First Cup of Coffee – May 16, 2025

My very exciting news on Never the Roses: a starred Library Journal review! Also, about the latest news around "AI" and some writers using it to generate books. My thoughts on art, creativity - and what we can do to "prove" we're not among them.

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Transcript

00:01.79
Jeffe Kennedy
Good morning, everyone. This is Jeffe Kennedy, also writing as Jennifer K. Lambert, author of Epic Fantasy Romance. I'm here with my first cup of coffee.

00:15.74
Jeffe Kennedy
ah Today is, say with me, people, it is Friday,

00:23.25
Jeffe Kennedy
16th, rolling right on through May. And I have exciting news this week, or this podcast, and going to Guess what? let's We'll do a little drum roll.

00:37.01
Jeffe Kennedy
ah Never the Roses got a starred library journal review. I'm so excited. I'm so happy about this. One of my friends asked if this was my first starred library journal review, and it's not.

00:53.84
Jeffe Kennedy
oh Because I'm just that awesome. No, no, no. Sorry. I'm very happy about this. I'm... I worry, you know, because this book might end up being super popular. And I know some people don't love it as much as my usual books, but um getting a great review like this, which I will read too, is just and makes me, makes me feel better that, I don't know, that it's really hitting all the points.

01:23.00
Jeffe Kennedy
I don't, I don't understand it, but yeah, I was worried. So, uh, what was I going to say? I've gotten so excited about this. Um, oh, not my first, the Bark of the Tala definitely got one.

01:37.41
Jeffe Kennedy
I think maybe some of the other 12 kingdoms books did. Um,

01:44.03
Jeffe Kennedy
And maybe not since then. I don't remember if Forgotten Empires did. You know, that was all during pandemic and things were very confusing. Lost to the mists of time. ah But here is this brand new, spanking new, dare I say gushing review.

02:03.77
Jeffe Kennedy
After an unspeakable act, Oneira, a powerful sorceress, wins her freedom and leaves the battles of rival kingdoms behind. She builds a fortress far away from human habitation and quietly resigns herself to a solitary existence.

02:19.37
Jeffe Kennedy
Then two magical creatures, it's really three, I don't know why they said two, um find her, providing her with comfort, if not peace. Still, Oneira is restless and steals a rare book from the library of her nemesis.

02:33.24
Jeffe Kennedy
Stearanos, a formidable sorcerer, is enraged that his wards did not keep out the thief, so he leaves a note to provoke the mystery thief to return. The back and forth between them escalates, and Stearanos eventually discovers that his thief is Oneira.

02:48.87
Jeffe Kennedy
When he confronts her, the pair form an unexpected understanding and intimacy. But when Stearanos is commanded to take up arms against the kingdom Oneira once protected, the two find themselves on opposite sides of the war yet again.

03:03.76
Jeffe Kennedy
Verdict Lambert, pen name of Jeffe Kennedy, (Reluctant Wizard), weaves a heart-wrenching tale of guilt and longing with two star-crossed lovers finding much needed absolution in each other, only to be forced apart once again. This captivating romantasy is a resounding delight and will leave reader readers dreaming of a sequel. Isn't that great?

03:27.45
Jeffe Kennedy
I am and just thrilled. And my publicists and agent are thrilled at all the great pull quotes. um Um, so yeah. And then this week I have been planning, working on plans for my actual book tour, which, um, actually means that I have been approving plans.

03:51.85
Jeffe Kennedy
Uh, this is like a super cool thing on this particular phase of the eight ticket Cinderella ride. dated reference there. Young people might not get it.

04:03.28
Jeffe Kennedy
um But I'm not going to explain it. you You can Google the meme just like we Google the words you make up.

04:12.40
Jeffe Kennedy
Ha ha ha.

04:15.50
Jeffe Kennedy
Turnabout is fair play. um But yes, a ticket, Cinderella ride, that they send me emails with um potential plane itineraries.

04:26.31
Jeffe Kennedy
And I get to pick which ones I would like. And then they will pay for them and everything. And it is just super cool. um Even when I had my day job, we did our own travel. We did not have um an agency that handled travel for us.

04:45.92
Jeffe Kennedy
And, uh, yeah, I mean that, and that was just part of it. Um, so never in my life have I had someone plan travel for me and it is everything that I thought it could be.

04:59.83
Jeffe Kennedy
yeah so So, yeah, that's the excitement here. um writing wise. Oh, I did not get my edit letter yet back. I got a, um,

05:14.99
Jeffe Kennedy
I got an email from Diana. I haven't heard from Allie all week. I'm not sure what she's doing. Maybe she's buried, buried in babies and ah work.

05:28.35
Jeffe Kennedy
Both his work, baby work and publishing work. ah So Deanna sent me an email last night saying, Jeffe, three exclamation points, not to shock you, but we're running a little late. We're almost done reading tears, heartbreak, and just need to gather our thoughts.

05:46.43
Jeffe Kennedy
I'm getting that letter to you early next week. Thank you for your patience. So that's fine. um I told her that I'm just as happy that, you

06:00.80
Jeffe Kennedy
you know, that someone else is running a little late on things and, and I've been working on the secret project.

06:12.71
Jeffe Kennedy
So, um, yeah, that's the other news is that I have started writing again. i started writing again on Tuesday and

06:25.92
Jeffe Kennedy
I'm worried because this is acting like it's frozen, but past experience tells us it's actually recording, but Chrome just like stops working. um Zencastr, I know I keep mentioning, won't support, won't run on anything but Chrome, but it also seems to not be running on Chrome too.

06:48.78
Jeffe Kennedy
So we'll see if I'm just going to keep talking and we'll see if it comes back. So, yeah, I've actually gotten a fair amount done. Oh, good. It came back.

07:01.17
Jeffe Kennedy
Gosh, that's so weird. um I've gotten almost 7,000 words so far this week on The Secret Project. And that has been... um really fun to work on. People are asking me how it feels and it feels good.

07:17.61
Jeffe Kennedy
Um, I said I was tanned, rested and ready and yeah. So, and it's fun to work on this project. It's something that, uh, I kind of been mulling and noodling for a long time and it feels great.

07:34.78
Jeffe Kennedy
And that kind of leads me into the other thing I want to talk about, um, which is, ah for the rest of our lives, we're going be talking about AI and I'm going to have to put air quotes around it every time. Uh, so like the latest brouhaha is that a survey came out from book but saying that half of indie authors surveyed of 1200 indie authors, uh, that they were using,

08:05.50
Jeffe Kennedy
Generative AI at some phase of their writing work and half said they never would and something like 7% in between those halves said that they would think about it and there's been a fair amount of conversation about it in the short time since it released.

08:22.70
Jeffe Kennedy
ah a whole lot on what what their sample was because it seems that they asked people who buy bookbub ads, which skews very heavily to the sort of indie author who might embrace generative AI.

08:42.46
Jeffe Kennedy
ah Because it is very well known that the group 20 books to 50 K started by Michael Anderle. um i know, know,

08:53.65
Jeffe Kennedy
you know Michael and Judith and Craig. I don't know if Michael and Judith sold the business or not. I think Craig extracted himself from it.

09:05.91
Jeffe Kennedy
But Michael started it because his whole idea was that you could write 20 books to be making $50,000 year. And he has always taken advantage of whatever technology assists in that goal.

09:25.04
Jeffe Kennedy
And, and he and Judas have a very nice lifestyle. He's bought me an expensive dinner, a full, full disclosure. And, um, You know, so he's, he's done a well and the group is Uh, I know Craig wanted to buy the business from them for a while. I don't know if he succeeded.

09:47.90
Jeffe Kennedy
I know people who are still part of that group. Um, I know others who have left, um, but they are very, very much focused on, on making money and something that Craig,

10:04.54
Jeffe Kennedy
Craig Martelle, I was trying to think of his last name, ah that Craig emphasized repeatedly is minimum viable product, meaning that you should put as much effort into writing and publishing a book as would make it viably successful and no more to conserve your effort because his view they were really trying to hit that 30-day rapid release algorithm on amazon mostly doing kindle unlimited and so yeah that was his idea was that enables you to write shorter books faster so that you can write the next book and hit the algorithm

10:46.60
Jeffe Kennedy
Um, it's a very profit focused model, um,

10:55.33
Jeffe Kennedy
for people who are in this business for the love of storytelling and who think of themselves as creating art, uh, I had conversation with someone the other day about art and it was very interesting. I'll have to tell you about that, but going set it aside for the moment.

11:13.93
Jeffe Kennedy
Um, the concept of minimum viable product is kind of repellent, if not revolting to some of us.

11:24.75
Jeffe Kennedy
And yeah. We'll just leave that at that. At any rate, apparently 20 books to 50 K, there's a large group within there that have ah the minimum viable product people who have seized upon ah the large language model of generative AI, chat GPT, whatever the hell, and are using those to write books because you can write books faster that way. And that's what matters to them.

12:00.02
Jeffe Kennedy
And for, yeah i I've never used, I've actually never seen Chat GPT. I've seen outputs from it, but I think it's on the iPhone and i have an Android.

12:15.40
Jeffe Kennedy
I've never seen it and don't care to. i have never touched it. I've turned off the ai assist on everything that I can.

12:27.54
Jeffe Kennedy
I don't even like predictive text on my phone. It's like, don't tell me what I'm going to say. I feel very Gen X-y doing these things, you know, put up the Gen X meme. ah But, but yeah, this putting words in my mouth is really offensive to me.

12:44.10
Jeffe Kennedy
Just when I'm telling someone good morning, not let alone, let alone in my books. So something else that's happened as I saw a book blogger of some sort, we probably don't say that anymore, bookstagrammer, saying that she had received an arc of ah monster romance that was um inspired by The Last Unicorn, only they didn't confessed to that days. Um, she recognized it. She recognized it from the movie and put up screenshots of it saying, is this plagiarism?

13:25.90
Jeffe Kennedy
And some people looked at it and it appears that what she did was take the movie script or sound, you know, like the dialogue, maybe the sound from the movie and fed that into chat GPT and had it rewritten. That's what people are theorizing.

13:43.26
Jeffe Kennedy
um she sent it back to the author and said she declined to review, that it was a d DNF, did not finish, and was declining to review. And the author said, well, that yes, she was inspired by The Last Unicorn.

13:56.00
Jeffe Kennedy
but And people were saying to contact Peter S. Beagle, which sure you should, um but you know and Peter's delightful, but I'll tell you who's got the pockets and the will to pursue something like that is the movie studio.

14:11.79
Jeffe Kennedy
I don't think I commented that, but um yeah, you know, so there's been talk of asking authors to prove that they're not using a i ah to write their books.

14:28.01
Jeffe Kennedy
And there's been some interesting riffing on that. Like, how do we prove that? Because like, if you video us writing, you'll just see us like staring out the window, which is not wrong. ah But you know, like,

14:41.32
Jeffe Kennedy
I think it's probably going to come to this, uh, saving multiple drafts of your work. It's what I do. i know people who do a new draft every single day, and maybe that's the thing to do, to show going to have to show our work, uh, just in case it gets challenged that way.

15:04.71
Jeffe Kennedy
And I feel like it's maybe it behooves us to do so, because i i really would love these people who are using, um computers to write their books for them. Let's put it that way.

15:22.51
Jeffe Kennedy
Um, I think they're a scourge. I'm sorry. You're, I feel very strongly about this. Um, maybe you're a widget maker, which is what this whole minimum viable product idea is And certainly there's a market for that, but it's not, it's not what storytelling is about. It's not what the art of writing is about.

15:47.36
Jeffe Kennedy
oh And I was talking to this friend of mine, a new friend who is an art history professor and very interesting. And we were talking about the nature of art. i was asking them, you know,

16:03.26
Jeffe Kennedy
we'll saying that it took me a very long time to think of what I do as, as an art. And, uh, and they said they thought that wasn't unusual, which was interesting to me because there is something about calling yourself a creative or an artist that feels, um, I don't know, poncy poncy to, uh, use my friend Charlie's word.

16:29.18
Jeffe Kennedy
I we don't really have an equivalent in English or something like that, but yeah, it's like being uppity. It's thinking pretty highly of yourself, except that,

16:42.69
Jeffe Kennedy
and long time listeners will know this, you know, I talk about process a lot. I talk about, you know, like for me, a lot of times writing a story is like transcribing it from elsewhere.

16:55.18
Jeffe Kennedy
um And, and to me, that is part of the joy and delight of creating the book. And, and here I sit with my book coming out in,

17:09.63
Jeffe Kennedy
less than two months people. It's already less than two months. I just can't believe it. Uh, which was inspired by the forgotten beasts of eld. And I have in the acknowledgements that I considered it to be a conversation with that book, but I didn't, all of the, uh, synthesizing happened in this eye, in the actual organic eye, the OI.

17:37.99
Jeffe Kennedy
Um, And that's an important part of storytelling that conversation that um taking end stories and what's meaningful to us about stories and telling and retelling them.

17:55.49
Jeffe Kennedy
And we talked a lot about how art is in the eye of the beholder. and like the definition of what is art. and And I was also asking them what they thought about whether or not something was good and was completely validated in my long time argument that the tastemakers are those from tend to be upper class, that they are the people from the classes who decide what is worthwhile.

18:26.64
Jeffe Kennedy
And that ultimately when somebody says that this is good and this is not good, that it's a classist argument. So I felt very validated by that. But, you know, deciding what is art, and and they use the example of, like, you could go look at art in the Guggenheim, and then you can look at graffiti in the subway, and only we decide what what is art.

18:55.36
Jeffe Kennedy
And I think that this um, dredging up from our guts and our spirits and the the laboring over the work um, that this is just this is what it's about. It's what I'm here for.

19:14.29
Jeffe Kennedy
So.

19:16.94
Jeffe Kennedy
So yeah, um, I'm thinking I'm going to start saving periodic drafts of what I'm working on. Uh, I feel like my books probably, well, I don't know.

19:30.22
Jeffe Kennedy
ah Who knows? You know, the, the ai has been trained on my books, so maybe they could convincingly, ah produce, uh, something that sounds like what I would write.

19:42.66
Jeffe Kennedy
But yeah, I think um i think this is the thing to do. I think we should all just start saving periodic drafts, saving our notes and so forth and showing how we worked on something.

19:58.40
Jeffe Kennedy
Such are the times we live in. Interesting times, right? We won't get bored soon. All right. On that note, I'm going to go get to work. I hope you all have a fabulous weekend.

20:09.66
Jeffe Kennedy
It's the Santa Fe International Literary Festival here this weekend. So I plan to, I'm going and volunteering and should be interesting to see some of the discussions.

20:24.83
Jeffe Kennedy
All right. ah You all take care and I will talk to you on Monday. Bye-bye.