Category: Blog

Alpha and Omega

Jeffe Kennedy / / Blog

I’m back from Oklahoma City today and, as always after one of my work trips, playing catch up.

It can be shocking, transitioning between my various lives. At home, it’s quiet. I like it that way. Sometimes I don’t interact with anyone else for hours on end. This level of concentration is meditative for me. I feel most at peace when I can do this.

I know. I know. My mother despairs of me.

On the work trip, I uproot myself from my lovely home, plunge into the semi-hysterical swirl of airports, luggage and rental cars. I meet up with my colleagues and work in a room where seven people are asking me questions at the same time. Or they say, “okay, after you answer those three people, I get you next.”

It’s good to be needed. (And paid!) But I get overwhelmed. I try not to get cranky.

(But – guys? – just because I’m smaller and female does NOT mean you get to overlap my airplane seat!)

Fortunately, I love the people I work with. The last evening, we all went out to Bricktown, in the older renovated part of downtown Oklahoma City. The heat had relented and we enjoyed a gorgeous evening on the rooftop patio.

I posted the other day that being in OKC reminds me of the past, of my family’s origins, of how cities rise and decline. This work project, too, has been like that. I worked on it for over ten years, sometimes at a crazy level of intensity. Then it got axed and we went cold turkey. Now, after an 18-month hiatus, it’s running again. But changed.

It seems that things rarely ever end. They just stop for a while and then start again in a new way, with a slightly different face.

There’s comfort in that.

Before I Put on My Make-Up

Jeffe Kennedy / / Blog

Still in Oklahoma City for the day job, in a hotel I’m really not thrilled with. What I get for letting someone else pick it!

As I put on my make-up this morning, I noticed that the nasty lights over the mirror made my skin look green. At least, that’s the excuse I’m using to explain the puffy bags under my eyes. But, suddenly, I had this memory of those make-up mirrors with the lights on either side, that you could stand up on your vanity table. They had something like four settings: indoor, outdoor, evening and office. You could set the lighting so you could craft your color scheme to look best in that particular lighting.

Office was decidedly green.

This says so many things about how the world has changed. Designing a cosmetic scheme for different events in the day is no longer a priority for most women. Not all offices are studies in green fluorescent lighting. (For verisimilitude, Mad Men really should have used it. But who wants to see people in that light?) And who really has a vanity table anymore?

Being in Oklahoma City turns my mind to the past. My grandparents met here, back in the 30s. My grandfather managed the Criterion Movie Palace, which is now gone. They left the high-rolling scene here in a scandal, exiled to the backwater of Denver. Now this city is a declining ruin in many places. One of my colleagues asked why it declined and Denver boomed.

I don’t know.

But this city has beautiful places, too. With lots of renovation going on. What goes around, comes around.

One day I’ll send the city all those photos of the Criterion. I keep thinking someone would love to see them.

Moving On Up

Jeffe Kennedy / / Blog

I just love how this storm made everything look like a watercolor painting. It reminds me of one of my favorite Renoirs, La Roche-Guyon. I have a print of it hanging in my house. Now I’d like to hang this photo next to it. Impressionism, Santa Fe style.

I’m off to fabulous Oklahoma City this morning and will be there most of the week.

For now, I’d like to announce that I have a New Website!!

It’s still at http://www.blog.jeffekennedy.com, but it should be a whole lot shinier and easier to, um, actually FIND stuff. Thanks to Liz and Sienna at Bemis Promotions for all the fabulous work on it!

So, please take a tour and let me know what you like and don’t like. I’m still giving them nitpicky some feedback on changes.

It’s a brave new era!

Waiting for Godot

admin / / Blog

Here’s a pic of grandson Tobiah with my mom and Stepdad Dave, who is helping Tobiah open his birthday presents. A little catch-up here, since I posted a pic of granddaughter Aerro last week.

So, I was at a bit of a loss on what to write about this morning. It’s kind of that tip-of-the-tongue feeling, like I had a topic in mind, but can’t quite recall what it was. Tomorrow is all about Feeding the Vampire’s book birthday. But I had *thought* I had a plan for today.

Then I remembered.

Oh yeah, I totally thought I’d talk about my agent and my new book deal today.

But you know what? She promised to get back to me by Monday (yesterday) and she hasn’t. Everyone keeps telling me to give her more time, but it’s been officially one week now. I’m not necessarily in a hurry. Still, I don’t see much reason to sit on my hands any longer. Publishing is absolutely about patience panties and waiting for people to get back to you. When the ball is in my court, however, I don’t see much reason to wait.

It was kind of amazing, really, how people popped out of the woodwork with advice when I announced that I had a contract offer. Everyone was full of the advice to contact every agent I’ve ever kibbitzed with and let them know I have an offer on the table. This is the moment, they urge me, to hook an agent.

I feel vaguely like the girl who’s gotten pregnant and is looking to bag her man with it.

The thing is, like that knocked-up girl, I’m feeling a bit like, if they didn’t want me for myself and my work before, then I’m not sure I want them just because I’ve got a bun in the oven. Frankly, I’m not convinced I want an agent at all. Kristine Rusch, who posts the very insightful Rusch Reports on the publishing business from the writer’s point of view, recently laid out really good reasons why unagented writers not sign with agents. (The post contains a fascinating history of how literary agents came to be in the first place – well worth reading.)

Her post came at just the right time for me, because she echoed what I’ve been thinking, from all the reading I do about the huge changes in publishing.

Now, I’m not so concerned about the agency clause. The gal I’ve been talking to has a boutique agency, so I imagine she doesn’t have anything really bearish like that. But, more and more, I’m wondering what agents can do for writers that we can’t do for ourselves. A bunch of agencies are now announcing that they’re assisting their authors with self-publishing, or even developing epublishing branches. They’re clearly doing this because their traditional revenue streams are drying up. Indeed, several of my friends who have long-standing relationships with agents are not seeing new sales to publishers right now. Except maybe in Young Adult.

It’s a difficult time for agents. I totally get that.

So, right now I’m not convinced having an agent would really make a huge difference for me.

I’m still the awkward girl at the prom. My work is still the kind that the big publishers frown at, with worry on their faces, unable to clearly envision where they’d put me on the bookshelf. I truly believe the key for me lies in building readership. (Thank you, all you lovely readers who read and say nice things to me!) People out there do want to read my books, but no one will know it until I have some numbers.

I’m at peace with that.

What I’m not at peace with is waiting. I don’t want to be like Vladimir and Estragon, eternally distracting myself while I wait for something I might not even recognize when it arrives.

No point in reaching for that brass ring if they’re dismantling the Carousel and converting it into the Zooming Horses Racetrack.

(Wouldn’t that be a cool ride?)

So: no announcement today. See? Here you are, waiting along with me. I may yet sign with this agent or another, on a future project.

But, on this, I’m ready to move forward.

Let’s do this thing!

Morning Glories

admin / / Blog

When I planted these morning glory seeds, I had a vision of the wisteria vine taking off and climbing up the portal, with the purple morning glories winding through. Gardening is a lot about grandiose visions that reality sometimes can’t quite catch up to. Our dry winter and even drier spring slowed things down. But, now that the monsoon rains have started, look! I have a blossom. With more promising.

It thrills me to to see it.

Saturday, at the local post office, the guy there was saying to everyone, I can’t believe summer is almost over! Someone else – not me – piped up and pointed out that we’re just heading into August and that we have at least two more months of warm weather. Really four, because we don’t get freezes around here until around Thanksgiving. Post office guy shrugged that off. “But the kids start school in two weeks!”

You all know this is the part I find interesting.

This week at Word-Whores, the theme is made-up holidays. Already Linda and Laura have said interesting things about Holy Days and traditional holidays vs. special and intimate ones. We have all these layers of schedules in our lives, rhythms dictated by the turn of the seasons, the ebb and flow of work, the divisions of school breaks, the intensive celebrations that require tons of preparation. We plan around these things, always looking ahead to which train is coming down the tracks.

Never mind that the school schedule is changing. We set up summer break originally to correspond with labor-intensive planting and harvesting schedule. Now schools go through summer, start early, have longer winter breaks. But still we associate school starting with harvest ending and the onset of winter.

There must have been something about Saturday, because the woman at the gym – not Crazy Gym Lady, a different one with her own special, gentler brand of nutty – was telling everyone who came in that Christmas is only four months away. Someone else – not me – pointed out to her that it was really almost five months. Which, when you think about it, is far closer to being half a year away than actually looming. Still, she was undaunted, keeping her gaze on that Christmas train.

The Taoists say that the key to serenity, to real spiritual understanding, is to keep ourselves in the present as much as possible. In their view, only the present is real. Being awake and fully aware of what’s happening right now allows us to enjoy our lives. No anticipating the future, for good or ill. No dwelling on the past.

After all, how can you enjoy summer when you’re thinking about it ending?

So I’m enjoying the transitory bloom of my morning glories. I have them now, and that’s all that matters.

Amusing Dreams

admin / / Blog

I had what I think of as my Water World dream last night.

It’s one of my standard dreams – you know the familiar ones you repeat over and over. Like the being on stage and not knowing your lines one. Or taking the final exam without ever having gone to class. Or being naked in public except for some feathers and a beak.

What, you don’t have that one?

At any rate, Water World is a water park in Denver. No, this has nothing to do with Kevin Costner. It’s one of my very favorite places to go, though I haven’t been in the last couple of years. I love riding the donut tubes down all the different swirly slides. It makes me feel like a kid again, to spend the day in my swimsuit. At the end of the day, my hair is wet and snarled, I’m sun-baked and water-soaked, deliciously exhausted.

Damn, now I want to go!

My Water World dream is one of those “going there but never quite making it” dreams. It’s not a a bad or frustrating dream. We just spend the day going through the admissions turnstile and getting different color wristbands. We get distracted and have to go save people or find treasure. We spend a lot of time in the parking lot, seeing the rides from a distance. Elements from Elitch Gardens, the amusement park of my youth, which has since been relocated and transformed into a Six Flags conglomeration, find their way in. The giant rise of the wooden roller-coaster always figures prominently.

It’s actually a fun dream, full of the anticipation of arriving. I’m eternally poised to have the best day ever. It’s also familiar and, in an odd way, comforting. It’s part of who I am. The sum of so many experiences.

These are the kinds of qualities it’s difficult to give characters. Someone recently told me that common wisdom is that novels about dreams rarely work well, because dreams inherently have no structure, which gives the story a “mushy” feel.

I can totally see that.

In fact, one of the “rules” writers like to cite is that you should never have dream sequences. That editors hate them. I suspect this is the “mushiness” coming into play. Usually if a character has a recurring dream, it’s a nightmare, as JD Robb’s heroine, Eve, experiences. Of course, she has the marvelous latitude of an ongoing series to use that dream as a theme, a device that reveals where Eve is emotionally.

Now I totally want to do something like this. Damn the rules – full speed ahead!