Make Pussy Sparkle Happen

Don't resist Pussy Sparkle because it's happening, and so is the Magic Reborn audio book. My take on the Taylor Swift leaked text messages and also female friendships in general. And my response to being ghosted. 

Join me for your First Cup of Coffee every Monday at 9:30AM and suggest a topic or ask a question here at The Morning Refill. 

Love, Lies, and Ley Lines is OUT NOW 

Transcript

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When will Magic Reborn be on audiobook? Love Lies on Ley Lines has released. I dedicated it to my friend Kelly Robson. They revealed a set of text messages between Taylor Swift and Blake Lively. The phrase is pussy sparkle. Good morning everyone. This is Jeffe Kennedy, author of Epic Fantasy Romance. Also writing is Jennifer K Lambert. I'm here with my first cup of coffee. Which is delicious. Welcome to the new podcasting schedule. We are going to be posting on Monday mornings. We are going to be changing up the format just a little bit. As Sydney the tyrant, demands, we already have our first question. Those of you who actually look at the podcast Shownotes will see that there is a link to “The Morning Refill” link. So if you have a question or something that you would like me to talk about, go to the show notes and see the morning refill link. And you could send a question. And we already had a question, which is when will Magic Reborn be on audiobook? Soon? Very soon. Probably it depends on your definition of soon. Probably a couple of weeks. My wonderful narrator, Deborah Balm, is recording it. Probably even as we speak right now. She sent me, the first four chapters for approval. And of course, it sounds fantabulous. So when she finishes, then she puts it through production, and then she sends it to me, and I upload it to the retail sites. They usually take their sweet time approving it. Yeah. So I'm going to say loosely, a couple of weeks, one day in some far off ideal future. I will release the audiobook on the same time as the print and e-book versions, but this is not that day. So the exciting news is Love Lies on Ley Lines has released. Woo hoo! Very exciting. I'm so happy to have this book out in the world, and I'm loving the things that people are saying about it. I'm getting words like refreshing and, you know, people love how fun it is. It's a fun book. It's one of the more fun books I've done in quite some time. I am in the midst of writing the second book, Blades Books and the Bandit, and it's really fun to revisit this world and these characters. I’m a little more than 5,000 words in. Just started this week. Really. So am I really in the midst? I don't know, but it's fun to be drafting something new. And one thing I wanted to talk about is I created a phrase especially for this book, especially for my character, Cha. This book is a it's a gender swapped. Smokey and the bandit and my character Cha, “Arancha Evermore” Who is the Burt Reynolds character. She is the bandit and she has a man in every town. And I really wanted to give her that insouciance. And it's difficult when you gender swap things, right, because there are readers who are going to push back on that because they don't always like when a female character behaves in a non ladylike way. And I did see one review where somebody said they'd phrased it delicately and, and it was kindly done. And of course, everybody gets to have their opinion and I don't mind that at all. But they did say that there was a phrase that was used in the book that made them uncomfortable. And I did have, one of my other friends also was uncomfortable with it, and it just makes me want to lean into it more. I'm sorry, folks, I'm feeling ornery. The phrase is pussy sparkle, pussy sparkle. And I did this very, very deliberately because I wanted Cha to own her sexuality. And this is a phrase that I, I made up. I'm just going to put it out there and be bold and own my own genius. Shall we say genius? I made up the phrase pussy sparkle, and I'm going to go back in time a little bit to when I was in college and I did peer counseling training, and it was pretty intensive training. It was like 80 hours. We did ten eight hour days on Saturdays and one of those days when we covered sexuality, the ice breakers that we used to start today was we had like big whiteboards, and we wrote down all of the slang terms we could think of for intercourse for male genitalia, female genitalia and masturbation. I think it was those four categories. First of all, almost all of the masturbation slang terms are male oriented. There are not that many for females. A lot of the terms for intercourse are also male oriented, and the terms for female genitalia are largely largely male gaze. So these are slang terms that men use to refer to female genitalia, and they have plenty of words that they use to refer to their own. Women have very little language to talk about. Our own sexuality. And I was talking with a friend of mine, and she was looking for a man. We were talking about how you how you decide if you're attracted to someone. Right? And I think we're both sapeo sexual, as we tend to, you know, like a person for their intelligence and wit. First. But, you know, you need that chemistry. You know, she was kind of looking for a fling. We were talking about that feeling of when, you see. And this is my female gaze. Right? When you see a hot guy and you feel that special zing. Right? And I think of Wayne's World, right where they would you swing, you know, when they saw an attractive woman shwing, which is, of course, very male genitalia oriented, right? Well, what's our word for women? We do. We have one. Do you have one? Is there one that I don't know about? I'm going to say no, but there is now, and I'm going to make pussy sparkle happen, because that's that nice little tingly feeling you get in your nethers, when you feel interested. And, I'm sure it works female to female too, but I am. I am going to make fetch happen and I'm so determined on this, in fact, that I'm getting ribbons, badge ribbons that I'm going to have at Love Lit on. It's Valentine's weekend, 13th to the 15th in San Diego. I'm going to have pussy sparkle ribbons, and if there are ones leftover, you can, I just send a question to the podcast and ask if you can have one. And I will send you a Pussy sparkle ribbon because we are going to make this happen. So I also am excited about revisiting this world because I really love the friendship between Cha and Goldilocks. Di the nymph. She's a sorceress. She drives the big rig and she's the one who controls the ley lines. They travel down these ley lines and they are a smuggling team, and they have been best friends since they were roommates at Magic Academy. And it has been so fun to write this female friendship because, again, we don't always have really great models of very strong female friendships in pop culture. And it's it's really great to to write that. I was struck this week and I did put, a thread up about it. The friendship between Taylor Swift and Blake Lively, they revealed a set of text messages between Taylor Swift and Blake Lively. I saw a number of people commenting that they were very uncomfortable, that these clearly very private texts between them had been made public, and I agree, I feel bad, but I'm also fascinated, beyond by fascination with Taylor Swift, because I think she's amazing in many ways. This is a partly swiftie podcast, after all. But it's really interesting because they have this very grown up conversation about why there's distance in their friendship, and Blake starts talking about what's going on with Baldoni and Taylor ends up calling him a little bitch and refers to one of her own songs. She said she thinks he's gotten out this tiny violin, which is hysterical. But what I love about it is that they are both like, am I the jerk here? Is this me? You sound funny. How can I be a better friend? And I love that. I love that because. And I've talked about this, over the years on this podcast about how easy it is to let female friendships go. And I think it's probably true for male friendships. The thing is, is when we have conflict in our romantic relationships or in our families, or with the people that we live with or the people we work with every day, we are pretty much forced to resolve that conflict in one way or another. But with our friends, especially a friend, that we don't necessarily see unless we make the effort to see them, it's easy to just let conflict lie and not put in the effort to fix it, just to let the distance grow. And I know that every single person listening to this podcast has had that happen, and some friendships are meant to naturally dissolve away, but it's something that that does bother me, which is why I talk about it all the time. It's like, well, why do these friendships end? And because we don't treat them the same as our so romantic relationship. We don't have these long conversations about, you know, well, what went wrong and why don't you love me anymore? Instead, they just remain unresolved. They basically turn into ghosts, right? So I love that Taylor and Blake were very actively talking to each other about, you know, these things going on in their lives. They're both obviously very busy women that Taylor was in the middle of the eras tour while this was going on, and Blake was dealing with this horrible situation, but they talked it through. I love getting to write a friendship where these two are incredibly close, and they, did have a big schism where they kind of just let things lie for a while because it was easier to stay apart and they end up resolving it because they need to work together again. I think that's one reason that we love wicked. The Elphaba and Glinda end up making this very deep, very strong friendship right? And kind of against all odds. It's kind of an enemies to besties story they see in each other to complement, which is what we look for in romantic relationships, too. When I write, romantic relationships, I am always looking for the things that they really like about themselves, but that maybe no one else in the world likes, but this person does. And then also they are strong, whereas the other is weak. And so that we fit together and we create this more solid whole together. And I think good friendships can do that as well. If you look at the dedication to love, lies and ley lines, I dedicated it to my friend Kelly Robson, who lives in Toronto, and I said that she is the Di to my char. I don't know if I'm necessarily that much like char, but, and I don't know if she's that much like Di. That's kind of how writing works, right? You know, whatever blender setting we're using, both Di and Kelly are lesbians, and they are both married and have very strong marriages to another woman. And I really wanted to capture that dynamic, because Kelly has told me, and we've been friends for coming up on ten years now, and we met through Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association. She's a huge and powerful force in my life. And I've talked about this too, that, you know, especially as we grow older as women and outlive our spouses and so forth, that our friendships are these the people who sustain us. And it's usually our friendships with other women. Kelly had once told me that I'm the first platonic female friend that she's had, and and I love that for us. And I tried to capture some of that, that quality in the relationship between di and Char. So I think that another aspect of growing older is that you get a lot more deliberate about forming your friendships, too. When you are younger, you know you well, you're friends with like your next door neighbors, right? I think in college is when I first learned to deliberately create friendships from my friend Karen Kuntz Wisner. And we are still friends, but we don't talk very often. She was my sorority sister and a year ahead of me, and Karen taught me how to. If I saw someone that I thought was interesting, how to deliberately cultivate that friendship instead of allowing proximity or common activities, determine who you're friends with. One thing about the internet that is a positive of the internet is that it has allowed us to find people deliberately find people who share our same interests and ideas. And I have multiple besties who are hugely important to my life, and I can vouch that I think every single one of them I met through the internet first, I talked with Jennifer E-step regularly and she is indeed one of my besties. Kelly I absolutely met first in the Sephora chat room. Meegan Mowry I met on Twitter and we became friends. Dorinda Jones Yeah, I'm sure I talked to her on the internet first, although then we were in our local, New Mexico chapter, Land of Enchantment romance authors together. Same with Minerva Spencer. She and I talked on internet first and then met in real life because she also lives in New Mexico. Grace Draven. Yeah, absolutely. We talked on Twitter first because our readers were cross recommending us before we ever met in person. Those are the people who I really talk to every day, who are not related to me and who sort of formed my core network of of support of people who are, you know, really there for me. And I've needed people to be there for me these last few months. If a friendship is important, if a friendship is good, then it's worth fighting for. It's worth working through the conflict. In the writing world, we are friends with other authors, obviously. And some of that is circumstantial, but also some of that is deliberately finding support. We have, you know, critique partners and so forth. Professional jealousy is a real thing. And I don't know if that's exactly what happened, but there are a number of friends that I've had that used to be incredibly close that, you know, just, well, frankly, ended up ghosting me now, just disappeared from my life. And I don't know if I did something wrong because I never did go back and ask. I think some friendships are worth fighting for. Another one's, you know, that it's run its course and we just have to figure out which it is this time. Right? So, I think that covers it for this week. Again, if you have a question or want me to discuss anything, go ahead and check out that morning refill link and I will talk to you all next week. You all take care. Bye bye.