy
i So I have to pause here a moment because i am I can see from my window. Normally I can't see a whole lot of what they're doing because there's a tree in the way, but they're putting up one of the posts for the portal that's near and they're being very careful. to It's been great. They've been great about preserving stuff on the landscape that they can. And we have this juniper tree.

15:00.12
Jeffe Kennedy
ah that's kind of in the corner between our house and the casita, and they guess it's over 100 years old. And so they've had to trim it back some, but they've been so careful about how much of it they trim off that, yeah, it's just kind of cool to see them working around it. These these guys are just such craftsmen and so careful. It sort of belies a lot of the the tropes, the stereotypes, right?

15:30.89
Jeffe Kennedy
but So, sorry, it's kind of fascinating to see what they're trying to do here. Okay, anyway, I was saying something important about, oh yes, ah one thing that they asked me was if I could if if i could write articles, you know, like um posts, blog posts, or articles for various sites, and they asked me to give a list of article ideas, things that I could talk about.

15:56.83
Jeffe Kennedy
And I said, yeah, that that was something I could do. And I mentioned that I had started out as an essayist. And it's it's a great skill. um A lot of fiction writers. OK, I'm just going to pause to watch this. OK, they were just having to navigate this very long beam around the hundred year old juniper. And there are currently four guys working on this particular piece. Okay, no more getting distracted. um Anyway, oh, I was saying that a lot of writers, a lot of novelists and other writers of fiction ah start out in journalism because journalism ah is a paying job in writing, right?

16:46.10
Jeffe Kennedy
But in journalism, you learn to write to deadline. You learn to write concisely. You learn to write to the reader. So they're they're useful skills to have. For those of you who listen to this podcast and are looking for um you know advice, just general ideas, how to go about being a writer, oh people often ask, what are good ways to learn craft?

17:15.80
Jeffe Kennedy
and you know they're often looking for classes right specific person to teach them craft which I'm often at a loss i I don't know a lot of people really teaching craft in useful ways ways that help help your process I think rather than being prescriptive saying um you must do things this way. That's why um longtime listeners will know, you know, like I'm always complaining about the, you know, plotting for panzers, you know, that they're always wanting to do this kind of thing because um teaching people to outline a story, teaching people to pre-plot is a teachable thing. Whereas teaching

18:05.68
Jeffe Kennedy
how to follow your intuition and listen to the voices from beyond ah is that's harder to teach. I'm trying and I might try to do more, but craft, one way to learn craft is to do something like blogging, like writing articles, journalism, because learning to write to deadline is a tremendous skill.

18:34.37
Jeffe Kennedy
says she who's behind on her deadline, but never mind there. I generally can do it. I'm better than many, um but also ah learning how to write concisely, learning things like word choice. I'm amazed at how many books I read, you know, and yes, that's really the self published books. I know that there's always someone who will leap out and say, well, I found a mistake in a traditionally published book. And it's like, yeah, I find them too. Every once in a while, but sometimes self published books, there are a lot of them. And one of the big mistakes I see because it doesn't get caught by the tools, right? It is word choice. It's the wrong word. And sometimes it's like not even

19:26.76
Jeffe Kennedy
an inadequate word, it's flat wrong. And yes, there is such a thing as the wrong word. So on that note, I'm going to get busy. Please check out Vow for Girls. I'll be talking about it on social media this week. And um it's kind of in honor of Galentine's and Valentine's too. So ah on that note, I am going to get to work and I will talk to you all on Friday.

19:56.44
Jeffe Kennedy
You all take care, bye bye.