First Cup of Coffee - July 12, 2024

On having shining boundaries to protect your sacred, creative spaces, even if it makes people angry, which it will. Also, gardening as an extended analogy for writing, how we keep learning and recreating.

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Transcript

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00:01.92
jeffekennedy
Good morning, everyone. This is Jeffe Kennedy, author of Epic Fantasy Romance. I'm here with my first cup of coffee.

00:12.87
jeffekennedy
It's delightful. If you're on video, you will see that it's a ah latte from the coffee shop. Special Friday a treat because it is, ah say it with me, people, Friday.

00:28.58
jeffekennedy
ah July 12th. So what a happy day. We love Fridays. And David went and got me a latte and he got me a croissant. And so it is a good day. Looking forward to the weekend. Very exciting. I get to have a COVID shot tomorrow. um How much is this one knocking people for a loop? It's the one that started to be available last fall. My physician was like, yeah, you need to catch up on that. I feel like we're not getting the communications like we were. um So I'm never sure if like we're supposed to go get it yet or if we're eligible yet or if you just go as soon as it's out. She said this one replaces the previous ones. So who knows what that means.

01:20.80
jeffekennedy
So we'll find out. I planned the shots for Saturday afternoon so I could spend Sunday chilling if necessary.

01:34.57
jeffekennedy
ah So let's see. A few things to talk about today, one of which I'm going to talk about gardening. An analogy that we use a lot in writing, especially for those of us who are not pre-plotters, who do not outline the book ahead of time, ah I won't go into. I will attempt not to go into my entire rant about pre-plotting. If you're a longtime listener, you know I don't like the terms plotter versus pantser, which I do think is worth revisiting.

02:15.22
jeffekennedy
um If you're writing anything, if you're writing any kind of story, you are plotting the differences whether or not you plot before you write it or as you write it like I do. So plotter is a misnomer and also pantser because that comes from flying by the seat of your pants and that's not how it feels to me. um And not to most people I know. So we do talk about architect versus gardener, which I know George RR Martin uses that analogy. I don't know if he came up with it.

02:55.81
jeffekennedy
But I find that a much more useful approach. And of course, all of these things are spectrum, right? None of these things are, you're either this thing or that thing. You're usually using some kind of combination and it might change from book to book. um An architect is someone who plans everything ahead of time. They have maybe extensive outlines with maybe pieces of dialogue and detailed scenes and they figure out the beats and they've got it all planned to the to the nth degree uh you know and maybe you know like if you move down the spectrum towards gardener it's not that planned but it's um yeah it it has to do with that planning the structure ahead of time and how in detail you go before you actually start writing whereas a gardener

03:51.65
jeffekennedy
ah works more with the idea of planting the seeds and seeing what grows and cultivating what grows. And you you weed as you go along and you encourage the plants that you that you like that are appealing to. And I find that a very useful analogy because that is how it feels to me. There is an aspect to pants or to flying by the seat of your pants that implies a haphazardness that you just like careening through the air with no clue of what you're doing, which is not what we are doing at all. ah In gardening, it's very intentional.

04:38.93
jeffekennedy
It's also a more, dare I say, organic approach. It is a way of working with the nature um of things, of the universe. um That's why I prefer intuitive writer, right? It's it's an intuitive way of working. Gardening is often a very intuitive process. You can learn the rules, which would be analogous to learning the craft, learning the business aspects. um You know, you learn your shade plants versus your sun plants, and you know which ones need deadheading and which ones don't. You know,

05:24.95
jeffekennedy
you know, learn about soil amendments. I was talking about soil amendments on Monday ah that at this point my gardening career, and this is another reason that this is a useful analogy for me, is that I am a gardener and I don't think I've necessarily identified as a gardener, but I have spent a lot of my life planting and nurturing gardens in every house that I've lived in. And my house was back in the small town that we lived in once on the town's summer garden tour. So

06:02.77
jeffekennedy
Yeah, it's um it is part of who I am. I don't always think of it that way. oh And on Monday I was talking about that I regard myself as being a desultory gardener because, well, I've learned some things. I'm like not a master gardener and I don't think do things as assiduously. as I might. It's more of a hobby. But lately, I've been getting more serious about it. And I think that this is one of the things that I want to talk about today is extending this analogy. ah you know like you don't just I think this is what's just occurred to me in the last couple of weeks is that um when I started out gardening,

06:48.69
jeffekennedy
i you know, was in my early twenties. I learned my grandmother was a gardener. My mom always liked to say that the green thumb skipped a generation, that she's no good at it, but that ah I got my grandmother's gardening genes. And certainly I spent time helping my grandmother in her garden. Good times. She had a lovely one. um

07:16.53
jeffekennedy
So I just sort of flew into memories of my grandmother's garden, the tiger lilies, beautiful.

07:24.68
jeffekennedy
um But I didn't learn tons from my grandmother. So when I was in my early 20s and David and I bought our first house, I guess that was mid 20s, I started to learn how to garden. And we had this Union Pacific house with these two little kind of a cottage thing and like with these two squares of lawn in front. And I dug up the lawn and planted a cottage garden. And it was pretty. It was really pretty. And I learned a lot then about what I was doing and I

08:02.66
jeffekennedy
you know, learned enough to make a nice garden table, have my house on the garden tour, and carried those lessons through. You know, basically knew what I was doing. I can plant a garden. I can keep it growing and blooming. um But now I'm finding that I want to level up. I want to make my garden better. I want to figure out a way to make things overwinter better. um you know And some of it is like, ah you didn't know ah it will be 15 years that we've been in Santa Fe in another month. And birds flying around out there,

08:46.43
jeffekennedy
um which is amazing to me. And I feel like I've never really figured out Santa Fe gardening.

08:57.44
jeffekennedy
I've been busy. It feels like I've been busy and now for whatever reason This is something I want to do and I think that we do this in our writing careers also that if you are not Simply trying to recreate the same thing over and over which some authors do and some are very good at that and Most of us want to keep learning and growing. We want to level up. We want to do something more, something different, something meaningful.

09:30.07
jeffekennedy
So we, um yeah, decide to start learning new skills. Now what does that mean if we take the analogy back to writing? ah You know, you you read widely. You read authors you don't normally read. uh somebody not long ago an aspiring writer was asking me about um I can't remember how they phrased it now but saying that was I must read

10:06.32
jeffekennedy
that all my own books must feel to me better than anything that I read. And I was taken aback by that, you know, that they're like, well, you you know, you must love your own work so much that you think what you write is better than anything you can read out there. And I said, God, what a terrible world that would be, you know, if I couldn't. I love it when I find books where I think, damn, I wish I'd written that. um that's uh it's a bittersweet feeling right because you have the damn I wish I had written that but it also gives me something to aspire to uh going to this this is what lit up my gardening thing is going to george r martin's house and seeing his extensive gardens which are you know nurtured by

11:00.22
jeffekennedy
ah Master gardener. I don't know who he hires. I should ask maybe I could pick their brain But they were so beautiful and it was like I want my gardens to look like this And so that's what we do. We read a book and we think ah, I want my book to read like this Right now I am reading A Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes by Suzanne Collins because Sarah Gailey told me that I should read it. And I need to email Sarah. Sarah, you are absolutely right. This this book is brilliant. I remember reading Hunger Games way back when. I didn't read any of the other books. I know I kind of want to. But it's it's such a good book. um So thank you, Sarah.

11:47.38
jeffekennedy
um I said her and I should have said they. Sarah is a they. Anyway, thank you Sarah for that recommendation.

11:59.14
jeffekennedy
so So yeah, I think this is how we draw inspiration, not just for stories, but to improve, to do better, to make ourselves ah into something I don't, more than we were, right? It's ah it's an ongoing process. you know What is, why are you a creative, right? In anything you do, gardening literally or metaphorically, right? Trying to figure out cooler and better ways to do things.

12:37.92
jeffekennedy
So that that's where I'm at. and Well, and I guess I'll add just a bit more to that, you know like with it being an iterative process, it's trial and error, and which means that sometimes things don't work. Sometimes plants don't over winter. Sometimes we cut scenes. Sometimes we hu realize that we are doing the same thing and we need to do better. or be more inventive, or push ourselves. Pushing ourselves is painful, but sometimes it needs to be done.

13:15.96
jeffekennedy
I was thinking, too, on a wildly different subject, probably. We'll see. You know, I talk a lot about um when you want to write, making the time to write, because you're never going to find the time to write. You know, if you wait to find the time, it ain't going to happen. you you need to make it. And when you make it, you have to create boundaries around it because the people in your life no matter how much they love you. Sometimes the ones that love you the most will challenge those boundaries because it's, I don't know, it's a human nature thing. It's also a universe thing. The universe is going to, I don't understand it, but the universe will immediately mess with you when you like start a new resolve, you know, Oh, I'm going to do this thing. Um,

14:11.61
jeffekennedy
and the universe will like throw you a curveball and be like, do you want it bad enough to deal with this? I don't know why it happens, but it does. um

14:25.33
jeffekennedy
But thing about people, people, people, I recently found out that someone with a former friend ah who treated me very badly, um You know, i but I won't go into details. Of course, we all have these things, right? Where this friend treated me badly and I ah drew a line. I am good at boundaries. I have another friend who told me that I left the best boundaries of anyone she's ever seen. And I do think I've developed that in part from writing over the years.

15:03.66
jeffekennedy
ah And I love that quote about that ah and I'm gonna paraphrase I put it on social media at some point But that your boundaries don't have to be like a barbed wire fence, you know They don't have to be this forbidding thing, but they they can instead be a shining light that says These things are important to me ah and and I expect people in my life to respect that respect where I am what I am keeping sacred for myself. I think that's really hugely important. oh And there are people who will not respect that. So yeah, I found out that this friend who had treated me badly and I had drawn a line and said, I will not allow you to treat me badly any anymore. And um a mutual friend saw them not long ago and

15:59.32
jeffekennedy
this person said that they were very angry about what happened. And that really annoyed me because I thought, you don't get to be angry. You don't get to be angry about this because I was the one that you treated badly. I was the one that you tried to, well, I can't go into details, but that you did not treat well. I was the wounded party You don't get to be angry about this. And of course, I don't get to control how other people feel. But when you draw lines, when you create these boundaries and insist on this, these things being held sacred, other people will become angry with you.

16:46.63
jeffekennedy
it's it's a weird phenomenon um and we we don't like it right when people become angry with us and They they use that certain kinds of personalities will use that to try to control you They will threaten you with with anger, right? They'll be like, oh, I'm getting really pissed off now um You know, how dare you how dare you do this? and It's like no, no. No, all I'm doing is I'm drawing my boundaries. I'm saying you If you want to be a part of my life, then you do not get to trespass on these things. You do not get to put your feet on this sacred soil. And if people become angry with you about that, then that's on them, right? that You can't control how they feel, right? There we are. We can't control that. ah But you can also not let it bother you.

17:43.57
jeffekennedy
I often say that the best revenge is living well. If you create your boundaries, if you respect those sacred things in yourself and in your life, if you make that time to be creative and nurture your garden. We can go back to that analogy. I thought I might connect it in some way. ah You know, that time you spend in your garden is for you, right? And it doesn't matter how anyone else feels about it. yeah It's part of us being human beings, right? Being creative and

18:25.42
jeffekennedy
when people ask about the business, right? You know, like, you know, how do you deal with reviews and how you deal with, you know, like book sales or lack thereof and so forth. That's one way, as you come back to this idea of of the garden, that you are at heart, at the core of things, cultivating this for yourself. You are writing stories for yourself. um If you only cared about making money, there are all kinds of jobs out there that you can go get where you'll get paid and probably better than you get paid as a writer. But if you want to create,

19:09.57
jeffekennedy
That's because you have something in you that yearns to do that. And it's here I am. I'm going to wave my permission wand. Here I am waving the permission wand. ah It's a star-shaped wand. It's silver. So when I keep next to my desk for ah when I make decisions on things, I wave the permission wand. um you You have my permission to draw those boundaries and insist that people respect them. And if they are angry, they are angry and and you can't control that. And don't let it stop you. So there's your pep talk for the weekend. I hope you have a wonderful weekend and I will talk to you all on Monday. You all take care. Bye-bye.