BookCon's Connection to ICE

Welcoming February with a moral quarry; to BookCon or to not? Obviously, the answer is to not, but the bigger concept is that can you always choose to not when it comes to the big corporations. 

Ask me a question! The Morning Refill is your place to send me your thoughts. I've gotten requests recently for Pussy Sparkle ribbons, so I will definitely let you know of those details once they're ready. 

Transcript

0:08

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. Welcome to February 2026. And if you're here in the U.S., it's, Yeah. Already feeling like it's been a year, right? We're a year into this regime, a little over a year, and it's been a lot. I want to talk about money. Which is not something that we always talk about, especially as creatives. Many of us are creatives because we don't want to deal with money, and yet we have to, because money makes the world go round, right? One of the things I talk about in my world Building masterclass, building a world that makes things difficult for your characters, and one of the things you have to look at is where does the power in this world come from? Power defines our lives. Who has power? Who does not? In fantasy worlds, a lot of times, especially like the times I write, and is possibly a hallmark of fantasy, is that there's often some kind of magic, and the power comes from who has magic and who does not. Right? And if you have literally magical power, then that gives you power over other people. When I'm talking about this in terms of worldbuilding, I encourage people to look at the correlation between how power functions in their world and to our world, because we are all ultimately writing about. Even if we are writing about shapeshifters and alternate fantasy worlds, we are still writing about human experience in our worlds. It's, that's what we know. And so we are always writing kind of a metaphor for our lives, right? We don't have magic in our world. You can argue with me. The witches out there will say things to me. But I'm going to say that there's. We don't have people running around being actual superheroes. We don't have people able to cast enchantments or make things work through literal magic. Right? But we do have people wielding power in our world. And where does that power come from? It's it's money. Money is what enables people to have power. And when we talk about do you want to monetize your creativity, making money pays the mortgage, buys your groceries, all of those kinds of things. But it gives you power to control your life. If you can pay for something yourself, then you have power. You have autonomy. You have the ability to control what happens to you. A good example of this is women. Before we were allowed to have credit cards or buy houses by ourselves. It put us under the power of the men who could do those things. You know, a lot of the reason that many younger women are not getting married today is because they don't have to, and the trade off isn't worth it if you don't need someone else in order to live your life in order to buy your groceries or have a roof over your head, then you can choose who you want to be with. Money and power have been become so incredibly weaponized right now. And it's not just the US. This is a global thing where we have, very few people with massive amounts of wealth basically trying to secure all the power for themselves. We are seeing this play out, and it's on one level, fascinating, but also awful and horrifying. And part of why I'm talking about this today is I had already made some notes to talk about author finances, a little bit creative finances, because I wanted to offer to many of you who are out there, you know, like trying to make money from your creative work. It is the dream. And I'm not going to tell you that it's not great. You know, for a long time I worked two careers and it's making a living off my writing is. It's great. I am immensely grateful I am able to do this. It's not always a secure feeling. There's a lot of risk to it. I never know how much money I'm going to have coming in each month. I have to self-insure. I have to really pay attention to taxes and self-employment tax. All the meetings I go to, our meetings about things I actually care about. My favorite subject. Me and my work. I don't have to deal with a lot of bureaucracy. I don't have to deal with personnel issues. Hiring. I don't have to. I don't have to keep track of my billable hours. You know all of these things. And if you're having to do those things, you really do have my sympathy. I did it for a very long time. 18 years in corporate America, and. Yeah, it it sucketh. But the thing is, if you're a creative and you're wanting to make a living from your creative work, there are realities to that, right? And I recently saw somebody posting about having paid off their student loans with their writing and having paid off their spouses student loans with their writings. And they were justifiably proud of this. I'm not, I'm not throwing any shade there. But one of the things that bothers me when I see people say stuff like that, you know, like, well, you too can make money from your writing and, you know, look at me. I paid off my student loans. Is that there is a lot of information that gets left out. It's not it's not a case study. It's not a blueprint for you. It is not something that you should think about too seriously. If you have not yet paid off your student loans and your spouse's student loans with your writing, you don't know how much those student loans were. You know, like maybe a number popped into your head. I remember it popped into my head. My spouse had student loans, and because he has Parkinson's disease and is on disability, he got forgiven those loans, thank goodness. But the number I thought of was that number. The fact that this person is writing full time while their spouse works tells you a great deal right there, right? Because there is a huge difference between paying for your life and also paying off your student loans, right? How much money do you have left over after you pay for everything else that you have to pay for, like medical bills and for children, and for mortgage or rent and ever climbing grocery bills and so forth. You might not have that much money left over, even if you are not having avocado toast every Sunday for brunch. As soon as you look at someone who says that they are able to do x, y, z with some money from their writing, look at what other income do they have in their lives. I know people who are retired from careers, and they have a great retirement stipend, and they have health insurance from their previous job, which is great for them. I mean, that's an ideal situation to be in, right? But that doesn't mean that it's something everyone can do. Not everybody has a salaried, benefited spouse. Not everybody has a nice retirement package. So when you look at someone who says, I paid off all of our debt and student loans with my writing, maybe you can't. And it's not because your writing isn't amazing, and it's not because you're not doing everything you can to run your business. It's because your situation is different, and we all know social media is the place where nuance goes to die, right? Nobody cares about nuance. It's all about the hot take. It's kind of like the high concept version of solving our life's problems. Can you say it in ten words or less? So this sort of segways into the whole thing about book con, the boycott and so forth. So in case you have not been paying attention, read pop. Who is organizing Book Con and organizes a few other cons like that? New York Comic Con is another book con is funded by the same people that are providing the information that enables Ice to do the horrible things that they're doing. LexisNexis. They have all of our data. They know everybody's data. That's how they are going to specific houses, using battering rams to knock down the doors and abduct legal American citizens. Finding this out. It's like, well, we can't possibly support the rise of fascism. Their attempts to intimidate and destroy the Constitution, intimidate citizens, intimidate everyone, persecute their enemies, create a reign of terror. Then you, like me, like all of us, are trying to find effective ways to fight against it. And then the question becomes, do we boycott put on? Some people are. I was never planning to go anyway, so that's an easy choice for me. There are people who have already paid their money and will get it back if they don't go. There are people who were really excited about going who could use this for their careers. We feel bad about being out there banging the drum, saying, buy my book, you know, here's my new book. Please, please buy it and read it so I can pay my mortgage. There are people saying, well, you know, what's the point of boycotting? Would LexisNexis even care? Would they even notice? You know, and really, it's the immediate organizers who would read pop. They're the ones who would be impacted. We have to make choices. Ever since target rolled back its Dei initiatives when Trump came into power, immediately they did that, gratefully licking the boot. And I stopped shopping at at target, and I didn't until last November when my mom fell and broke her hip. And I was I had to buy some things and I was melting down. I was incredibly stressed. I couldn't think of anywhere else I could get them. And target was right there. And finally I just broke down and I went out and bought them at target. But I felt bad about it, and I know nobody cares whether I felt bad about doing that. And all of this reminds me of the starfish story, which is a little schmaltzy, but it does contain an important truth. And just in case you don't know this story, a person's walking down the beach and they see a person but thought actually going up to stranded starfish and throwing them back into the water. And the beach is littered with all of these starfish that got stranded by the tide, and they will die. The person watches for a little while as this other person, one by one, throws these starfish back. It's a drop in the bucket, right? It's barely a dent. They say, oh, what is the point of this? You cannot save all of these starfish. It doesn't matter that what you're doing and the person who's doing this says. But it matters to me. And it matters to this starfish. And I think that's what it comes down to for us. Does anyone care if I spend my $5, on a latte at Starbucks versus my local coffee shop? Well, Starbucks does not care, but my local coffee shop does. The small business does. It matters to that starfish. And it matters to me because I am thinking through what I'm doing, holding our collective leash. We know where our money is going, that we know how money is power, and who are we handing power to? What's very important is that we are not complacent, that we don't just go along with things because it's convenient, or because we shrug and say, oh, well, it doesn't matter because all these starfish are going to die anyway, and I can't do anything about it. Yeah, some days, some days you just need to buy paper towels and so that you can clean up the, the vomit or something like that. You know, it's you do what you have to do as much as possible. The more that we can think through these things, the closer we come to holding these entities, these people who hold our collective leash accountable instead of simply obediently trotting along. That's probably a lot for the day. That's all I'll say for today. I hope you all are getting by. It's it's crazy times. I think that we are going. We're in. We're in the worst of it. People are saying it might still get worse. It might? But I do think that it's going to get better. Somebody said to me this morning that time is a circle. And. Yeah, time is a circle. We will come out of this. You all take care. Bye bye.