First Cup of Coffee with Jeffe Kennedy

Long Live Magic Reborn (Jeffe's Version) 12/19/25

Jeffe Kennedy Season 9 Episode 19

It was the end of a decade, but the start of an age. And I was screaming, "Long Live Magic Reborn!" Mark your calendars, for real this time, because Magic Reborn is done! Dec. 30th can't come fast enough. I'm really excited for you all to read this book!!! I had the time of my life writing it. 

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I'm also obviously not on my first cup of coffee. That was a lie. I'm sorry. So guess what? Guess what? Guess what? Guess what? Did I mention exciting? Good morning everyone. This is Jeffe Kennedy. Also writing is Jennifer K Lambert, author of Epic fantasy Romance. I'm here with my first cup of coffee. Today is say with me, people, and say it loud and proud. It is Friday night, December 19th. And for many of us, the beginning of the Christmas holiday. Whether you are very, Christy or not, here we are looking at Christmas week coming up. I am, of course, traveling to Tucson to spend it with my mother. But I do not want to bury the lead. Guess what? Guess what? Guess what? Guess what? I finished, I finished the book. What? I finished this morning. Magic Reborn is officially complete. I'm so happy, people. I just I'm it's such a relief. I woke up, actually, yesterday to yesterday. And today I woke up at about 330 or 4 in the morning. Just. And I don't normally do this, but I will do it if I'm finishing a book where I just have to get it done. It's just burning to be complete. And I worked on it quite a lot yesterday. I had Writer Coffee with Jim. That was great. Took a break to do that, but I actually wrote for a couple of hours before I met up with him in the morning. And then this morning I wrote almost 4000 words. But, she is done. There are like, 38 pages that I have not gone over. So I'm going to try to go over those, which hopefully won't take me very long, knock on wood. And then I will send this off to Minerva Spencer to prove it for me. Beginning of next week we will send for formatting and I will get it uploaded for the. By the 26th and release date on December 30th. It's so exciting. I'm so happy. And it's great, I that's great. If I do say so myself. I love the ending. I got to put in all of these little happy, moments for all of you to tie off. Yes. The series. This finishes the nine book arc where we do more books in this world in the future. I don't know. It's a very rich world, and there are certainly plenty of opportunities for things going forward. As I was sort of writing up the various, tying up endings, I was hearing your little voices, messaging me and saying, well, now can we have such an SOS story? Because there are some, some obvious paths going forward. We shall see. I'm also obviously not on my first cup of coffee. That was a lie. I'm sorry. I have had a couple of lattes, and now I'm working my way through my pot of green tea. So I'm actually drinking green tea and my pretty candy cane mug. So I do have in one of my many spreadsheets a line for at bat and on deck, a rare sports metaphor for me. If I like any sport, it's it's really baseball. Mostly because I liked sitting in the sun and drinking beer when I was in college, watching the Cardinals play in Saint Louis. Watching Darryl Strawberry was his very fine rear end steal basis. That was, the beginning and end pretty much of my sports love. But I will use baseball metaphors on occasion. Very excited because in January love, lies and Ley Lines comes out and I am planning to release books two and three in that series next year. So. So that's what's on the, agenda next. Oh, I am meeting on virtually online with Agent Sarah this afternoon, and we're going to go over the cover for Love Lies on Ley Lines, because I've got a whole bunch of, possibilities from The Fabulous Raven, and I just need to, sort of pick a direction. And soon we'll get that cover up. We'll probably do that, cover reveal after Magic Reborn has released. So it's not too clutter up your minds. She also did character art for me, and I kind of love it. My editor also asked for several other story ideas, so Sarah and I are going to go over those. So excited for for both of these things to happen. Yeah, so that's going to be my day. I need to put that stuff together for Sarah so that I am at least somewhat coherent when we discuss this. I've been back to therapy for a second time. On Wednesday. And that was immensely helpful. That's really making a big difference for me. It's. I just feel awful. So I got the therapy works. So I'm starting to feel much more settled in my skin. I had a couple of hard conversations with my mom, but I think she's settling into assisted living and not berating me over text as much because I told her she had to stop yelling at me. And though she actually retained that, she felt bad. So that's helpful. I've just got a long list of things to get done, but fortunately the book is really not on there. I need to mail out presents for the grandchildren today. I'd like to go to yoga class just because it's good for me. Especially if I'm going to be driving. I finished the interior Christmas decorations yesterday afternoon, though. I did Christmas like this year. And I have to tell you, because I'm I'm an overboard kind of gal, as we all know. It's been pointed out to me that I am, what, somewhat passionate about everything I do. Which is okay, right? We accept ourselves. And so Christmas light. I did not do a tree, but I put up garlands everywhere. And then I was able to use the lights that I would have put on the tree in different places. And I think it looks very pretty and big bonus. It took me like two hours to do the interior decorations as opposed to like 1 or 2 days. And so now I'm wondering, will I go back? But, yeah, one of my friends said, you know, next year, if you want a tree, you can have a tree. And I thought that was a very good philosophy. So. I don't know if I'll talk about this very coherently. I'll make an effort. We'll see how I do. But I want to talk about the difference between gathering data and analyzing data and anecdotal evidence. And this is very clear in fields like science and not so clear in the creative pursuits. And so I have some kind of I don't know if they're fully formed thoughts on this or not yet, but you get to hear them anyway. In science, data is everything right? You you gather data. You analyze data. You look at how much of it there is. You apply statistical analyzes to it. And I have a friend who is looking at, having to take a statistics class in order to, take on a potential new career and feel intimidated by that. And I keep meaning to tell her that statistics classes. So that variety are not that difficult because the main thing they want you to learn is not how to run the formulas, because it's all on the computer. Now, you can just plug in the information, and you're probably not even going to be doing your own statistical analysis unless you're a researcher. What they want you to learn in a statistics class of that kind is how to know which numbers matter and which ones don't. And so when you look at a sample set, you want to know, is there enough, the n value, how many of these individual data points there are? How many are outliers? What how do you know? Bad data from good data. And a whole lot of this is what science is predicated on, because you only want to make decisions off of good data. And I read a very interesting thing about that. One of the ways that the grifters and political manipulators have been able to get people to be science deniers is because scientists are very committed to to this, to this method, to this way of viewing the world, and will very rarely report results definitively, because scientists are very aware that everything is within a margin of error. Now, what you do is you get it down to the very, very smallest margin of error that you can. But there's also no absolutes, right? And people want absolutes. And so the grifters and manipulators will put things in terms of absolutes. You know, they will say things like, oh, well, there is a God and oh, this is a sin. And, climate change is not real. And I'm going to caveat this really fast. I'm going to say that global climate change is real, that all of the data supports it. But scientists will tell you all the reasons why the data supports it, and they won't put it as definitively. And apparently this is really got in the way of communicating scientific certainties to the public. Because scientists always want to frame it in terms of this is how certain we are. And so this is, believe it or not, connected to writing. I do promise because as many of you know, or if you're listening for the first or the first few times, let me tell you, I keep track of all of my metrics. I keep track of how many words I do in an hour and a day and a year, and I make charts and graphs because I was trained as a scientist, and I believe very strongly in collecting data. And so one of the things that has sort of been my, my working hypothesis all of these years, if you will, is that the earlier in the day I start writing, the more productive I am. And, and really, I just go at number of words produced. And this is something that I also feel is true because when I write early in the day, it's easier and it goes faster. If I can get all my words done by noon, let alone 10 a.m.. That was glorious. That's really great. And I, I don't start running out of energy at the end like I do if I'm going into the afternoon, but that's anecdotal. The the actual data. When I look at the data, there is a trend that the later I start the fewer words I produce. But it's not a startling, correlation. It is. It's there. It's probably statistically significant. I have forgotten my statistics classes, but, I would have to look it up. But, you know, like my r value, what I think is probably statistically significant, but not as much as my feeling about this. And the problem with the feeling is that that's anecdotal. That's what we call anecdotal, information or evidence, because it's all the story that's how I feel about it. I tell myself this story, I believe it, I think it's probably true. The data doesn't overwhelmingly support it, where this becomes a problem in the world of science and so forth. Is that anecdotal data or evidence? It's not really data, isn't it? It's not prove-able and it's really not real. So like, I have a good friend who wanted to try what I consider to be a quack remedy for a very serious chronic disease that she had. And I was she was sending me YouTube videos from Russians explaining why this thing worked. And she said, I want you to just watch this one because you'll be convinced. And I watched The one, and it was one of those deals where they're like writing words on a piece of paper and circling them. And I message, sure. And I said, they tell you what, I'm going to make you a video where I write words on paper and define them and circle them for you, and explain that this is all anecdotal. And she said, well, you have to look at that. There are thousands, thousands of people across the world, maybe millions of people across the world who say that this works. And it's like, that's very compelling to her. Right? She believes what people say. And I don't know, there's something about that writing the word and defining it, circling it, that's convincing the people. And it's like, well, no, it's all anecdotal. It doesn't matter. First of all, you don't know how many of those people who review one thing are real, right? We know so much of the internet is fake, like over 50% of social media is bots. So you don't know that they're even telling the truth. And also, you know, people believe what they want to believe and people want to say that something works. And then if they if it turns out like then the cancer comes back or whatever, they're not going to go on there and say, oh, actually, no, it didn't work. You know, it just seemed like it. So this is all a very twisty path. I know, but this is what I'm thinking about. That even though my data doesn't show overwhelmingly that writing in the morning is the most productive way for me to be, it's how it feels best to me. And because this is a creative pursuit based on feeling, and I'm the one being effective, I'm not affected. I'm not trying to sell it to you. Although I will tell people when they ask, I'm like, find what time of day you're most productive. And I think one way to figure that out is to get gather objective evidence, see if you really do write more at some times of day than others. But also a lot of it is can you get yourself to do the work and like I said at the beginning of the podcast, finishing this book career, I, you know, wake up first thing in the, you know, or not even first thing in the morning and, you know, like 330 or 4 in the morning and I'm just vibing, just vibrating, needing to go work on the book and get it done. And that's not something I do every day, but it is something that I do right at the end and, you know, arguably needed to do it right. Get this done. So those are all of my thoughts for the day. Next week it's going to be, as I mentioned, holiday week. I am not going to do podcasts next week, so everybody can just take some time off. I hope that whatever you're doing, whether you are having a restful time at home by yourself, gathering with friends, if you're seeing family, I hope that if you're seeing family, that that is, celebration for you and joyful and not fraught, I guess it's always fraught to some extent, but I hope that you are able to enjoy it. And, yeah. So I will talk to all actually on release day, on December 30th. Look for Magic Reborn. It's really, really going to happen this time. How long have I been saying that? But now what? Really, really? Well, so, yeah, that'll be a great way to finish off 2025. So, I will talk to you all on Tuesday, December 30th. You all take care. And if you celebrate, Merry Christmas. If you don't happy, nobody else is working. So you don't have to either day. Or if you're having to work because all of your coworkers are off. I hope that it is easy and quiet for you and, yeah. Bye bye.