Friday, September 26, 2025

Magic Reborn is up to 15,000 words! Lust, Lies, and Ley Lines cover art is coming soon - and why having "mean" friends is actually a good thing. And Sydney the Tyrant strikes again as she workshops a new intro/outro for the podcast.

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Transcript

0:00
 This is Jeffe Kennedy, also writing as Jennifer K Lambert, author of Epic Fantasy romance.

 0:07
 I'm here with my first cup of coffee.

 0:16
 Good morning, everyone.

 0:17
 Today is Say it with me, people.

 0:19
 It is Friday, whatever day it is.

 0:25
 Oh, September 26th, 2025.

 0:30
 And if you're on video, you'll see that I have a Maine Coon companion here next to me.

 0:36
 It just feels like it's been a busy week.

 0:39
 There's been a lot going on.

 0:41
 I've had a couple of friends like having dealing with personal stuff and which, you know, always consumes me to, you know, and it's like, oh, I just, you know, want everybody to be happy.

 0:56
 I had to take the car in for an oil change this morning.

 1:00
 And then Sydney, who maybe we should start calling tyrant Sydney.

 1:05
 Actually, she's not and that will probably bother her.

 1:07
 So I shouldn't say that.

 1:08
 Wanted me to record an intro and outro so we can have like official ones in front of a blank wall and the only blank wall I have is the casita.

 1:17
 So I was a good Kitty.

 1:19
 I obediently tried to do this and I set up you know, like a little tripod and I think it turned out like **** it's bad.

 1:27
 I also recorded an intro and outro with this background.

 1:30
 We'll see what Sydney says.

 1:32
 Probably she's going to just recording a whole new set for me.

 1:37
 She offered to film them for me and we might just have to do that because it's, I don't want to say I'm hapless.

 1:44
 I feel like I'm actually fairly good technologically.

 1:48
 But yeah, that did not go well.

 1:50
 She wants a blank background so that we can like green screen, put things behind me.

 1:55
 So this is like, I don't know, we're going Uptown, people, totally Uptown.

 2:02
 I know this is weird.

 2:04
 Long time listeners probably heard me mention this before, but I get very self-conscious knowing that David can overhear me if the door is open.

 2:12
 Which is dumb, right?

 2:13
 Because I'm like talking to all of you.

 2:16
 But yeah, whatever, who knows?

 2:19
 I'm, I think I'm starting to get more Zen with the fact that they're like, I've certain odd quirks that just are.

 2:28
 And it's like, I don't know why I feel this way.

 2:30
 I just do.

 2:32
 I was going to put this on threads.

 2:33
 I have kind of like a funny spot on my arm.

 2:36
 If you're on video, you can see it, the doctors among you, you can diagnosis.

 2:41
 For me, it's, I wanted to say I feel like at this age and I'm not that old, right?

 2:46
 But it's like every day is a new game of is it a bruise or is it skin cancer?

 2:53
 I, I know the ABCD thing, you know, like, so it's asymmetry, right?

 2:59
 This is asymmetrical.

 3:00
 There's a, you know, border.

 3:02
 There's no even border color.

 3:06
 I think it's like if it has various colors, this is kind of one color and diameter.

 3:11
 Like if it's bigger than a certain size, I need to look up the actual metrics on those.

 3:16
 But yeah, bruise or skin cancer.

 3:20
 Such, such are our lives, right?

 3:24
 But I have made good progress on the book this week.

 3:29
 I know I've passed 15,000 words, which is good.

 3:34
 I am not yet hitting.

 3:37
 I would like to hit 2500 words a week to get this done by the end of November.

 3:41
 In case you weren't paying attention, I did push out release date to end of November.

 3:45
 So sorry, but hopefully we can make it.

 3:49
 But to give myself plenty of room, I'd like to hit 2500 words a day.

 3:55
 I've gotten 7000 words, a little over 7000.

 3:58
 I've passed 15,000 on the book, so, you know, I'm, I'm feeling pretty good about it.

 4:08
 I've tapered off as the week went.

 4:10
 Monday I did a little over 2500.

 4:13
 Tuesday I did a little over 2100.

 4:17
 This is definitely effect of the of the marathon thing, right?

 4:22
 I'm probably trying to ramp up too quickly.

 4:26
 It would be nice to be more sustainable, but also, I don't know, sometimes that's how it goes.

 4:33
 I'm making progress and ramping up on this book, and I'm feeling more or less pretty good about that.

 4:39
 I've also been dealing with getting things ready for sex, lies and Ley lines, which I believe I'm going to call lust, lies and Ley lines, which is like L to the fourth.

 4:54
 I think I'm settled on the title.

 4:55
 I need to do a little bit more research.

 4:58
 Nobody has told me.

 4:59
 If you think that the word lust will get me in trouble metadata wise I think it should be OK but if I'm wrong please tell me.

 5:11
 I did talk to a couple of cover designers.

 5:15
 I have been working with Ravven for coming on 10 years now and she's amazing.

 5:21
 I feel very lucky to have her.

 5:23
 We work great together and I was looking at for this book, since it's a slight departure, it's more humorous.

 5:33
 It's kind of a caper.

 5:35
 I thought, well, maybe I should do a different kind of cover.

 5:39
 And I had a friend tell me that she thought I should change up my covers, that my covers don't look like the rest of the romanticy market, you know, and Twixty and me, people like I am never like the rest of the anything market.

 5:54
 So I'd really appreciate the thought.

 5:57
 And also it's like, even if I do it, will I ever be like everybody?

 6:03
 I will never be like all the other girls, right?

 6:06
 And I'm not a pick me.

 6:09
 I thought, well, I looked at the other covers.

 6:13
 If that's what you're supposed to do, It's like look at the other books in your genre and figure out what the comps are, the comparison, right, What you would compare it to and do a cover like that to signal genre.

 6:26
 And I, I've talked about this before, but you know, the, a cover has, it needs to attract attention and it needs to convey genre.

 6:35
 It's really just the two jobs.

 6:37
 You know, I, I really don't have this whole thing that many writers have, especially newbie writers.

 6:42
 And I've had to mentor people out of this, sometimes unsuccessfully 'cause they're like, well, I want the cover to convey what's in the book.

 6:51
 And it's like, no, no, no, you have the entire book to convey your story.

 6:56
 The cover only needs to do those two things, attract attention, convey genre.

 7:02
 You don't need to like show nuances of the story or theme and so forth.

 7:07
 I guess kind of you want to give a sense of tone.

 7:10
 You know, like one thing I wanted to show about this book is that it's more light hearted.

 7:15
 It's, you know, it's got that touch of humor.

 7:18
 What I came up with was, is that I probably needed to do an illustrated cover.

 7:23
 And Revven, who had already agreed, she, you know, she was like, yes, I have time for you in November.

 7:27
 Let's do it.

 7:28
 Great.

 7:30
 She had said, no, I can't do an illustrated cover.

 7:32
 She said I'd like to move more into illustration, but it's not not her thing, which I was afraid of.

 7:39
 So then I talked to a couple other cover artists and neither one seemed to be exactly a right fit.

 7:47
 And so I went to one of my author groups yesterday and one thing we had talked about was that you need mean friends.

 7:56
 You need friends who are going to tell you the truth and be mean to you about it.

 8:03
 I mean, you know, maybe there's a, it's tough love.

 8:06
 I, I talk about tough love.

 8:10
 I think it's actually CM Niscosta Christine who says mean friends, but we mean the same thing, right?

 8:17
 It's, it needs to be both.

 8:20
 It's someone who who wants you to succeed.

 8:24
 So not someone who is going to be unkind to you simply because they love to shoot people down.

 8:31
 And those are people are out there.

 8:32
 I'm sure you all have encountered them.

 8:36
 So it needs to be a friend, but it also needs to be a friend who will do more than just pat you on the head and say you're wonderful.

 8:43
 And it's great to have friends who say you're wonderful, who love you and think that everything you do is amazing because you need those people in your life too.

 8:53
 But for this sort of thing, you need mean friends.

 8:56
 So I went into this group and I said, OK, be my mean friends.

 9:01
 And I said, you know, this other friend of mine who actually is kind of but the best kind of mean friend, she thinks that my covers aren't doing me any favors.

 9:12
 And they said, well, you're hitting the same thing that a lot of long time fantasy romance are, is that the market has moved on just even in like the last three to four years and my covers don't look like everybody else's.

 9:26
 Now, as you all know, I've finally memorized the number.

 9:30
 I have like 68 published titles at this point.

 9:34
 I'm not going to go back recover.

 9:36
 My back list would be so expensive.

 9:39
 And I'm no, no, no, no, maybe someday.

 9:42
 I guess I shouldn't say no, no, no, maybe someday.

 9:44
 Not right now.

 9:45
 What I'm looking at is this book.

 9:46
 How should I change up how this book looks?

 9:49
 And so we were all looking at cops and so so they're great.

 9:54
 They're like, no, you, you know, guess you need to have a different kind of cover for this.

 9:58
 What genre is it?

 9:59
 We were talking about it because of course, I don't even know what genre it is, which is for you newbier writers, when like agents and editors say things to you.

 10:09
 Like, first of all, you have to know what book your genre is.

 10:12
 If that's hard for you to know, you are not alone.

 10:15
 I mean, and sometimes I feel like it's their job to know what genre it is.

 10:20
 And very often, like for me, with one of my very first books with Rogue's Pawn, the first book in Covenant of Thorns, I was pitching it as maybe paranormal romance and maybe as urban fantasy, knowing full well it wasn't really either.

 10:36
 And when Karina Press finally published it, they published it as fantasy romance, which was a genre I had never heard of.

 10:43
 But of course, this was like 2010, right?

 10:47
 Yeah, I didn't know what genre it was.

 10:49
 And yeah, it hurt me during pitching because people would tell me.

 10:53
 They would say it's not paranormal romance, it's not urban fantasy.

 10:57
 I didn't have another name for what it was.

 11:02
 And I had that one agent who told me that my work fell in the cracks between genres, which is a story I often tell if it's new to you.

 11:15
 Yeah.

 11:15
 And I actually went to the to the bar afterwards and cried.

 11:18
 And my friends all started calling me Crack Ho because my work fell in the cracks between genres.

 11:25
 But then the market shifts, right?

 11:27
 You know?

 11:28
 Anyway, so I'm trying to figure out like, what genre this book is.

 11:35
 And we ended up sort of having this.

 11:37
 I mean, they're so helpful.

 11:38
 It's so great.

 11:39
 Because when we say mean, we mean brutally honest and not honest in a brutal way.

 11:47
 I think there's a difference 'cause there's people who like, use honesty again, as an excuse to hurt you.

 11:53
 You know, I'm just being honest.

 11:55
 And I didn't know if you were aware that you're fat, you know, something like that.

 12:01
 This is just pulling off the gloves.

 12:04
 You don't have to protect my feelings.

 12:06
 Tell me what you really think.

 12:08
 So we ended up coming around where I'm looking at other books that are, we're kind of deciding what genre it is and what the comparables are.

 12:16
 And that's when it's really helpful to have writer friends to try to figure out what genre it is.

 12:22
 It's like, well, is it mostly this?

 12:25
 It's a little bit this, it's a little bit that, it's a little bit the other, but is it mostly this?

 12:30
 So we kind of found the sub category, the niche that we think that it is.

 12:35
 And I found another kind of cover and I said, what about this?

 12:41
 And they were like, yes, yes, that conveys what you've been talking about.

 12:47
 And it's more of an object cover.

 12:49
 It doesn't have people on it, which is apparently the market's really moving away from actual people.

 12:55
 So you'll illustration or objects.

 12:58
 So the best part is it's all a very long story that the object cover I picked where they were like, yes, this absolutely conveys the genre that you want to and the mood and the theme that you want to is the kind of thing Revven can do.

 13:14
 I messaged her and I'm like, what about a cover like this?

 13:17
 Could you do something like this?

 13:18
 And she said absolutely.

 13:20
 So I sort of came back around full circle, but I'm really happy to have this resolved.

 13:26
 And yeah, so now we just wait and see until the end of October if anyone in tread buys it.

 13:32
 If not, I'm going to self publish it.

 13:34
 Finally, I know a lot of you have been waiting a long time for this book because I've been teasing it forever.

 13:41
 It'll be nice to have it out there possibly before Christmas, before the holidays.

 13:48
 Wouldn't that be fun?

 13:49
 This is something that I talk about a lot and I feel like I need to talk about more often because people don't understand me when I mention it.

 13:59
 But it's who you have read your books that you have to find that right blend of someone who is mean and wants you to succeed.

 14:12
 So you can't have toxic people giving you feedback, but you do need people that will give you feedback on your writing and on your stories that is knowledgeable and also not colored by emotion.

 14:29
 Maybe that's what I want to say because a lot of times people have their spouse read their stuff or their sibling or their parent or their child, even an adult child.

 14:43
 And I always, I always say don't have anyone related to you.

 14:49
 Be your critique partner.

 14:51
 And inevitably someone will argue with me every single time.

 14:54
 They'll say, well, you know, my husband is my first reader and he is great and OK, maybe.

 15:01
 But I think that if it's someone that you have an an intense emotional relationship with, like someone like a spouse or a lover or a partner or a relative, that that is always going to color how they respond to your work because they know you so well.

 15:20
 Even if you have a fantastic emotionally shameless relationship with them, they still know you really well and there are going to project things that they know about you into reading the story.

 15:33
 It's it's inevitable.

 15:35
 So I am a huge, huge fan of not having someone that you are close to read your stuff.

 15:43
 Find people who, I mean, you become friends with your crit partners, which is fine.

 15:48
 But you know, like I have people read my work who are very good friends, but they're good friends that they don't try to protect my feelings, you know?

 15:59
 So it's, it comes back to the mean friend thing, right?

 16:02
 Maybe we need a better word for it, but that's our shorthand for now.

 16:07
 So anyway, on that note, I am going to see if I can get another day's worth of work on this book.

 16:14
 It's still the best writing week I've had in quite some time.

 16:19
 So that's good, right?

 16:22
 Always pushing to improve.

 16:26
 I hope you all have an amazing weekend and I will talk to you all on Tuesday.

 16:31
 You all take care.

 16:42
 Sorry.

 16:43
 Let the cat out.

 16:44
 I like that I don't have to pause anymore because Sydney will edit.

 16:48
 Now this cat is crying again.

 16:50
 Hold on.

 16:51
 I put more snacks in this puzzle box.

 16:53
 We'll see if that helps.