First Cup of Coffee - August 9, 2024

Recent revelations on ghostwriting, using metrics for good, rain gauges, gardening, JD Vance's memoir, the real meaning of "bemused" and whether everyone has one great novel or flower arrangement in them.

Ann Patchett's book The Getaway Car: A Practical Memoir About Writing and Life is here https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12471186-the-getaway-car

The preorder links for RELUCTANT WIZARD, out August 27, are here https://www.jeffekennedy.com/reluctant-wizard

The posture-correcting sports bra I love almost more than life itself is here https://forme.therave.co/37FY6Z5MTJAUKQGA

You can buy tickets for Wild & Windy in Phoenix (February 2025) here https://www.wildandwindybookevent.com/phoenix-authors

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Transcript

00:02.06
jeffekennedy
Good morning, everyone. This is Jeffe Kennedy, author of Epic Fantasy Romance. I'm here with my first cup of coffee.

00:13.12
jeffekennedy
It's wonderful. Today is, say it with me, people, it is Friday, woohoo, August 9th. A lot of you are going back to school.

00:27.26
jeffekennedy
or going back to school-related activities. It's amazing to me how many people are closely tied to the academic calendar. And I feel like I've been having this conversation with a number of people because, for example, the kids in our neighborhood started school today. How do I know this? Because they put out a little bulletin. I i myself am not tied to the academic calendar.

00:56.19
jeffekennedy
in any way, shape, or form, other than all y'all. But they you know put out a dispatch saying, hey, kids are starting school again, August 9th. Watch out for the kids. um Because if they didn't, we would just gleefully run them over. I feel like I should caveat that that is sarcasm, I'm kidding. oh Anyway.

01:20.53
jeffekennedy
So I happen to know. ah and But I also happen to know because it feels like everybody is saying, oh no, summer's over. And I believe I have had this rant before. In fact, I know I have ah because my stepsister actually gave me a gift one year that I was complaining about people preemptively ending summer, saying, oh no, summer's over. um Just because the kids are back in school, just because teachers are back to work, just because all of you people who are academia adjunct in one way or another, um and you have resumed your

02:06.61
jeffekennedy
calendar year does not mean that summer is over. People, give us a break. it It's August. ah Summer doesn't technically end as if these things matter until mid-September, late September, right? Out of equinox. ah And depending on where you live, you might have months of summery weather left. We have months left. It doesn't get cold in Santa Fe until Thanksgiving.

02:37.14
jeffekennedy
And I feel like I should knock on wood because otherwise, who knows? But um yeah, it's still absolute summer. I'm planting things, things are blooming. Don't tell me summer is over. oh And I know that one year for my birthday, which is coming up very soon, couple of weeks, my so two weeks from yesterday. Yeah.

03:07.96
jeffekennedy
My stepsister Hope, who is thoughtful and delightful, sent me a really great iced tea pitcher and iced tea maker from the now defunct Tivana. I was very sad that Tivana went away because I liked to them. I really liked their strainer, their iced tea strainer, alas.

03:27.20
jeffekennedy
ah I still have the pitcher, but I need to find a strainer. The strainer broke. doesn't matter. ah But she sent me that for my birthday saying that she had paid attention to some rant I'd put on social media about how I was, it was still summer and I still wanted summer.

03:53.58
jeffekennedy
So anyway, ah that takes care of the cats in the, well only the New Mexico weather part of our podcast. I should mention that we got tons of rain last night. Monsoon rains, lightning, rain all night. Fabulous. It was amazing. ah As part of my ongoing garden efforts, those of you who listen frequently, I'm sorry,

04:20.29
jeffekennedy
But you know, you know what you're here for. I have, as part of my ongoing making my garden better efforts, I am getting more assiduous about watering because I feel like I've never loathed these 15 years. I'm 10 days short of the ah 15 years ago we moved to Santa Fe. I feel like I've never quite gotten the rhythm of watering here. And it was a chance remark by one of my friends who is an intrepid gardener and that has lived in New Mexico all her life ah when I said something about my rain gauge that I would have to see like how much rain we got. And I forgot to look to see how much rain we got. I should go look. ah Squirrel. I'm going to go look.

05:09.49
jeffekennedy
Well, we got over an inch and an eighth of rain, a lot. So my friend mentioned, we were talking about getting rain. She's down in Albuquerque and I and i said, I had a rain game and blah, blah, blah. And she said, well, of course you do because you can't be a gardener without one. And it was this aha moment for me because I thought, oh,

05:35.30
jeffekennedy
Wait, I'm supposed to do something with that information? There's a reason exists for this metric. However, it was not completely useful because like having an inch and an eighth of rain, I know it's a lot of rain. It's a lot of rain for us. So it's like, okay, that's great, but what do I do with this information? How does this translate into action? And I do feel like I'm gonna go somewhere with this ah for once.

06:03.48
jeffekennedy
because I talk about metrics and writing a lot, right? So let's put a pin in that and come back to it. So the thing about trying to figure out how do I apply a metric, right? um It doesn't help me to know that there's an inch and an eighth of rain, except that my garden doesn't need to be watered today, right? Unfortunately, I watered it yesterday morning because My point, if I will eventually get to it, is that I've been trying to water more because I think I have been under watering and the garden is, son of a gun, responding. So what I did was I bought some soil meters, moisture meters, and I've been using those to see ah how wet or dry ah the garden is, the secret garden in the back.

06:52.91
jeffekennedy
um and a great revelation to me, which probably should not be. yeah I'm full of great revelations lately, is that different parts of the garden dry out sooner than others. It makes me think of that um George Carlin joke, you know, like, have you ever noticed that the Cheerios on the sides of the bowl dry out first? It's because they're closer to the sun. I love ah

07:24.66
jeffekennedy
jokes that point out poor conclusions like that. ah But yeah, some parts of the secret garden, and I will put a post on this show. um and I think you've seen pictures of my garden anyway. Some parts dry out a lot faster than other parts.

07:45.37
jeffekennedy
Go figure. Okay, so this should not be the revelation it is, but it is. So like, because ive I always water the whole garden. I mean, I can't do it at once, but when I water, I water everything. I don't have to. Water is precious here. I should caveat that. For those of you who live in water plentiful places places, water is our most expensive utility. So we are always looking to conserve water.

08:12.44
jeffekennedy
I mean, that's like on an annual average, right? More than air conditioning, more than heat. It's water. It's the desert.

08:23.77
jeffekennedy
so um

08:28.73
jeffekennedy
I think that you know it's it's working. I'm excited about this progress in the garden. It's looking nice. ah

08:38.94
jeffekennedy
But you know I think this is one question that we do with writing is we think about, okay, we know certain things about our process, right? And I'm always talking about how we have to rediscover that it's an iterative process. I'm forever rediscovering things about my own process. um Progress on reluctant wizard by the by. I finished revising it and I am up to 75,000 words, which means that I've got about 9,000 words left.

09:13.98
jeffekennedy
I think I know how it's going to end, and I should be done early next week, so I think I'm pretty much on track for that. So that's great. um and But one reason that I know I have 9,000 words left, for those of you who may be totally new to the podcast, those of you who have been listening for a long time, you know that I use all kinds of predictors. um I don't outline ahead of time.

09:37.86
jeffekennedy
But I do know when I hit certain story beats that I can then calculate how much of the story I have left. And this story is shorter than most, which is okay because for me and for like most every writer I know, ah the books get longer as you go. And so this is the first book in a trilogy. It's the same world, but it's kicking off a new storyline or it's kicking off a storyline from a different direction might be better to say. And so it really does read like first book in a series. And you know that each book is gonna get longer. So it's fine with me for this book to be closer to 85,000 words. It's gonna come out, I'm predicting about 84,000 words. And I know this because um you know when I hit my act one climax where all stakes are set,

10:36.48
jeffekennedy
I then know that that's a quarter of the book and all along this book has just been you know even though it's like really is it gonna be this much shorter and yeah it is I'm coming in within a thousand fifteen hundred words of the predicted climaxes and like x3 climax I just wrote it I posted the social media that the x3 climax it's it's funny because they're never what I think they're gonna be I mean Even with me not outlining ahead of time, not being a pre-plotter, I still don't know that.

11:15.24
jeffekennedy
what it's like what the what the climaxes will be and it turned out to be like this feat of library magic which I'm amused at myself because I feel like it should be something much more exciting than that but then everybody who saw that post and responded is like hells yeah library magic so okay that's this is what you're getting with this book was reluctant wizard um so you know i These are ways that I use metrics that are really helpful to me, hi and I encourage people to keep track of these things to know how many words you can write a day. How many words can you write a day without having rebound?

12:02.67
jeffekennedy
How do you apply those metrics? I think keeping track of your actual progress of what you really do is hugely important, but then knowing what are you going to do with that information later, that's another really big piece.

12:22.09
jeffekennedy
And I probably had a segue about this when I initially thought about it, but now I just have the notes. So ah one thing I've been thinking about, and I think that many of us are doing, is watching the with complete bemusement. We're having an argument about what bemusement means, and aside.

12:44.84
jeffekennedy
this gal from the Netherlands was saying that it really bothered her that people use it to mean amused instead of confused. And I said, well, hey, I i had to go look it up because I use it as a combination of confused and and amused at the same time, that there's definitely a quality of being entertained by it, maybe been affectionately entertained,

13:13.93
jeffekennedy
ah but certainly not upset by it, not that kind of confusion. And it turns out bemused means to be made to muse about it, to be made to think about something. So there is that quality of thinking about it and being kind of puzzled. But it turns out it's mainly in the US usage. And we got confirmation from like one of our UK authors. In the US, there is this quality of being amused to it that is not in other English uses, which is interesting.

13:44.15
jeffekennedy
Anyway, we have been amused bemused here in the U.S., not with affection, but certainly with plenty of hilarity at ah J.D. Vance's campaigning as Trump's running mate and the bizarre stuff he's doing. And it's funny because I read J.D. Vance's memoir. I may have mentioned on here, the whole Billie Elegy. I read it in, oh, I looked at that before, so I've talked about this, in like 2015, because a friend of mine was going to write a memoir, and so we tandem read a few of the big, best-selling memoirs of that year. And so I read it then before I knew of J.D. Vance as anybody but this guy who wrote a memoir. And there even though I had problems with the book, which I believe I've already covered,

14:33.35
jeffekennedy
ah And in general, I liked it. I mean, i i was I thought it was a good model of, I thought it was a well-written memoir. I thought there were problems with the content, mainly that it leaves out the existence of people of color, which at the time I felt like, well, I won't go all into it again, but now I understand reflects a very deliberate worldview, right? People of color don't exist.

15:02.83
jeffekennedy
and Amusingly, when I talked about this like on Facebook, I had several people pushing back on me, and I'm sorry if you're listening, but explaining to me that they like never spoke to a black person until they were in their 30s, that they truly did grow up in all white communities where they never saw a colored person. Oh, we don't say colored. I apologize for that were they that. That is the word that they're using, and I did not mean to do that.

15:29.44
jeffekennedy
i apologize, where they never met a person of color, ah where they'd never seen a black person. And I wanted to tell them, you know, I feel like this is not the flex that you think it is. It's, you know, maybe it's an explanation and maybe, yeah, okay, J.D. Vance never met a black person before he wrote his memoir. i Let's not go there. I know I already went there, but but let's come back out of there. ah Anyway, I realized that I had a residual level of respect for JD Vance because I thought the book was smart and interesting and had some insights. And then ah one of my friends pointed out to me that he undoubtedly had a ghostwriter.

16:17.55
jeffekennedy
which was another aha moment for me, which I should have thought of. This particular friend has been a ghost writer. She's had a pretty decent career as a ghost writer, so of course she knows. And I should have thought about it, big and I don't expect most other people.

16:35.90
jeffekennedy
to, like I'm in the industry, but it's very true that almost every book that you read by a celebrity of some sort is going to be ghost written. And there will be no credit, there's no evidence of it. This is how ghost writing works. and And I know this like from my friend, you know like you have to sign these iron, ironclad contracts that you will never, ever, ever reveal yourself to be a ghost writer or hint in any way because they want it to seem as if J.D. Vance wrote this book when undoubtedly some very smart writer wrote it for him. ah And it's it's worth keeping in mind because it does create the illusion.

17:23.55
jeffekennedy
um that he's like a thoughtful intelligent person which is like this last week of campaign and he has showed himself to be not like rather astonishingly not um You know, but, and there's no shame in using a ghost writer because despite what many people think, it is not easy to be a writer. It is not easy to write a book. It takes time and skill and talent helps, but it takes a lot of effort to refine that ability two to write a book, um to write a thoughtful memoir, which is why we were studying those memoirs, right?

18:07.72
jeffekennedy
Ann Patchett has this great story that she tells, and i I did stop to look it up. It's in the book, The Getaway Car, a Practical Memoir about Writing and Life, which I highly recommend. ah oh well I'll link to it in the show notes. Really excellent book. I love Ann Patchett as a writer. um I love her nonfiction.

18:31.70
jeffekennedy
And so in this story, she talks about being at a party, and I believe, I may get details wrong, I apologize, if I read it a while ago, but I believe it was a party for her husband's people. And so, you know, like she's their being dutiful spouse, and somebody asks her the inevitable question.

18:49.33
jeffekennedy
you know, what do you do? Oh, I'm a writer, you know, and any of you who are writers are out there are already kind of like cringing a little bit inside your skin, right? Cause you know how these conversations go and they're like, Oh, have I heard of you? What have you written? That's kind of thing.

19:03.85
jeffekennedy
And you know so she's trying to forge her way through this, being polite and you know being a good spouse and like not getting irritated. And this woman says to her, well, I believe everyone has one great novel in them.

19:23.08
jeffekennedy
and um and slowly starts to lose her shit over this, which it's a great story because I think we can all empathize with this. And she's like, what does that mean? And the woman says, well, I think everybody has a great novel in them that they could write.

19:39.86
jeffekennedy
And it's like, well, does this apply to other things? does Do you think everyone has one great flower arrangement in them? Does everyone have one great ice sculpture in them? Does everyone have one great symphony in them? And I i can't remember exactly how it resolves, but I have this image in my head of like her husband sliding up and very carefully edging her away from the conversation and the rant.

20:08.02
jeffekennedy
oh But I think of that often whenever, especially when I'm in those kinds of conversations. It's like, does everyone have one great flower arrangement in them?

20:19.66
jeffekennedy
So um that was a Rambly podcast today. I'm finishing this book, I have book brain, but um at least it was longer than Mondays. There were complaints from one person, one person complained and we all know what her name is, Kathy Kennedy. So hopefully today was better. I hope you all have a fantabulous weekend.

20:48.48
jeffekennedy
and I will talk to you on Monday. You all take care, bye bye.