Tag: cats and New Mexico weather

Seeing Through the Fog

Jeffe Kennedy / / Blog


Overnight, all those overcast skies that have haunted us dropped down into the valley. I think this is a better photograph, more dramatic. I used the telephoto lens to show you how really neat it looks.

But that perspective is a bit misleading. Here’s how it looks with my other lens, that I usually use for landscapes.

Now it looks a bit less like the fog is billowing up for attack. But you also lose some of the sense of it. This is how our eyes – and brains – are still superior to cameras. I can look out and see both aspects at once. Not even as switching back and forth, but in combination with each other.

I think about this kind of thing a lot.

It seems that writing is a constant decision-process on which lens to use. Do I want to focus on the complex politics of my Twelve Kingdoms? On my heroine’s private pain? When do I back up and give a glimpse of all the tiers of people who make up life in the castle? When my hero and heroine are finally alone, do I leave the room? (It turns out that no, I am apparently incapable of leaving the room.)

There’s all sorts of rules for creating close point-of-view (POV), so the reader feels very involved in the story, but I seldom see advice on when to pan back. When to let the reader see the bigger picture. And yet, from these kinds of choices, extraordinary scenes are created. Sometimes you just have to follow your instincts, I suppose.

Or cheat, and show both.

Turning Up the Heat

Jeffe Kennedy / / Blog


Our weather really shifted this last week. I think it did all over, the hot late summer temperatures abruptly giving way to chilly and damp.

All last week we had overcast, with rain coming and going. SO not like usual New Mexico weather. We’d wake in the morning to 50F temperatures and all day long it would barely reach 70F. Normally this wouldn’t be a big deal, because our house is passive solar and we warm well past that during the day. However, that requires the participation of the “solar” aspect, and we weren’t getting any.

It was getting darn chilly in the house.

I considered turning on the heat.

Decided no no no.

I have this friend in Boston who used to try to go every fall with not turning on the heat until Thanksgiving (last Thursday in November, for you non-US folks). She lived alone in an old apartment and Boston is an expensive city. It’s also a coastal and fairly northern city, so that’s getting pretty cold. I would tease her about it, how she’d have to spend the money she saved from not turning on the heat on cold medications instead. It was partly a game for her, too, I think – to see how long she could last. Now she lives with her husband and they’re expecting a baby soon. I should ask her where she stands on the heat thing now.

It’s a kind of stubbornness, I suppose. A refusal to capitulate to the changing season too soon. But also, I hate to be wimpy. After all, it was about 68F in the house. Some people set their air conditioning to that level. It’s not that cold, I kept telling myself. Why change the temperature of an entire house when I can put on a pair of socks and a thicker sweatshirt?

Still, yesterday the sun came out and it felt really good. I might have baked in it a bit.

And it’s supposed to be solidly in the upper 70s this week, so I dodged the bullet.

Maybe I can make it all the way to Thanksgiving…

The Happy Whacker

Jeffe Kennedy / / Blog

This is David happily using his new super-duper weed-whacker.

See, we had a weed-whacker that we brought with us from Wyoming, but it was meant for stuff like, well, grass. Soft stuff. Not desert stuff. Desert stuff is all impenetrable woody stems and thorny exteriors. The plants guard their precious water stores by making it exceedingly difficult for anything to munch them. Turns out this also goes for being chopped down.

Now, I am not the one who thought the chopping needed to happen. I think this is one of those male/female things. Just as he doesn’t notice his bank statements sitting on the counter for weeks on end, I don’t look out over our property and say “Curses! Look at those bushes. It offends my eye to see them!”

(Okay, he might not have used that exact phrasing, but he did say that it bugged him to see it. He said this in a way that invited me to agree that I could barely sit on the patio for the irritation of seeing all those bushes just growing out there.)

He pulled out the trump card, though, by pointing out predators could use the overgrowth for easy cover to stalk the kitties.

I agreed something needed to be done and he happily settled in to research the ideal chopper-downer tool. Boy, did he find some. Did you know you can easily spend $2K on a big bushwhacker? Finally he picked out a bushwhacking lawnmower that was “only” $329. I balked. He mentioned predators again. I whined about the expense for something we use once a year. He agreed to look at attachments for the weed-whacker.

I’m a cruel, cruel woman.

Finally we went to Home Depot and perused the weed-whacking options. We found the ideal solution in this kind of cool Ryobi Brush Cutter. (You may not care that much, but for those who like to ogle power tools, and you know who you are, there it is.) It’s nice because it has a manly big blade that cuts through woody interlopers like butter. And you can get other attachments for it, which pleases me, for the next time we discover there’s some power tool missing from our lives, leaving a big black hole of aching despair.

He spend the rest of the long weekend happily trimming down the ugly shrubs and dead cholla.

It does look much better now.

 

Meet Bunny Rodriguez

Jeffe Kennedy / / Blog

Harry’s Roadhouse is one of our favorite local restaurants, just up the road from our house. It features prominently enough in my life that I already had a subject tag for it on the blog. Well, last Friday night, we went to Lobster Night at Harry’s.

They do this in the summertime on Friday nights. They fly in fresh-caught lobsters from Maine and cook them that night. Major treat for us landlubbers. You have to make reservations ahead of time because they want to be sure of the exact number of plane tickets needed for the lobsters. I’ve long been meaning to sign us up, but never quite got around to it.

Well the weekend before last, we went to Harry’s for breakfast and I saw the sign on the door saying that Labor Day weekend would be the last lobster night of the season. I said to David that we should do it and he said great. I told the host when he seated us that we wanted to sign up and he promised to send the signer-upper to us.

She visited us during breakfast, wrote down the reservation name (David’s last name) and my credit card number. She put us down for two lobsters and reminded us that we were reserving lobsters only and would have to wait for a table, as is always their practice. All is good.

When we got home, we saw neighbor Doug out walking his dog. We’ve barely seen Doug and Susie all summer – another thing we’ve meant to do – so I suggested that we invite them along to Lobster Night. I go chat with Doug, give him the scoop. Amazingly they’ve never been either, though they’ve lived here much longer, and he’s excited to go. I tell him to call, reserve their lobsters and maybe mention they’ll be joining us.

So, later that same day, Doug calls me and says Harry’s doesn’t have our reservation. He told them Dave, Jeffe, David’s last name – nothing. But he made their reservation. He says for me to call Kathleen and make a new reservation. I don’t want to do this, because I know they already have one for us. I figure Doug somehow failed to communicate the proper information, so I blow it off.

The next morning, Kathleen calls me. Smitty, she says, invited us to join him and Susie at Lobster Night, but she needs a reservation from us. Now, Doug’s last name is Smith and everyone calls him Smitty, even Susie. But he’s never asked us to call him Smitty, so we don’t. I tell Kathleen we already have a reservation and had invited them to join us, in fact. Oh ha ha ha, Smitty said something like that, but she can’t find my reservation anywhere and will we be joining Smitty or not?

I say we are and all is, once again, good.

We get there Friday night and it’s a gorgeous evening. David and I get there first and he puts our name in for a table. He comes back and says they asked if we were with Smitty. We have wine and sit outside to wait. Doug and Susie arrive. We have a lovely time.

The lobsters were absolutely amazing. As good as being in Maine.

As we leave, Kathleen asks us how everything was. She is the same lady who came to our breakfast table. I say amazing, wonderful and I hope I just don’t get charged for a second set of lobsters for the lost reservation. She laughs and says oh no, no, no – that one disappeared.

We get home, I pull my phone out of my purse and there are two voicemails, missed calls from a local number. Yeah, I knew what this would be. Both are from Kathleen, the first saying they hadn’t seen us and to be sure to come or we’d lose our lobsters. The second, about 45 minutes later, saying something similar and to please call.

I call, ask for Kathleen. She gets on the phone and I say, hi, I was just there eating lobster and on our way out we chatted about this lost second reservation that you left me two voicemails about.

Oh! she says. Oh! I started to wonder about that after you left. The thing is, I had your reservation attached to the name “Bunny Rodriguez.”

And no, David’s last name isn’t anything CLOSE to Rodriguez.

But it’s all good. She sold the lobsters to someone else and she apologized for the confusion.

All of these various names. Plus, I have a new secret identity now.

Bunny Rodriguez, at your service.

Happy Labor Day!

Jeffe Kennedy / / Uncategorized

I love to have an all-white bed in the summertime. The layers of whites create a crisp cool feeling.

And look! Isabel matches.

It used to be, back in Wyoming, that I’d retire the white sheets after Labor Day, along with my white sundresses and white shoes. I know some people get annoyed with that “rule,” saying it’s arbitrary and silly. But I like the ritual of it. Observing the changing of the seasons.

In Wyoming, though, we could get a frost, or even a bit of snow this weekend. (I see our old hometown got down to 40 F last night.) Here, we still have a lot of warm weather still.

So, I’m enjoying the day off, finishing some outside painting and chores.

I’ll keep the white bed just a little longer.

Story Intrusion

Jeffe Kennedy / / Blog

This is Isabel’s favorite summer snoozing spot – on the east side of the house, in the shade, where she gets a lovely little breeze. It has the added bonus of a wall she can put her back against or, as she is here, press with her back paws.

Yes, I have to go pet her all the time. The cuteness is too much to resist.

The other evening I was out on the patio, too, reading Zoe Archer’s Blades of the Rose bundle. (For those of you not snapping up every ebook deal you can find, a “bundle” is like a digital box set. In this case, I was able to get all four of the books in her Blades of the Rose series for the price of one book. Fab deal. The only thing is, Kindle measures reading progress by percent, not page numbers. So, when you’re reading four books essentially at once, you’re stuck in the low percentages FOREVER. 3%. 4%. 5%. I have to get over it… But I digress.) While I was reading her lovely story, bits of The Middle Princess started floating through my head.

This is a good thing. First, it means that Zoe’s stories are inspiring and put me in the best frame of mind to create my own stories. I think it’s really a high compliment to the author. Second, it means that Middle Princess is talking to me and that part of me is connecting to the story even when I’m not actively writing. I don’t know how other novelists do it, but I really need that kind of ongoing flow, especially since I can’t work on it all day long. It’s also a lovely, dreamy feeling.

The phenomenon reminds me of REM intrusion. REM is Rapid Eye Movement sleep, of course, or dreaming sleep. What’s really interesting about sleep-deprivation studies is that they all show that the main effect of sleep deprivation is sleepiness. This seems silly until you think about it. The symptoms of sleepiness – feelings of fatigue, intense desire to sleep, blurred vision, murky thinking – all intensify the more sleep is missed. With sleep, the symptoms disappear again.

The really measurable effect of sleep deprivation is when REM sleep is lost.

Studies have been done where people were allowed to sleep as much as they liked, but were awakened whenever their brains kicked into REM. This has dramatic and rapid effects. People quickly lose the ability to make rational decisions instead of emotional ones. The most minor problem becomes insurmountable. After a few days, the need for REM state becomes so desperate that the brain spontaneously goes into REM even while people are awake, called REM intrusion.

Yeah, you actually start dreaming while you’re up and about. Puts a whole ‘nother spin on hallucinations, doesn’t it?

I kind of wonder if Story Intrusion (my term) isn’t similar, though less pathological. I hope.

Maybe I’ll go have a nap by the side of the house.

The Tao of Hummingbirds

Jeffe Kennedy / / Blog

This pic is from the same series of watercolor rain shots I posted before. This photo isn’t framed as well, but I love it for the hummingbird zooming in on the middle right, like a guided missile. (um, left to you folks)

We have about four hummingbirds in residence right now and they are practically part of our household. Every morning I wake to the sound of them whizzing past the open windows, squeaking at each other. They dive around the feeders under the front portal (pronounced pohr-TAL, for you non-New Mexico types), bulleting through at impossible speeds. Their game is intricate – one perches near a feeder and waits for another to come in, then dive bombs the interloper. They scream off over the desert, quickly becoming pinpoints against the sky, while another leisurely bobs in to have a drink. The other day I saw one, perched on the saucer of this feeder, wait while another screamed in at him, at a zillion miles an hour, then popped up, letting the other bird pass right underneath him. Hummingbird Tai Chi.

It’s funny to me to observe their busyness and compare it to my own. The emails screaming in, one after another. The phone calls and conference calls, an intricate dance of back and forth. And while you’re busy dealing, someone else slips in and takes a long drink of your nectar.

So it goes, eh?

I told David this morning that today looked pretty hairy for me and we talked about why. Then he said, “why do jobs have to be that way?”

It’s a good question. I suppose we should seek the Tao and be One with the universe. Then the politics, the pressures and deadlines wouldn’t matter.

I don’t know anyone who can do that.

What I do see is that the hummingbirds seem to glory in their games. They are beautifully vital, vibrantly alive. They make me laugh, to see them whizzing past.

I love that.

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!

How Not to Revise

admin / / Blog


This monsoon season has been a tease. The clouds loom, promising rain, and then evaporate. I watch it on the weather radar – the greens condensing, flashing orange and red – and then it dissolves away again.

As I mentioned yesterday, I’ve been in revision mode, refining The Body Gift. Actually, now that I think about it, I’ve been in revising/editing mode for quite some time now. Between revising Obsidian for a revise & resubmit, working on developmental,, line and copy edits for Sapphire and Feeding the Vampire, and now adding to TBG to send to this agent, I haven’t done any real drafting since March.

Sure, some of this has involved adding new words, but really, working on a story that’s already *there* is a different process.

You know how sculptors (it might be a specific one, but I forget who and I’m feeling too lazy to try to find it) say that sculpting is carving away the extra stone, to find the shape that already exists within? (Maybe it was Michelangelo?) I’ve always loved this idea. This is how writing and revising often works for me.

Once a draft is complete and the story is pretty much *there* (this is a technical word I’ve used twice now. feel free to borrow, but use carefully – it’s a powerful term), it’s like a block of marble. Maybe it’s like a rough outline. Or like the horrible, globulous beings that are what remains of people when the transporter malfunctions. Kind of shaped like something, but not really discernible. Not alive, for sure.

I think it works this way for me because I don’t really plan my stories. It’s more like I download big chunks from elsewhere. Unlike A.S. Byatt, however, I don’t get mine in perfect dictation. So there I am, with my amorphous thing, that has some really lovely bits and some pretty damn icky ones. That’s when I begin carving.

Revision is an acquired skill, I believe. It takes care and judgment. You have to be brave enough to knock off big pieces that must go, but also patient enough to do the detail work. Over and over, you have to step back and see how you’re doing. It takes objectivity and precision.

And, oh yes, you can ruin it. I truly believe that.

There comes a point where, instead of refining and polishing, you’re hacking it to bits. Sure, with writing, you can always add it back in. This is the advantage the writer has over a sculptor who accidentally whacks off the nose. The story, however, that brilliantly alive creature, can slowly suffocate, wither away and die if pummeled too much. You’re left with a corpse. Maybe a pretty corpse, but a dead body nonetheless.

I know no one wants to hear this. We all want to believe that, with enough crit, enough time and dedication, we can make the book PERFECT. Maybe a truly practiced writer can. But, just as with sculpting, it takes skill and experience.

This is what I’m learning about revising: it’s important to keep the final image in mind.

We all start with a seminal image or idea. That changes as we go along. But, at some point in the process, (yes, yes, I know you pre-plotters claim you know it before you even start writing) you have to decide on what you want it to look like when you’re done. All revising should be directed to that idea. Don’t get halfway through polishing your Running Dog sculpture and then think, hey! a Running Cat would be way cool! Write down the Running Cat idea and go back to working on the DOG.

Having editorial notes helps with this, because you can keep going back to the line where your editor says “do this.” I’ve started keeping a list of what I’m revising towards. To remind myself of that final image.

I imagine that few sculptors create a perfect sculpture on their first try. This is why most writers I know have at least one novel under the bed, maybe several. Those are the corpses.

Like clouds promising rain, sometimes they don’t produce.

May they rest in peace.

Drop Me a Line Sometime

admin / / Blog

David asked me to stop at the grocery store after the gym this morning.

This is easy to do, because the gym is just up the road and the grocery store is right across the street. On my weight-lifting days, David usually stays home and does his own work-out. Apparently shapely thighs are not a high-priority for him.

Go figure.

Oh! And many of you have asked why there haven’t been Crazy Gym Lady stories lately. At first I stopped telling them, because I thought it wasn’t healthy to take notes on how much she irritated me, just so I could regale you on the blog. Then she got fired. Yes, she did! There has been much rejoicing in Mudville ever since. Incredible difference for us. We go to the gym, work out, nobody bugs us, we leave. Ah, blessed peace.

At any rate, this morning I paid my dues to the Gods of Shapely Thighs, then stopped at the grocery store. This woman was walking in who looked very familiar. This is our local store and we’ve been here two years, so a lot of people are looking familiar now. I knew she was out of context, wearing a shapely black skirt and jacket. But she’s very tall with tousled curly hair that’s quite distinctive. So I’m studying her as she walks in, trying to place her. She stops, just inside the door, at the greeting card carousel and starts flipping through them, frowning.

In trying to place her, I’m thinking she usually looks relaxed and happy. This morning, she was anxious, stressed. It was a bit after 7 and she looked like she would be heading into town, but had to stop to buy a card first. As I did my shopping, I thought about who the card might be for and how pleased they would be to get it. Or she was dressed to attend a funeral and the card would be for sympathy and would likely make the person weepy to read it.

Regardless, whoever gets that card likely never will think about the effort it took for my familiar lady to stop, pick one out and buy it on the way into town. A matter of minutes, but it cost her a bit of stress.

People in our lives do so many things for us, large and small, daily and annually. Some we expect. Some we don’t. But they all feed into the vast blood supply that supports and nurtures us.

I’m giving a bit of thought to that today.