Tag: Phantom

Master of the Opera – Act 1 is Free!

Jeffe Kennedy / / Blog

Free Read, Contemporary Romance, Erotic Romance, Phantom of the Opera Lots of exciting news to share today! First of all, Act 1 of Master of the Opera, Passionate Overture, is FREE everywhere!
Here’s a few links to download that puppy:

ARe
Blio
Books on Board
Google Play
Kobo
Nook
Amazon

Also, Act 3: Phantom Serenade is releasing on Thursday, February 6. You can read an excerpt here at the Contemporary Romance Cafe!

 Master of the Opera Act 3 600

Finally, Act V: A Haunting Duet, is available for review on Net Galley!! As always, if you have trouble getting approved, tag me somewhere and let me know. I have a WIDGET (one widget to rule them all!) that you can use.Master of the Opera Act 5 600

In Which I Catch You Up on ALL THE NEWS

Jeffe Kennedy / / Blog

eK lunchAnother photo from the RT Convention. This is me (in the yellow hat, if you don’t know) going out for barbeque with the eKensington group. I’m standing next to Alexandra Nicolajsen, who is the Digital Content/Marketing Manager for Kensington. The rest are other authors, except for the lady kneeling by the pig’s snout. That’s Alicia Condon, Editorial Director of Kensington’s Brava line. Just in case any of you want to stalk her at a conference. 😉

I feel like I have a lot of news to catch up on. I’ve been posting things in dribs and drabs, but I’m not sure where I posted what or who I told which thing. So, it seems like a Fridayish, wrap-the-week up kind of thing to list it all here. Forgive me if this is stuff you all already know.

So…

RUBY, Book 3 in the Facets of Passion series, releases on Monday!!!!Ruby_final  There have been a lot of great reviews already, so I’m really excited for this one to hit the world. I’ve also been giving copies away on Twitter this week to people who sing back the songs to me when I post lyrics. Pretty fun! Maybe I should do it on Facebook, too?

Along those lines, Book 4 in Facets of Passion, ORO, will be in Carina Press’s erotic holiday anthology coming out in December that Angela James is editing. I’m just thrilled about that, especially about the stellar writers I’ll be keeping company with: Christine d’Abo, Jodie Griffin and newbie writers to Carina, Elise Logan and Emily Ryan-Davis.

 This weekend (starting today, in fact) is the Southwest Book Fiesta. I’ll be hanging at a booth with my local chapter, the gals from LERA. I’m the Featured Author at the booth from 11 to 12 Saturday, May 11, and again from 5 to 6. Also, at 2pm, I’ll be on a panel with some other romance authors, including the fabulously famous New York Times Bestselling Author Miss Darynda Jones. I fully intend to bask in any glory she happens to reflect.

By way of promoting the Book Fiesta, I was interviewed on local TV. It’s kind of fun to watch – and very brief!

When I was at the World Fantasy Convention last fall, I met this Australian gal, Em Craven, who has a popular website called the E-book Revolution. She later interviewed me via Skype and posted the podcast recently. It’s about an hour long, but we had a really interesting conversation. She comes at things from a more fantasy/science-fiction perspective, a group of readers who’ve been oddly slow in embracing eBooks, especially as compared to the romance community.

In other news, I have confirmation now that my modern retelling of The Phantom of the Opera will officially be called MASTER OF THE OPERA. It will come out in January 2014, in six digital episodes, releasing every two weeks. SO interested to see how it’s received. I’m working on edits for it now and having a great time with my new Kensington editor, Peter Senftleben.

After that, Book 1 of The Twelve Kingdoms will come out in trade paperback in June 2014, with Book 2 in December. Book 1 is the one I called The Middle Princess, but that title will change. The spin-off story Negotiation, a prequel to the trilogy, will be out in an anthology, THUNDER ON THE BATTLEFIELD, Volume II,  in June – eBook first, followed by mass-market paperback.

I’m auctioning off two things in Brenda Novak’s big online auction to benefit diabetes research. One is a one-on-one mentorship with me, for you aspiring writers out there. The other is the opportunity to have a meal (your choice, as schedules allow) at the RWA convention in Atlanta with me and the fabulous Carolyn Crane. We’ll treat and you can bring one friend along – or keep us all to yourself! – and dish with you on any topic you like.

Finally – and this is funny – I’ve been talked into having a Street Team. For those who don’t know, this is just a loose association of readers who want to pimp my books to the world. Because this concept always makes me think of Westside Story, the team is officially the Jeffe Jets. Yes, you can absolutely sing the theme song and I think we *have* to get the jackets at some point. At any rate, if you want to play, let me know. If you want to coordinate, even better because I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing.

Whew! I think that’s everything. A lot, right?

Have a great weekend, everyone!

Nourishing Creativity – an Ode to Polton Elementary School and My Mother

Jeffe Kennedy / / Blog

BGtv6rUCUAEdv_PWith the Phantom book finished, I spent time in the garden this weekend. Most restorative to work with my hands and body, to clear away the old detritus, coax the perennials into shape and plant new flowers. And clean up the gargoyle. She’s watching over the pansies for me.

And, as of yesterday, I started in on developmental edits for Rogue’s Possession. For those who aren’t familiar with the lingo, those are the first round of edits. My editor just sends me an email describing some global changes she’s looking for. Add tension to the beginning, tighten the ending. Here are some suggestions. That sort of thing. Some of you may recall she’d originally asked for April 3 on those (dies laughing), but now we’re trying for April 15. I think I can do that.

My mom complains that I make my childhood sound awful when I reflect on my growing up. I suspect this is because our painful experiences are the ones that really spur us to change – or, at least, that’s how we remember it.

Yesterday one of my crit partners sent me the TED talk by Elizabeth Gilbert on the creative spark. You might remember it from early 2009, when it was really making the rounds on the internet. My friend, however, must have been under a rock at the time and missed it. The talk really resonated with her – as it did for many of us – and I watched it again, to be able to discuss some of the finer points. Surprising to me: I heard very different things in it this time, after dedicating so much of the last four years to my own writing.

My friend had come across the talk because I’d sent her this one, by Ken Robinson on how schools kill creativity. One story he tells is about Gillian Lynne, who was failing out of school at age 8 – until her principal recognized that she was a natural dancer. Her mother sent her to dance school instead, and Gillian became a success instead of an academic failure. My friend asked me if I thought my schooling had killed or nurtured my creativity.

Something I’d never once thought about.

I mean, I’ve mentioned my early schooling from time to time. How I went to an experimental school in the early 70s, with team teaching, no desks and open space classrooms. Mostly I have made fun of it (Magic Circle where we shared our feelings) or criticized it (the famous ordeal of my stepfather having to teach me the multiplication tables because I’d been pulled out into a special program and then plunged back into long division without knowing how to multiply). My stepfather was a vice-principal in a neighboring school district that was not experimental and he often complained about the gaps in my traditional education. 

But thinking back now… wow.

That special program that caused me to miss multiplication? (Which, by the way, took less than a week for me to make up.) I spent that third grade year with fourth, fifth and sixth graders, traveling around Colorado and learning about western history. Now I realize how much that year opened my mind to the range of human experience. Women like Baby Doe Tabor and Molly Brown became larger than life to me. That time instilled in me an appreciation for the concept of the frontier, of struggle, of the desire for wealth and success and the crushing effects of defeat.

My teachers were good to me at that school. They let me read in class when I was bored with the assignment. They gave me special projects to work on. Instead of smacking me down for being a smart ass (because, oh yes, I was one even then), they encouraged me to channel that energy. I found it funny, often, that they were always concerned that I not get bored, but now I see – I was never bored. My teachers found ways to challenge, stimulate and open my mind.

And my creativity.

I sometimes joke that I have such an eclectic approach to life. In college I double-majored in biology and religious studies, with enough credits to minor in theater. I ended up in grad school for neurophysiology, work as an environmental consultant and now write fantasy and romance novels.

I’m realizing now that this is their gift to me. That my early schooling did nourish my creativity. My mom bought a house near this school so I could go there and it made an amazing difference for me.

What a wonderful gift this was.

On Being Done – In So Many Ways

Jeffe Kennedy / / Blog

3_27 2Jackson has figured out how to get up inside the TV cabinet. He’s still not sure why we stare at that screen, however.

So, the Good News? I finished the book!!!!

(Cue screams of joy from fans and various expressions of relief and eyerolling from family and friends.)

The Bad News?

Wow, am I tired!

Not really physically tired, just emptied out. It’s really amazing, this writing-a-novel thing – it really does feel like running a marathon. (Or so I presume, not being the kind of gal who has EVER run a marathon.) Even working at a measured and even pace, by the end it feels like I’m creating an enormous soap bubble. Every day I add a bit more air, expanding it, steadying it, letting it grow larger and larger. And in the final days, I detach it from my wand and it floats away, leaving me hollow.

It’s a peculiar feeling. It’s like I have no thoughts at all.

If I could – and maybe one day when I get organized about this writer gig, I will – I’d plan for a week-long vacation post-deadline. I’d love to just go hang by a pool somewhere, order drinks from cabana boys and let myself gradually refill.

At any rate, that’s all I’ve got in me for a blog post today. I looked at my long list of very interesting potential topics and my writing brain did that thing like when your car battery is nearly dead. It kind of started to turn over, sputtered and went quiet.

Somebody send cabana boys. Stat.

Upping the Wordcount and Keeping the Faith

Jeffe Kennedy / / Blog

2_27_13Jackson, in a post-breakfast stupor. Not that any of us can relate to this.

Regular readers know I’ve been plugging away on the Phantom e-Serial. I’ve got another month to finish it, which sounds like a lot that way, but when you realize that’s 31 days, it sounds much worse. Still, I have it in hand, I believe. I’ve been working fairly steadily at about 1,675 words/day. That puts me finishing around March 24 – with a week to spare for revising. Fortunately the CPs all took a look at the first half – while I took a week-long break and wrote a new Facets of Passion story for a Christmas anthology (I hope) – and they all liked it! They really liked it!! (Cue Sally Fields Oscar gif.)

For you math whizzes out there, that rate is, yes, around NaNoWriMo levels. A while back, I never thought I could steadily produce at that rate while working full time. Amazing how things change! Last month – ooh, on February 1, even! it’s like a recurring THEME – I posted my cumulative wordcount numbers. I’ve been tracking my weekly and monthly numbers lately, to better understand how I work.

March weekly wordcounts

Here’s the chart of my weekly wordcounts. The first and last “weeks” of February are a bit artificially low, as they were partial weeks. Still, that second to last week of February, I hit 20K, which might be a personal best. (I haven’t been tracking weekly counts long enough to be sure.) I got there via a vacation day and a holiday, plus a solid weekend of work, to write that new Facets of Passion story. I like how I can see my rate increase through the month, however. This week was down, due to dealing with family illness and travel. I was feeling kind of bad about that, until I saw my monthly stats.

March monthly wordcountsYes, I just made 50K for February, which I’ve only done once before. Plus, as the lovely Laura Bickle generously pointed out, it was a short month. It will be interesting to see what March and April bring. I predict March will be another high month and April will drop considerably, because I’ll be revising two novels in that month. Editing time makes for poor metrics – even if you count pages revised and you’re clipping along at 30/day, that looks kind of pitiful. I need a way to weight that. Hmmm…

Oh! And the other fun news is that a spin-off story from the upcoming fantasy trilogy (The Twelve Kingdoms) has been accepted to a sword and sorcery anthology! Former Word Whore James R. Tuck is editing. CP Marcella Burnard will have a story in there, too, so it should be loads of fun. Turns out they’ll do two volumes of the anthology. She and I, of course, wrote very female-centric stories (not usually the thing for sword and sorcery), so we’re curious to see if Tuck divides the volumes by male/female, which would be interesting. It should be out in June, so we’ll keep you apprised!

Another Lesson in Persistence

Jeffe Kennedy / / Blog

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAYesterday I went on a backstage tour of the Santa Fe Opera.

Yes, it was super cool.

I wanted to see the backstage to help shore up details for my Phantom book. For new readers, I’m writing an updating of The Phantom of the Opera, which will take place at the Santa Fe Opera House. I’ve only been as a member of the audience. My heroine, however, works backstage. Now, I’ve been fictionalizing my little heart out, but I really wanted a sense of the reality of backstage – even if I decided to disregard it.

The thing is, the opera only offers official backstage tours in the summertime. My manuscript is due April 1 (no joke). So, if I really wanted to see backstage before I finished writing the damn book, I needed to find Another Way.

And not breaking-in, either.

Although that would be fun, too.

I had done the obvious – called and emailed the contacts on the website. Nobody replied. Thus I began working connections. Santa Fe is not a big town and the influx of staff and performers for the summer opera season is substantial. Still, I had trouble finding someone who knew anyone.

Could be I don’t run in circles that are rarified enough.

Finally, after growing tired of hearing me whine about it, David suggested I ask our next-door neighbor if she had connections. Susan is a sculptor, but she’s also into the theater scene. Plus she’d been getting me to help her with her luminarias (this was before Christmas), so she totally owed me.

I asked her if she had a connection. She said she might and to nag her about it if she didn’t get back to me. She didn’t. But, a couple weeks after Christmas, she invited us over for dinner. Over the meal, we ended up talking about my recent book deals. When I told her about the Phantom e-serial and the subsequent three-book print deal with Kensington, she said “Wait – isn’t this a big deal? The kind of thing all writers want?!?”

Yes. Yes it is.

~does a little dance of gratitude~

I have had this conversation numerous times, with various people, by the way. But that’s another topic.

At any rate, she tells me she did mention my desire for a backstage tour to a friend who was connected, but the friend didn’t seem enthused. However, Susan hadn’t told her this was a Big Deal. So she gave me the gal’s email address and told me to write her and explain this wasn’t a whim on my part.

I emailed the gal. And heard nothing.

But, because my email address comes from my JeffeKennedy.com domain, it sometimes gets blocked or sent to spam. At the very least, it gives me the excuse to nag people in case this has happened. So, after a week of nothing, I resent the email from another account, apologizing if it was a double and explaining the possible spam thing.

This time she replied – though did not say if she’d gotten it before. She said that, “as she’d told Susan,” she couldn’t help me and to call the Press and Public Relations Office at the opera.

Yeah, I was kind of bummed. Sure I was back to the very beginning. But I called, since I hadn’t called that specific number before. And, lo and behold, the office director called me back. She sounded suspicious at first, but warmed quickly.

Of course they could give me a special tour, she says.

Of course.

So, after two months of trying, I was in. And yesterday – after a couple of postponements – David and I went for the personal tour. I took lots of pictures, too.

I’ll still make a lot of stuff up, but it was great to soak up the feel of the place. Also, to ask my Many Questions.

That persistence thing, I tell you guys – it really pays off

Song Mash-ups and Fun Ways of Looking at Story Structure

Jeffe Kennedy / / Blog

Isabel 1_22_13Tomorrow is Isabel’s 7th birthday, so this is her birthday portrait.

I’ve been working diligently on the Phantom story, laying down the words, working up the story. (I feel really hip saying it like that, like “laying down the tracks.” I’ve been kind of obsessed with Pitch Perfect and how songs mash-up. That, however, is probably a different, but related post.)

It’s been interesting because, as you may or may not recall, this will be an eSerial. The story will be broken into six parts, released 2-4 weeks apart. I’m surprised at how much this feels like a new form to me. Normally I set up my story according the classic three-act structure. If you aren’t familiar, that means the Act I climax occurs around 25%, the midpoint or story hinge around 50%, the Act II climax at 75%, Act III climax at ~90% followed by denouement and assorted wrap-up. The simplest explanation I’ve heard for the three acts is: get your protagonist up a tree, throw rocks at him/her, get him or her down again. With the Phantom story, I figured out my overall arc and then set up mini-arcs for each episode as well. It makes for an interesting rhythm.

Lest you think I actually plot things out ahead of time, however, let me disabuse you of that notion immediately. I don’t. I can’t, really. I’m a write-for-discovery kind of gal and I seem to be unable to figure out the story any other way.  I’m at peace with that. The writers who extensively plot and outline ahead of time usually call this “pantsing” as in “flying by the seat of your pants.” I don’t much like this term. I think it says more about their fear of being out of control than anything salient about my method.

I was realizing, as I worked up this new structure, that this is like stretching canvas for me. I have painter friends and I love to watch them prepare canvas. One taught me how, so I could easily transport one of his paintings home and re-stretch it. They assemble the wooden frame to a particular size, choose the type of canvas they want, pull it tight over the frame and staple or nail it on. Then they add various gessos or other foundations, depending on their plans. (At this point I get fuzzy on the details.)

This is how setting up the story is for me: choosing the size, the foundation, with a sense of how it will eventually look. Then I paint the picture.

The other really cool thing I discovered is how my structures interweave. Oh look, I’m back to the mash-up thing. Guess it IS related. See, if you don’t know, a mash-up is when they take two or more different songs and weave them together. They might share a rhythm line and then the melodies work around each other, playing in counterpoint and blending, creating an entirely new song. Forgive me if I’m getting terms wrong, because I’m just not very good at understanding music. I *want* to understand, so I listen intently to this kind of thing, wanting to organically GET how this works.

An old boyfriend once cited the fact that I listen to the same songs over and over again as one factor in him dumping me. I can see that. But I also see how my tendency to get fixated on something like this also contributes to my understanding of other things. I didn’t get why I’ve been listening to the Pitch Perfect mash-ups on iPod over and over until just now.

My story is working the same way. Okay – if you hate math, leave now. But this is an example of what I found out. If I do 6 15K episodes, that’s 90K, give or take. That’s my overall frame. The Act I climax of the overall story takes place then around 22,500 words. That’s in the second episode. By the end of Act I, I should have my protagonist thoroughly up a tree – all the story clues and components should be in place. If I look at the internal structure of Episode 2, the midpoint, the story hinge, where things really change direction, occurs at 7,500 words into the 15K episode (halfway), which is at 22,500 words overall. Do you see? The overall Act I climax will be the SAME EVENT as the Episode 2 midpoint!

Isn’t that cool??

Just me?

If it were a musical mash-up, it would be that point where the two songs spiral up together and hit that came climactic note, for one harmonious moment.

We’ll see if it works like I hope it will. Off to paint in some images!

Another Reason Writing More Books is Better

Jeffe Kennedy / / Blog

1_10One of my Twitter friends mentioned how worked up she is about her new release. She asked if authors get used to it and how long the excitement lasts after release for more-established authors. A week? Two?

I replied to her and we had an interesting conversation about it. Then, yesterday, I saw on Goodreads that – overnight – over a hundred people had added Platinum to their “To Read” lists. This is a really fun thing to wake up and see. I Tweeted about it, wondering why the sudden surge. Several people suggested possibilities – very likely that it was cited on some high-traffic list – but I haven’t figured it out yet.

Then I went back to work on the Phantom book.

And this, I think, it what makes all the difference between authors of one books and authors of multiple books. The more books you have out there, the more books you’re writing, the less ability you have to obsess over one.

For example, with Goodreads, when I log on – and it’s one of my default pages for when I open Firefox – I have a sidebar that shows my stuff. At the top is my Author Dashboard, which shows my most recent publication. That’s Platinum right now, which is why I immediately notice the numbers. It shows me the cover, how many people have added it, how many rankings and how many reviews. To see more detail than that, or my other books, I have to click and go to the page. I rarely do this, because I think it’s putting my attention on the wrong things. (The main reason I have Goodreads on default is to remind me to update my status on whatever I’m currently reading – also in the sidebar.)

Now that Platinum pops up on that home page, I don’t see the Rogue’s Pawn ranking and review numbers anymore. It makes me move on, regardless of how well a book is performing.

The other thing I notice, now that I have seven fiction publications out there, is that different readers like different stories. We all go into this *knowing* that, but it’s difficult to keep in mind when a reader doesn’t like YOUR book. The perspective gets infinitely better when they don’t like this one, but do like that one.

So, all those times industry folks say the best thing you can do is write more stories? This is yet another reason why.