Inspiration – Jeffe Kennedy Blog

First Cup of Coffee – January 22, 2024

Jeffe Kennedy / January 22, 2024 / Blog, Podcast

A few thoughts today on marketing, newsletters, why you can be like Enya and not HAVE to do anything, why empty, supposedly “Inspirational” sayings annoy me, and some thoughts on Brotopia by Emily Chang.

Three Places I Find Inspiration

Jeffe Kennedy / December 31, 2023 / Blog

Happy New Year!

On this New Year’s Eve day, I’m busy crunching year-end financials in preparation to go to quarterly tax-reporting. Author finances, however, are not the topic of the week at the SFF Seven. Instead we’re discussing a much happier topic: sources of inspiration.

The two are somewhat tied together for me as I’ve spent the last two weeks refilling my creative well. I finished my revision of ONEIRA (final title to come) on December 15 and sent it off to my editor. Since then, I’ve taken a break from writing work – very unusual for me. The time has been consumed largely by Christmas prep, travel, visiting family, and doing business like the above crunching of year-end financials. Looking at this, I’ve realized that I’ve been relying on passive well-refilling: hoping that if I simply leave the creative well alone, that the vast water table of the universe will seep in and top that puppy off for me.

And, to some extent, that’s true.

However, I’m realizing I haven’t been following my new tenet of aggressively refilling the well. That would mean finding ways to actively pour juice into that well. And that’s where inspiration comes in. What are my top three?

Media

I’m putting a lot under this heading, much like my sibling-under-the-skin, Murderbot. One thing I have been doing is a full re-read of this excellent series by Martha Wells. Reading books – particularly brilliantly written ones by authors I admire – is a great source of inspiration for me. I also include listening to music under this heading. While road-tripping, I put my music library on All Songs Shuffle, which unearths interesting stuff I haven’t listened to in ages. A Cat Stevens song – The Wind – turned up, so now I’m diving into a full Cat Stevens song shuffle. What an amazing songwriter, to communicate so much in so few words. Finally, I love watching movies for inspiration. I got a great idea just the other night from a movie and now I’m sizzling to write this series. Though it will have to wait, the sparkle of that excitement adds to my overall feeling of creative flow.

Nature

I’m fortunate to live in a beautiful place. My desk overlooks a spectacular view and my morning walk with the dog is replete with huge skies, distant mountains, and beauty of all kinds. I say I’m lucky to have this – and I am! – but I also sought out this place, because being outside in a beautiful place is super important to me. Just living here refills my well.

Silence

Longtime readers probably know that I’m an advocate of silence for creative flow. By this I don’t necessarily mean the absence of ambient sound, though it sometimes means that for me. I’m talking primarily about the silence of the mind, the emptiness that allows creativity to flow in, that enables us to hear the voices scintillating through the veil, telling us their stories. Taking time off from the “noisier” parts of my life has been invaluable for that.

Huh… Turns out I’ve been doing better at aggressively refilling the well than I thought!

Best wishes for an inspiring 2024 for us all!

Stop Waiting for Inspiration

Jeffe Kennedy / September 6, 2023 / Blog, Podcast

Barnes & Noble is offering 25% on preorders for the next 3 days, so if you read on Nook and want a great discount on TWISTED MAGIC, go to B&N and use PREORDER25.

This week at the SFF Seven, we’re talking how to find inspiration when the story won’t come to you.

Did you know the word “inspiration” comes from the Latin inspirare, which means “to breathe into”? Same root as the English word for respiration and other, similar, breathing-related words. It refers to the sense of the divine breathing life into us.

The way creatives use “inspiration,” we usually mean it the way this topic is phrased – that we’re waiting for that divine breath, waiting for that story to come to us.

Stop waiting.

As a creative, YOU are the divine and the story is your creation. Did the gods wait for lifeless clay creatures to somehow totter up to them, requesting the breath of life?

No.

Similarly, those stories are not going to come to you. You must reach out and seize the clay, shape it into what you want it to be, and then for YOU to be the inspiration, to breathe life into the new work.

I know this isn’t the advice you wanted to hear. This isn’t easy. But then, being a Creator never is.

First Cup of Coffee – November 11, 2022

Jeffe Kennedy / November 11, 2022 / Blog, Podcast

I’m back to regular (mostly) podcasting, catching you all up on my activities, talking a bit about voice – how to recognize it and what it means – and asking for input on this midwinter holiday fantasy romance novella.

First Cup of Coffee – October 28, 2022

Jeffe Kennedy / October 28, 2022 / Blog, Podcast

Why I don’t believe in muses and how conflating the experience of writing – joyful or otherwise – with the experience of reading is counterproductive, and how writing turns out the same whether it was fun to write or not.

Jeffe and her Iconic Scene

Jeffe Kennedy / September 28, 2022 / Blog

SHADOW WIZARD releases tomorrow!! Preorder price of $4.99 will be good into tomorrow, then it goes up. (Along with my grocery bill, alas!) The audiobook is being recorded now and should be available in about 2 weeks.

This week at the SFF Seven, we’re asking: Do you have an iconic scene that inspires your writing?

I think most of my stories arise from certain pivotal images. For most every book I’ve written, I can almost certainly identify what the core image was. It’s more than visual, however, and feels more like a snippet of a moment: a character in a situation. For a long time I have had an iconic scene. I started drawing it when was a little girl and it’s found its way into any number of stories over the years. I’ve never quite felt like I fully wrote the story of it, though it’s haunted me less recently, so maybe I’ve come close enough for it to leave me alone.

The scene:

A woman stands on a cliff overlooking the ocean. Waves rise in whitecaps, dashing themselves against the rocks below. A wind off the water blows back her hair and gown. She’s waiting… Perhaps for an enemy to arrive on her shores? That’s my usual feeling. Sometimes a large wolfhound is with her. Sometimes I think she’s a sorceress, other times a queen.

If you’ve read a lot of my books, you’ll probably recognize ways that this scene appears in various forms. I might’ve finally worked it out of my system with the Forgotten Empires trilogy, although it still didn’t feel precisely like that iconic scene. Maybe I’ll wend my way back to it someday!

For the time-being, however, I’ve been in the marshes and woodlands with the denizens of the Renegades of Magic world. SHADOW WIZARD takes us to a new high house (if you’re familiar with the Bonds of Magic trilogy), and increasingly wild adventures. In this book, this snippet of a scene is one of my favorites:

She flung herself against him, embracing him with fierce tenacity, face buried against his neck, her chin digging rather sharply against his collarbone. For a slender, barely-there wraith, Seliah possessed a surprising amount of tensile strength. And she smelled of water in the moonlight, her tough, tense, thin little body vibrating with spiky silver magic, her breasts surprisingly—and distractingly—soft and full pressed against his chest. He couldn’t help a tiny fantasy of how it would feel to be buried inside that intensity, to have that passionate body surging against his, embracing and engulfing.

It’s never going to happen, he told himself firmly.

Are you sure? part of him whispered back slyly.

Yes. Ruthlessly banishing the image, he refused to touch her any more than he already had. Holding his hands out, even more awkward than ever, he kind of waved them around as he waited for the hug to end.

It didn’t. Instead she held on, a buzzing bundle of intoxicating magic and tempting woman. Jadren tried patting her back, thinking maybe that would satisfy her enough to encourage her to go away, but she only purred, snuggling closer, like a cat who’d found the one cat-hater in the room and had no greater goal in life than encamping on his lap forever.