First Cup of Coffee with Jeffe Kennedy
First Cup of Coffee with Jeffe Kennedy
First Cup of Coffee - Book Release, New Series, and the Dentist
First podcast with the fancy new mic! Comment if you think it sounds great, or simply just keep listening ~ If you haven't already, the time to get caught up on Warriors of Magic is now since the final installment is coming end of this month. All SIX Pov's will be featured in this book and I couldn't be more excited for you all to read it.
YouTube isn’t going anywhere, though. We’re planning to shift the channel toward long-form writing content, book discussions, and reviews. We think you’ll really enjoy it. And of course, I’d love your feedback. Let me know what kinds of YouTube videos you’d like to see!
Among the Thorns line edits are D-O-N-E DONE! Preorder here
In case you missed it, Strange Familiar Audio Book is now available on Youtube ~ Listen for free here
You can find the Owl Crate signed edition of Never the Roses here
A very beautiful hardcover edition can be found here
The audio book can be listened to here
And Kindle Unlimited has Never the Roses digital version! Your friendly neighborhood author is doing author-ly things this upcoming month!
Upcoming Events ~ LoveLitCon is a weekend of romantasy and bookish fun and I will be attending! Buy LoveLitCon tickets here using LOVE8368 for $10 OFF! https://lovelit.com/
Tuscon Festival of Books is March 14th-15th this year! See you there *Wink* https://tucsonfestivalofbooks.org
Books
Among the Thorns line edits are D-O-N-E DONE! Preorder here
In case you missed it, Strange Familiar Audio Book is now available on Youtube ~ Listen for free here
You can find the Owl Crate signed edition of Never the Roses here
A very beautiful hardcover edition can be found here
The audio book can be listened to here
And Kindle Unlimited has Never the Roses digital version! Your friendly neighborhood author is doing author-ly things this upcoming month!
Upcoming Events ~ LoveLitCon is a weekend of romantasy and bookish fun and I will be attending! Buy LoveLitCon tickets here using LOVE8368 for $10 OFF! https://lovelit.com/
Tuscon Festival of Books is March 14th-15th this year! See you there *Wink* ...
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. Which is wonderful. Today is Tuesday, December night, 2025. You may notice that the audio is drastically improved. Hopefully you will notice that because, Sydney the Magnificent has now set me up with, like, a real professional type. Big honking black podcast mic. It's, I mean, it looks very professional. Who knew? Dude. I think we need to entertain. Are we going against the brand here at First Cup of Coffee by going this professional? You know, because this started out as, like, this very baby thing. In fact, it's probably appropriate today to revisit the history a little bit. I started this podcast in 2017. So this is the eighth season going on ninth season. How is that even possible? And I would originally simply record this on my phone with like a voice memo thing. And then I gradually escalated to, like, better recording. And then I went to. Isn't it funny how we go in this circle because, yeah, I like got better recording and I stopped doing it just on my phone. Some of you who've been listening for a long time might remember, like when I was carrying my phone around in The Secret Garden and like, weeding and deadheading as I talked. And then I went to video because I was convinced at some point along the way that I should, be on video, that I should have it on YouTube as well, and which entailed like putting on makeup. And for a while I tried to do the video out in The Secret Garden in the summertime, but there were connectivity issues. And so I ended up like this summer doing it entirely inside at my desk. And now we have come back around to not being on video at all. Because Sydney says fi, she says no video, nobody gets video. No, that's not what she said. She said that most of you are listening on audio. You know, we're not getting that much video listenership. And she's got other plans for the YouTube channel where we are going to start recording some more, deliberately writing focused, videos to post for you all. Writing an industry where she is, has the avowed purpose of keeping me on topic. I know, I know, if you're out there rolling your eyes. Yeah. I kind of think the same thing. No, I can stay on topic. I can totally stay on topic. Right? It could happen. So can Jeffy stay on topic? We shall find out. This will be the challenge of the videos, but for now, I don't have to. Now I am sitting here without makeup in my yoga clothes. Only talking into the microphone, which is set up next to my desk and looks like, as I said, intimidatingly professional. So it's kind of funny to me that I started out like recording on my phone. I know one of them I did at the RWA conference, just sitting on the street side where there were like people walking by and house person asked for me for money. That was one of the early episodes. There was a lot of verisimilitude, back in the day. Actually, it's still verisimilitude. It is still the brand here, where I ramble on about my life and what's going on, and how that intertwines with writing and the publishing industry and so forth. Part of what I am trying to do here, endeavoring to do with the podcast. I know many of you have been listening for a very long time, and it's I appreciate it and it's great. As always, the goal is to, make a living, make things sustainable for myself. And I have long been meaning to, like, actually teach some writing classes. I've had that probably sliding down my to do list for, I'm sorry, a year now. We've got the casita now with the wonderful opportunity to do writing retreats with me. So these will all folded together. One of the things about me, and I think it's true of many creatives, but certainly is true of me, is that, the marketing, am I right? The marketing. I, I don't like buying and selling. I mean, I think that's probably a pretty simple way of putting it. I don't really like capitalist society. I especially now, I mean, things of just, like, getting more and more pointed. Also, I've, you know, like, need a roof over my head and food. And this is how I make my living. So every once in a while, I see someone on social media saying how writers could really benefit from having more marketing savvy. Yeah. Maybe so. Well, probably that's true. But also the thing is, is if we wanted to be marketers, if we wanted to be people who bought and sold stuff, and I always think of the monologue, by John Cusack in Say Anything, where he says he doesn't want to buy or sell or produce and goes through all the iterations of that. It's like, yeah, if we wanted to do those things, we would probably do those things instead of being writers. It's a much more secure living, right in our capitalist society. Now, there certainly are plenty of people out there who come from marketing backgrounds and also love to write. And, you know, God bless them. And I don't mean that in a ironic or snide way. I mean, that's like, yeah, that's great. I you know, that this is the intersection of your skills is amazeballs. And, you know, go on with your bad self. There are also people who are primarily marketers and get into the writing gig because they see it as a handy widget to sell. And for those people, yeah, I, I've, I'm not a fan. A lot of them are using generative AI to write books. They're teaching classes on how to use generative AI to write books. And frankly, I disdain putting on my books or my website that they are human created because I feel like that should be the fricking default, right? All my books are human created, full of flaws, like me. And no, I've never, never used generative AI of of any kind. You know, like I probably mentioned this before, and poor Sydney, she's, She it's wonderful. But she was on a zoom call with me and assistant Korean, who is my same age. And, Sydney was looking up ley lines because we were talking about the, upcoming book releasing in January. I love Lies and Ley Lines. And she was looking up what ley lines were, and she started reading to us what the I overview said. And both Carien and I just like totally chop down her throat. We're like, never read the eye overview. And we said it pretty much in that voice too. And like, what did it tell her? It's like came up with something like, lines between geographic points, World Heritage sites or something. I can't remember what all it said, which that's the thing with like the AI stuff is it grabs some information, but not all. And it's like, well, yeah, that is one way that the ley lines have been discussed, but it's also like not what light lines are. I even hate calling it. I have I'm putting, air quotes around it because, you know, it's just a large language model. It's just a really big data set, and there's no intelligence to it at all. People who are just marketers and just selling books, that they are using computer programs to generate are not my people. And we'll just leave that at that. Speaking of writing books, how is Magic Reborn going? It's coming. I've got 20,000 words left. If you were listening Friday, you will note that that's not a huge difference since Friday. But I'm getting there. I've also had sent the part that I had already revised the first 225 pages or so to, Minerva Spencer to proof, and she sent it back to me last night and said she was enjoying the heck out of it. And that it was very clean and very little of the fix. So that was, fantastic on both counts. It's great to hear that it's coming along. I think you all are good. Enjoyed this book. It's there's a lot of action. As I spoke before, it's, you know, the ninth book in the series. So it's basically all act three climax and the overall series arc. There's six points of view, and I'm rotating through everyone, and there's a lot of just enjoying the previous couple's relationships and them sort of coming to their final, personal triumphs. And were I mean, I feel like if this is a spoiler for you, you're reading the wrong genre, but they're going to defeat the big bad. Yeah, I think it's it's going to come along just fine. Yesterday was a scrambled up day. I had to go to the dentist very early to get my teeth cleaned. I have a thing about the dentist, which makes no rational sense, and I haven't been for a very, very long time. Like, since before we moved to Santa Fe 16 years ago. So something like 17 years. So, like, I went in for the dentist checkup and the dentist was, pleasantly surprised that my teeth were, I don't know, still attached to my head. She said, when you hear someone who has it come in at 17 years, you're braced for looking in their mouth and saying, like that a bomb has gone off. So, fortunately, my my friend who talked me into going, who said that it was insane was the word she used, that I had not been in so long. She said that, clearly I'm very good teeth that I haven't had problems. I do have to have two fillings or two small fillings next Monday, so yesterday I went and got my teeth cleaned, debridement and the whole, checking for gum disease thing, which I have a rant about the whole dental hygienist, gum disease thing, which I'm probably just not going to go into. I always say I'm not going to, and then I start, but this time I'm really not going to go into because I fully accept that I am not entirely rational on the subject. And I really, really don't want to feed into the current climate of science and health and medicine denial. Because it's crazy. That's crazy. And so, yeah, I have to have like the, the descaling done where they like to have your mouth at a time and numb it and go in and scrape underneath the guns and all of this so that I have strong bones, she said. I have very long roots, and I want you all to know that I. Yeah, I mean, don't be too jealous, but I have very long roots, which is apparently great for keeping my teeth attached to my head. But I'm going to do this. I, I am skeptical of whether this kind of thing really needs to be done, but I'm going to do it. I think those appointments will be in February, and we'll just see. We'll see if it makes a huge difference. And then I will have not only very long roots, but beautifully healthy gums. That will carry me into, the sunset like a prince on a white horse. How's that for a really mixed metaphor? So, I may end up finishing, final revisions on Magic Reborn the week of Christmas. I'm probably going to, definitely going to Tucson for the entire week of Christmas. And we'll see. My mom, she is moving into her assisted living apartment on Thursday, and I'm filling out paperwork. So much paperwork, people. While I don't want to slam the medical establishment, why do we have to put down the same information over and over and over? I have this stack of forms, and I'm filling out the exact same contact information over and over again, and it's like, I don't know, it goes to different departments and different file folders and what have you, but it seems incredibly inefficient to me. And maybe part of it is, is it's not more work on their part. It's just on our part. I keep saying that the people at this place are wonderful. And they are, but, Yeah, this paperwork stuff is just crazy. How many times do you have to write down the insurance ID? And it's just, Yeah, I worked on it for a while yesterday. I have to finish it today. And it's just one more thing. What else? I finished reading a book for Jennifer Estep. Finally. I started it in arc freaking October, and by by November was just shot. All to hell was on that. I am realizing now and and longtime listeners might know this too. I am realizing how much my life has been fully disrupted since about fall of 2022. That there has just been one crisis after another, like another thing every few months, and at least now it feels like I'm getting some things resolved. I'm really hoping that my mom will be happy in assisted living with David and his Parkinson's disease. We are getting him on via live. He is going to be on the pump, which delivers the Parkinson's medication. Really excited because I saw yesterday that it will limit the dyskinesia, which is like when his movement disorders doctor calls it the wibbly wobbly. Right? You know, the involuntary swaying and, you know, jerking of arms and so forth. The violin should really help with that. And that would be great. And also bypasses all of the aural stuff. One of the things with taking the Parkinson's medication orally is it really disrupts the digestive system and causes weight loss, all kinds of stuff like that, things they don't tell you in the beginning. And then you'll have a much more consistent dose. It's like the insulin pump, right? Instead of having these ups and downs and the physiology, you get things smoothed out. It's a good metaphor for where I'm at right now. I'm going to put up exactly as many Christmas decorations as I please. And I'm just getting some of these things off my list. I finally got my book tour expenses sent in yesterday, so that was amazing. So all of these things that have been sliding down my list forever are finally getting handled. And I'm hoping that, like, all the people in my life will have their stuff handled and maybe we could sort of return to a feeling of normalcy outside of the political situation, which is won't be normal again for a while, but it's probably going to get a little bit worse. But then I think it'll get better. If you don't follow Heather Cox, Richardson probably should. She has great insights and that's basically her take. So, yeah, I think that's where we're at. First podcast in a long time with no YouTube video. Let me know if you are wailing and gnashing your teeth. That really missing it. But otherwise, look forward to some other kinds of YouTube videos and I'll still be here twice a week with my first cup of coffee. So I will talk to you all on Friday. You all take care. Bye bye.