Author: Jeffe Kennedy

Ducking the Spanking

Jeffe Kennedy / / Blog

One of the things I love about this house is how the sunset fills every window. I don’t often take photos from inside the house, but I thought I’d try. Can’t get all the windows very well, though.

Hmm. Maybe I need a panorama card for my camera!

Writers tend to have funny conversations. If overheard, they might sound quite alarming. Discussions of how best to kill people, how to dispose of the bodies, argument over what kind of childhood trauma is the most scarring. For writers of the smexy, it can get particularly interesting. Especially when you’ve worked with the same critique partners (CP) long enough to have shorthand references.

The other day, I told one of my CPs that she was ducking the spanking again. No, not like when we were kids and hoped mom and dad would forget about the promised punishment. This referred back to a story she wrote, with BDSM elements, where the prospect of a spanking was held out for most of the story and, when the moment arrived, she glossed it.

Voodoo Bride knows about this. There’s nothing worse (for readers like us, anyway) to be promised a sexually intense situation that never materializes or is glossed over. The whole point of something like a spanking scene is that it’s intense and difficult and puts the characters into an extreme situation. It’s a very human and polite tendency to back away from tremendously fraught situations like that.

However: this is the story gold.

So when I read my CP’s story and felt like she’d created a very tense, difficult scenario and then defused it by making it not so bad after all, I could tell her she was ducking the spanking and she understood right away.

Now, I’m not saying you have to include a spanking scene, metaphorically or literally. If you don’t want to go there, don’t. But, if you include something like that, then follow where it leads, into all the dark, twisty, intense shadows.

If you’re going to have a spanking, make it a good one.

Aaaandd on that note – you all have a great weekend!

Video Chatting about Erotica

Jeffe Kennedy / / Blog

I’m doing a video chat tonight!

This is kind of a new deal, from Shindig Events. They’re still Beta testing, but I did a dry run last night and it seemed really cool. You need a webcam and a microphone, but you can hang out in the audience, talk to other people, participate in Q&A and have one-on-one or small group conversations.

So I’ll probably start out with a few thoughts on writing and reading erotica, but then I’d love for everyone to join in the conversation. Partly because we don’t often get to hang out together and talk about these things. But also I’ll be interested to see how the video chat works. This could be a really fun venue for reader events. Or writing workshops.

The party is today, Wednesday, February 22 at 3:30 pacific time/4:30 mountain time/5:30 central time/6:30 eastern time. Those of you in other zones have to do your own math. (Is that really midnight in The Netherlands??) If you can’t be there at the start, don’t worry, drop by whenever.

The link is: http://beta.shindigevents.com/demos/BewitchingBookTours/

They tell me the video chat works best if you use Google Chrome (of course – grr) and if you close your other windows and online feeds. I noticed mine ran much better once I signed out of Yahoo IM.

Come on by and try it out!

Mardis Gras Memories

Jeffe Kennedy / / Blog

Happy Mardis Gras! Laissez les bons temps rouler!!

Mardis Gras always feels like a happy day today. It’s nostalgia-making for me, too, since I’m rarely in a place where people know much about Mardis Gras. Back when I used to hang decorative flags on my house, nobody in Wyoming understood why I had a crawdad with a purple, green and gold parasol dancing – or the purple glittery wreath on the door. (I don’t put this stuff out at all in Santa Fe because with the adobe-style architecture it just looks wrong, wrong, wrong.)

Everything about Mardis Gras appeals to my magpie heart. It’s shiny. And sparkly. People dress up in crazy outfits and dance and shake all their stuff. I love the licentiousness of the party day. The Carnival, with all the celebrations of the flesh that it implies.

I have memories of parades in New Orleans and balls in Memphis. There’s nothing like drinking from Foster’s Oil Can in a brown paper bag, cheering at luridly lit floats and toying with the idea of flashing your tits to strangers, just this once, though you never do. And going for turtle soup and steamed shrimp and potatoes afterwards, weighed down in beads and trying not to get too much butter in them.

So, though it’s a gorgeous, clear day in Santa Fe, my heart is in New Orleans today.

If you want to be a voyeur, you can watch here: http://www.nola.com/paradecam/

Begging for Blurbs

Jeffe Kennedy / / Blog

I’ve started hitting up some of my author friends for blurbs for Rogue’s Pawn. It’s really kind of an odd place to be.

To clarify right off the bat: a blurb is absolutely not objective. It’s advertising, pure and simple. I mention this because I sometimes see blurbs referred to as reviews. An example of this would be Jessica Andersen’s first book in her Final Prophecy series, which carries a blurb from J.R.Ward. If you can read that, it says: “An astounding paranormal world…I swear ancient Mayan gods and demons walk the modern earth!”

I mention this particular example because I bought this book back in 2008 when it came out, entirely because of the blurb. At the time I was completely addicted to J.R. Ward’s Black Dagger Brotherhood series and I was willing to read anything connected to her. Turns out the two of them are good friends and critique partners, so of course J.R. did this favor for her writing friend and for a book she wanted to support.

But this is how a blurb is not a review. Blurbs are absolutely biased support and people argue all the time about whether they’re effective.

See, the other way people get blurbs is through their agents or publishers. An agent might ask one client to blurb for another. The publishers ask star authors to blurb debut authors. Theoretically the authors always read the book first. They’re allowed to decline also. There are some famous stories out there of authors who not only declined to positively blurb a book, but tried to dissuade the publisher from going ahead with publication. Neil Gaiman has a story like this. It also happened to a friend of mine recently with her debut book. Seriously, the publisher asked this big, famous author whose name you would totally recognize to blurb this book and the author wrote back this awful letter on how much she hated the book and that the publisher should cancel it.

Don’t try this at home people.

At any rate, being the requestor is a funny place to be, because you’re essentially begging your friends and acquaintances for the favor of not only reading your book, but saying something nice about it. Or at least compelling. It’s kind of a fun game to read blurbs and discern when the blurber was just trying to think of something positive and interesting to say when “I loved this book!” is simply not a possibility.

Back when Wyoming Trucks, True Love and the Weather Channel came out, I was much bolder about asking. I asked writing teachers and famous authors both. Barbara Kingsolver’s agent wrote me a really lovely message in reply. Mary Karr didn’t bother to answer.

For some reason, I’ve lost some of that brashness now. Maybe I understand better what the big authors’ lives are really like. Marcella was egging me on last night to ask Robin McKinley and I was abashed at even the thought of asking her. I’d feel like a puppy peeing on her shoes.

Actually, given how much attention she lavishes on her Hellhounds, that might be an effective approach.

So, for now I’m hitting up my friends – especially the ones who’ve already read the thing and made nice noises about it. As I screw up the chutzpah, I might see if some others want to read, with an eye towards blurbing.

Who knows? Maybe one day I’ll be good enough to ask someone like Robin.

Choosing the Happy

Jeffe Kennedy / / Blog

This hawk was in the tree across the road. Love my new telephoto lens!

David and I were talking yesterday about the value of happiness and making choices to be happy. Now, not everyone really values happiness as a top priority. Sure – people say they want to be happy, but often they value other things above that. Being admired or respected, making our families happy, fitting in with the crowd. If we look critically at our daily choices, we can see that we often choose to do something that doesn’t make us happy because we think the other thing is more important.

For example, a lot of us woke up this morning earlier than we wanted to. It might have made us happy to sleep longer, but maybe there are children who need to be cared for and that’s more important. Or we have to get to that job on time, so we can be paid, which can be a factor in long-term happiness. So, sometimes we make a considered choice to put someone else’s needs above our own happiness or we sacrifice the short term in favor of the long term.

But we can also get in the habit of capitulating to the “shoulds.” All those things that we think we should do, whether they make us happy or not. It’s easy to fall into that pattern of all the little responsibilities and debts that drive our daily decisions.

David mentioned it because he’s been reading Anthony de Mello, who made a deliberate decision to be happy. That’s what he wanted out of life. For every choice he encountered, he weighed whether it would lead to happiness.

This is harder than it sounds. For instance, he ultimately told his best friend they could no longer spend time together, because the friend didn’t make him happy. It’s a hard, strong line to draw and many of us would flinch at such a decision because of all the voices whispering that it’s selfish. Choosing one’s own happiness over someone else’s will always be labeled selfish. It’s up to us to decide which we value more: being happy or being thought an unselfish person.

It got me thinking though, that it doesn’t always have to be huge, life-changing decisions. In everything I do all day, I can choose those things that lead to happiness for me. Throughout my day, there are many opportunities to read rants and encounter unpleasant news and thoughts. I don’t have to look at them. I can focus instead on those things that I believe do make me happy. I can create a tesseract of happiness.

By little, incremental choices, I think I can find ways to have a happy life. Which I do think is the most important thing for me.

Now I’m picturing what a tesseract of happiness would look like.

Cross-Marketing Miscalculations

Jeffe Kennedy / / Blog

Yesterday I talked about filling out the art fact sheet so Carina can design the cover for Rogue’s Pawn. After I finished the blog post, I got serious and finished the fact sheet. (And yes, I totally included the talon pic – make of that what you will, cover artist!) I included a bunch of other images, too, trying to select the ones I thought would convey the right feel.

When I described my heroine, I pulled some text from the story, but I also mentioned she frequently wears this black Ann Taylor cocktail dress, because it’s what she had on when she was accidentally transported to Faerie. It becomes her sorceress dress. I toyed with sending an image of it – even got so far as opening the Ann Taylor website (always dangerous) – and changed my mind.

Not that I don’t know exactly what the dress looks like. I do. I have this dress.

See, when I first started writing this book years ago, for the opening cocktail party scene, I dressed my heroine in my favorite outfit at the time. Yeah, it was a shortcut, but I’d also been writing nonfiction for so long that it was easier for me to ground the story in real life elements. Then the dress became kind of a shtick in the story and I started spinning all these writer fantasies about it, you know how we do.

I had this idea that I would wear the dress to signings and panels. I imagined how people would recognize it from the book and be pleased and entertained. There may have been even a few improbable scenarios where the Ann Taylor people called me up and proposed glamorous cross-marketing campaigns that involved giving me lots of free clothes.

Hey, a girl can dream.

Never mind if my concept of cross-marketing more closely resembles self-aggrandizement.

The problem, besides being a highly unlikely idea, is that the dress in question is now sadly out of style. So far out of style that I actually haven’t worn it in probably three years. My mother is rolling her eyes at me for having it in my closet still. I should probably get rid of it, but I’ve kept it all this time, for when the book would be published, like a talisman.

And now, the book is entering the world and the dress needs to be retired. My heroine is wearing a different dress, one that you all will imagine when you read it. I’m not going to tell you what it used to look like. Instead of being a past dress, it will become a present and future dress.

There’s something magical about that.