First Cup of Coffee - September 6, 2024

Why so many authors end up "trunking" their first novel, why it's often not only a good idea, but inevitable - and how to know if you should. Also, garbage data, The Fall, and The Riddle Master of Hed (and why I think I bounced off of it as a kid).

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Transcript

00:01.70
jeffekennedy
Good morning, everyone. This is Jeffe Kennedy, author of Epic Fantasy Romance. I'm here with my first cup of coffee.

00:12.17
jeffekennedy
Ah, delicious. Today is, say it with me, a Friday! Woo hoo! September 6th. A nice, cool morning here in Santa Fe.

00:26.53
jeffekennedy
We got a big storm came in yesterday. Cool things down. Got some rain last night. ah Very sorry for those of you struggling with massive heat in Southern California and Florida. I know you are longing for some September autumn weather. I hope you get it soon. Jennifer is of course paradise. What can I tell you?

00:49.63
jeffekennedy
I have a lot of things to talk about today. A lot of you have been sending me the thoughts on things to talk about, which I very much appreciate. ah that's That's great. That's very helpful to know. Sometimes I feel like I've talked about things before and then, ah but then it might've been years ago. So ah um yeah, really appreciate getting that feedback. So today I want to talk a little bit about um your first novel and why you should maybe trunk it.

01:20.29
jeffekennedy
ah which is not something that people ever want to hear. I also want to talk a little bit about The Fall, which some some of you recommended I watch, and also ah Patricia McKillip's Riddle Master of Hed. I want to talk about that a little bit, and I have a couple other things on my list, but let me see if I get to them. Let's talk about trunking a novel.

01:48.58
jeffekennedy
called trunking because you would literally put it in the trunk. Some people call it the drawer novel, put it in a drawer, ah under the bed novel. All of these are obviously terms that come from the days where you would tippy-typy everything onto paper and you would end up with a stack of paper that was your novel that you would then lock into a trunk never to open again. So the thing about first novels, and I'm going to talk about it as like the first novel, though sometimes it's multiple. I know authors, very successful authors, with multiple trunked novels. Why? Why? Well,

02:38.26
jeffekennedy
This is a sensitive topic because our first novels tend to be very near and dear to our hearts. Usually it's an idea we have been thinking about for ages, um maybe our whole lives in some cases. We um

02:59.64
jeffekennedy
They're the first born. It's the thing where we um love that initial idea. We also tend to work on them for a really long time. Odds are, yeah i obviously there are no statistics on this, but odds are that you will have worked on your first novel far, far longer than you ever work on any novel of ever again. um I occasionally hear from writers who worry about that second novel and that's fair. um I could talk about Second Book Syndrome a little bit. ah I'll try to remember too. But the thing about first novel is as you work on it over and over again because you are learning.

03:46.05
jeffekennedy
you are learning. And actually I'll try to talk about second novel right now. um the The pitfall with the second novel is that you work on the first book for so long and you're usually not tracking it. People don't, especially if it's something that you've picked up and set down over years and years and years, which many people do. ah And then you get a book contract, hooray, and then you have to, they'll say, well, can you turn in the book two? Can you turn in the sequel by next year? And you say, sure, a year sounds like all kinds of time. And you don't actually know how long it takes you to write a book beginning to end because this first book was so off again, on again, because you were learning it took longer. And so, yeah, that is the danger with second book syndrome. and

04:42.42
jeffekennedy
does happen to authors that they blow deadlines on that second book because they don't know how long it takes them to write, which is one reason why I always encourage people to track track your progress, track find out how much you actually learn take to write a book. um But see, the thing is is that first book is probably going to be an outlier anyway for all the reasons I've already mentioned.

05:11.51
jeffekennedy
um A little tangential thing, which I did not put on my list of things to talk about because I thought I wouldn't get to it, but now it's kind of come up, is the idea of garbage data, that when you ah are tracking all of your data, you do have to be aware of what is relevant and what is not.

05:30.36
jeffekennedy
And if you are not a great math person, get a math friend to look at things. so One of the things that um I've been paying attention to, ah especially in my more recent process, with the book that I'm currently writing, A Rose on the Mirror, I'm noticing that I am productive later in the day. I've been getting good Third hours, which is weird because that's not my usual pattern. I Let me caveat. I do usually Improve each I do three one-hour sprints and it used to be back in the day when I was getting 3,000 words a day and I'm trying to work back up to that I would usually get somewhere in the high 600s in that first hour Then I would usually get something like a thousand or eleven hundred in that second hour

06:25.76
jeffekennedy
And then that third hour I would get the remaining whatever we came out to 1300 or something 1200. um And sometimes I wouldn't even need a full hour to do to get there. And then I would always stop at 3K. That's one thing that I was good about doing because that helps preserve the writing energy for the next day as if I stopped to at 3,000 or thereabouts. I mean, I wouldn't stop right on the dot. But it's good to stop in the middle of the flow because then you can pick up the flow the next day.

07:02.04
jeffekennedy
ah But I have always thought that I do my best writing in the morning, which I still think is true. But one of the metrics I track is my start time versus word count. And I've been doing it by an average ah for reasons. But I was looking at my graph, which is a pretty strong scatter graph. I mean, it's points all over the place. Start time versus how many words I got for the average

07:32.82
jeffekennedy
start time for any given week and how many words I got for that week. I'm going to start counting it daily to see if that makes a difference for those three points each day. ah but I do a trend line through it. and it does The trend line has a very nice like one-to-one correlation that it looks like the earlier I start, the more words I get. ah But I did have a math friend look at it just for interest's sake. you know say is this real and He pointed out that there were a number of things wrong with it. He said, you know because I'm not accounting for other variables. right like

08:14.50
jeffekennedy
The later I start in the day, am I more likely to be interrupted by other things? So valid. But it's interesting with this new book, I'm tending to have a fairly low first hour. Maybe it's taking me a while to work into it. I don't know if it's this book or if it's just where I am in my process. I think we change over the years. ah And so,

08:43.37
jeffekennedy
So I'm starting to think about the book. I need to not do that. um Yeah, so for some reason, you'll like yesterday, um I went to writer coffee, very fun. And I had kind of a shitty first hour. I only got 352 words. But then my second two hours, I got 822 and 833. And I thought that I almost bailed on my third hour because I didn't start until 330 people.

09:14.61
jeffekennedy
and normally I have the idea that I don't write well in the afternoon and then I ended up getting those 833 words. So I'm beginning to think that my math friend is right, surprised Pikachu face, ah because Maybe they there's just too many variables and that's kind of garbage data. so So coming back to my actual point about that first book, you almost can't figure anything from that first book because so much of it is learning. um You know, there is that um idea, which I do think is valid. It seems to bear out for a lot of people.

09:56.87
jeffekennedy
that you need to write a million words before you clear those creative pipes, before you get your writing to the point where you've kind of hit your stride, when you've refined your voice, you kind of figure out what you're doing.

10:11.83
jeffekennedy
ah I saw somebody on threads talking about how she figured out that she had written 200,000 words and had only 50,000 words that were usable. And so she was lamenting um those 150,000 words that were not useful. And I replied and said, you know, you need those words to get where you're going. And this is the thing about the Trunked novel is that when you decide to trunk it, if you decide to trunk it, and we'll talk about that.

10:46.89
jeffekennedy
you have to resign yourself to the... I'm sorry, I'm losing my train of thought. Yeah, if you decide to trunk it, you have to be aware of that so much of what you were doing in that book was learning and its it wasn't a wasted effort. It was a very important effort. um Everybody I know with one or more trunked novels say, you know, that was my learning novel. That's the one that I needed to to learn on and grow from.

11:18.16
jeffekennedy
It is a ah delicate thing that I bring up, especially if I'm doing like one-on-one author coaching with people, because sometimes people will come to me with exactly this kind of book where they'll say, I've been working on this novel for, like like sometimes people have been working out for 10 years, right? Longer, maybe.

11:38.32
jeffekennedy
And youll they'll say, you know, I love this idea. It's the book of my heart. in In fact, I have a friend and I just talked to him last weekend. I worked with him extensively on this book because he couldn't finish it. He kept starting it over and kept not finishing it. And so I worked with him for, I don't know, maybe a year or more, a couple of years.

11:59.96
jeffekennedy
I'm meeting with him regularly and I had to keep pushing him through, finish the book. And I said, you don't know what it's about until you finish the book. This is advice I frequently give. You've got to finish it. Because once you finish, it changes everything. And people don't believe me until they do it. And then they're like, oh, that changed everything. It does. Got to finish it. So that's part of the learning process.

12:25.83
jeffekennedy
So he and I had talked very early on because there are red flags there when somebody tells me things like that they've been working on this book for a really long period of time, that they love this idea, that they've never been able to finish it, that they keep changing the beginning, they keep getting stuck. And and I will gently suggest to them, especially if I'm coaching, um you know, I will say, you know, there is a possibility that this book has died.

12:54.00
jeffekennedy
which, you know, we don't want to think about, but sometimes you have worked something for so long that it becomes overworked. It's been too many people have given you advice on it and the initial spirit spark of life in it has gone and a lot of times when people are really flogging themselves over a book where they're you know you could just tell um that they just hate it anymore and a lot of times that's because it it's just it and you know so it's like so I talked to this guy about that and I said you know it's possible and he said yeah he said I could see that he said I feel like I want to finish it and I was on board for that because you learn from finishing writing the book right

13:37.93
jeffekennedy
So he I saw him last weekend and I knew he'd finished it because we talked about that and then he was going to go back and revise because he had learned so much about the book from finishing it. But he told me that he had started something entirely new and that it was writing so much faster and feeling so much better. And he said he's probably going to trunk that first book. And I was like,

14:02.33
jeffekennedy
yeah yeah you don't want to because you feel like you've invested so much in it and you loved it there was a reason you loved it but a lot of times it's just it's it's done it's done you wrote it you learned from it put it in the trunk write the next book and you'll be amazed at how the energy flows It's not something that people want to hear. I tend to be very careful about suggesting it to anyone who hasn't deliberately asked. But yeah, that can be the case. And ah yeah, for the record, um I do have one trunk novel. I keep thinking I'll go back to it. I would like this idea. But if I did, I would totally rewrite it. I like wouldn't even look at the original

14:52.02
jeffekennedy
because that's something else people do is you can get really bogged down in trying to use those words and this book is from so long ago those are old dead words there's you could spend a whole lot of time playing um Dr. Frankenstein trying to uh ignite the corpse with lightning and you're still gonna end up with a monster now just create something new That's end of that sermon. um Let's see if I can get to a couple of my other topics. ah The fall, many of you recommended that and I did like it. I liked it a whole lot. I just finished watching it. um The third season I did feel like kind of went off the rails. I thought Gillian Anderson was amazing.

15:36.33
jeffekennedy
um I think I previously stated that I don't really like serial killer movies, but as many of you predicted, I did really like the the threads of feminism about women in that in that kind of workplace. Gillian Anderson being a homicide detective in Belfast.

15:57.14
jeffekennedy
ah chasing this serial killer special investigations officer and the things that she dealt with especially questions around her sexuality and so forth for being kind of a loose woman.

16:10.80
jeffekennedy
I would say I had some problems with how they ended that I think are relevant to ah the podcast here as much as I stay on topic, which is that apparently Jamie Dornan, who played the serial killer,

16:28.27
jeffekennedy
announced that he would not be doing another season. They decided to wrap the show. and you can And you get that feel in season three, right? Those last couple of episodes feels like, oh, let's go ahead and divert the way these characters behave and in order to wrap this up neatly. And I think it felt kind of unsatisfying. I think they didn't really know where they were going with season three anyway.

16:52.83
jeffekennedy
But I did want to pick a little bit on the portrayal of Katie, the babysitter that has the... Well, she does have an affair with him. I mean, they are they were in a very sexual situation together. A couple of them.

17:07.81
jeffekennedy
and it's kind of downplayed. I was bothered by the way that they had it seem as if I felt like they kind of took Katie's character in this direction of making her be, ah you know, in the courtroom where she is all like saucy and resentful and they're trying to make her like, oh, maybe she's a baby serial killer or something like this. And they were kind of making it seem like what he did with her as a grown man with a 15 year old babysitter um was somehow not so bad because she was like clearly a deviant personality. i I have a real problem with that kind of portrayal. But I'll just leave it at that. Otherwise I did really like the show and I recommend it. I think it was

17:57.38
jeffekennedy
Yeah, well worth watching, and I don't like serial killer shows, so all of you who recommended that, you were spot on. ah I have been rereading. I can't tell if I'm rereading or reading for the first time. You all know I'm a huge fan of Patricia McKillip, huge fan of The Forgotten Beasts of Eld. And whenever I mention Patricia McKillip. There is inevitably somebody who will say, oh yes, and the riddle master of hed. And I always felt like maybe I didn't read it. So I just read it. I'm now reading the second book, Heir of Sea and Fire, which I remember picking up because of the beautiful cover with the woman with the long red hair.

18:37.83
jeffekennedy
It's very interesting because Patricia McKillip wrote this after she wrote Forgotten Beasts of Eld, and I wish I could talk to her about it. She unfortunately passed away. I did get to talk to her, and like now I wish I could have this conversation. But the Riddle Master of Hed feels much more Tolkien-esque, much more boy, male characters predominate. There's a few female characters.

19:02.08
jeffekennedy
But I'm wondering if she felt like she had to do that. If somebody told her, you know, the fantasy market, this is what you need to do. um Morgon is the protagonist. ah But also there's a lot of kings and there's a lot, you know, like the heartless death. there's There's a lot of boys in this book. Heir of Sea and Fire now is picking up with more central female characters, which I like. You know, there's Raederle and Morgul and Lyra, so things are looking up that way, but it made me realize that I don't think I did read The Little Master of Head. I think I checked it out from the library as I did all my books. I remember having those books in my hands. I don't think I read it.

19:55.70
jeffekennedy
Or if I read it, I skimmed it, but almost nothing about it was familiar to me. And I think I i bounced off the boyness of it all, unless. But um it's an interesting read now. So on that note, I'm going to go get to work today. Are you amazed I got through all my topics? It's almost as if I had an outline. ah All right. um I hope you all have a fabulous weekend and I will talk to you all on Monday.

20:25.03
jeffekennedy
You all take care. Bye bye.