Life, Death, and Long-Term Planning

So... this happened last week, but I hadn't shared here yet. THE TALON OF THE HAWK won Best Fantasy Romance of 2015 in the RT Book Reviews Reviewers’ Choice Awards!!! Look at that amazing company. I'm just thrilled that this book won. Not only because, well - winning! - but because this particular story really gutted me to write and remains a special book for me.
This week's topic in the Bordello is Long Term Plans - when to stick to the script, and when to deviate.

I'm going to tell you all a story. This should come as no surprise.

I should caveat that I have a precarious relationship with long-term planning. I absolutely believe in having a vision for my life. I have many long-term goals - they're simply not tremendously detailed. Those deals where you lay out one-year, five-year, ten-year plans? Mine tend to be along the lines of "visit Maldives, snorkel at Lord Howe Island and be BFFs with Tina Fey." I am decidedly NOT the person who sets salary goals, etc. I've tried. It doesn't work for me.

This is why.

David and I have been dealing with a THING these last weeks. It's not really about us, but it's impacted us both on profound levels. A few years ago, David's brother (who I'll call R for privacy) was diagnosed with lung cancer. A really bad kind. The news hit David particularly hard as it came not long after their father died. A couple of weeks ago, we found out that, after years of treatment and remission, the cancer was back and it didn't look good.

I haven't seen David cry many times, but this was one.

This threw us into a limbo of uncertainty. R was hospitalized a good thousand miles away from us, in a part of the country where it's both ridiculously complicated and outrageously expensive to fly. This means a thirteen-hour road trip. Moving to Santa Fe has come with this price for us. We're no longer a two- to four-hour drive from family. We agonized over what to do. David spent a lot of time on the phone with his other brother and one sister, along with our son, daughter and daughter-in-law. Plans were made and discarded any number of times. We made decisions and changed them as the news changed. David wanted to see his brother, but the brother would be in surgery, or too out of it to see anyone.

This ever-changing window of opportunity, a moving target at the end of a road trip that would consume at least three days, maybe more, was further complicated by a planned trip to Tucson Festival of Books, an eight-hour drive in the other direction. I'd cancel if I had to, but it was a huge professional opportunity for me - I was on a panel with Terry Brooks! - and it was also my mother's birthday. In addition, David just started a new job in Socorro, NM, about two hours south, in an acupuncture practice there. Newly made patient appointments would have to be canceled. We'd make the sacrifice without question, but only if it made sense to do so.

Finally the brother said he most needed to be left alone and not be bombarded with company and we respected that.

We went to Tucson last weekend and it was even better than I'd hoped. Everyone I met was wonderful. And Terry Brooks, one of the most gracious superstar writers I've yet met, read reviews from THE PAGES OF THE MIND to the audience before the panel started and gave me the most incredible boost. David and I had a lovely weekend enjoying the Tucson sunshine. News was that various surgeries had gone well, so all seemed well.

This last Thursday, David was in Socorro when we got the news that all was NOT well - the doctors gave the brother days to live and he was being sent home. Again we made massive plans. David would be back in Santa Fe by midday Friday, we'd drive up to Denver, pick up our daughter and grandkids, drive up to Cheyenne, stay the night with David's sister, then all make the final trip to northern Wyoming. Then a major winter storm hit Colorado on Friday, dumping heavy snow from border to border. We revised the plan to leave super early Saturday morning.

Now, I had tickets to see Amanda Palmer in concert Friday night at the grand opening of Meow Wolf, George R.R. Martin's art complex. I'm one of her patrons on Patreon, so I knew she and Neil Gaiman, another of my writer idols, had been in Santa Fe for over a week. She'd done a Q&A for patrons on Sunday night, but alas - we were in Tucson. When we decided to head to Wyoming on Friday, I scrapped the concert plan. I was going to give them away, but I couldn't find the email. When we scrapped that plan to go early Saturday, I didn't even think about the concert. Staying up late was the last thing we needed and, while I really wanted to meet Amanda, I was ambivalent. The timing felt bad, it seemed unlikely I'd get to talk to her at a gig like that, and the whole meeting-your-heroes thing. I'd had a great experience with Terry Brooks and didn't want to ping the universe for too much, you know?

So we went to bed early, and David and I got up at five am Saturday morning (yesterday), ready to be on the road by six. We turned on our phones to find voice messages that David's brother died during the night. His other brother said we might as well hang tight for funeral plans.

At a loss, up far too early, already caffeinated with no particular plans, we hung around for the morning. It was good, actually, to simply rest. David talked with family a lot. I read a book. I told David anything he wanted to do with the day was good by me. He suggested we go have lobster pizza and wine in the sun at Rooftop Pizza, raise a glass to his brother, and celebrate life.

We headed into town and the historic plaza was mobbed on this beautiful spring break weekend. Our favorite parking lot was full, as was our second favorite. Between the tourist drivers and pedestrians, it took a long time to wend our way back around. Then we nabbed a meter spot a few blocks away - hooray! - and walked to the restaurant. As we approached the street corner where there's this little courtyard area, I saw a redheaded woman changing a baby's diaper and singing.

We continued to cross the street, but I said to David, "I think that's Amanda Palmer."

I wasn't uncertain if I should go say hello, but David talked me into it, saying I'd regret it if I didn't. We crossed back. She'd just finished changing the baby and handed him off to a sunbathing guy who I knew must be Jason Webley.

I said, "Are you Amanda?" She smiled and said yes and I told her I was one of her patrons. She asked if we came to the concert last night and I said no, that we had tickets but... And in there she asked for our names. David had been hanging back, as he figured this for my deal, but I had the strange urge to explain, so I introduced him and said that his brother passed away that night so we didn't make it.

She was genuinely stricken and asked David it was unexpected and he said cancer She told him she'd just lost someone to cancer and that it was the anniversary of her brothers death - and she hugged him, long and hard - like a full minute. It was extraordinary because David doesn't like hugging strangers, but they connected in this and his whole body softened with the shared grief. And it hit me that he'd needed this.

Then we talked about death a little, and how David and I were going to eat lobster pizza and drink wine in the sun. She said that was the perfect thing to do. It was kind of surreal and awesome.

And perfect.

By the time we got up to the balcony a few minutes later, she and her friends had moved on. Our timing had been serendipitous.

You all know how I feel about serendipity.

So all of this is by way of explaining why I'm not much for long-term plans. I'll make them - but I'll also discard them in a flash, because some of the best moments come as gifts from the universe, bestowed on a schedule not our own.

As we ate lunch, we talked about how this is a wonderful thing about living in Santa Fe, that we could run into Amanda Palmer on a street corner. And David said, "now you just need to make Tina Fey be your friend."

Totally in the plan!

And always in the plan to savor this beautiful life we've got.

Jeffe's Top Three Most Memorable Books of 2015

This week on Word Whores, we're discussing the Three Most Memorable Books You Read in 2015.

I like that way of putting it - the most memorable, not necessarily our favorites. It's an interesting lens. However, to do this post, I still started with my Goodreads report for 2015. I like Goodreads for that, how they can give me a decent sample of my reading year. It is, however, only a sample.

I added 47 books so far to Goodreads for 2015, while I have 114 on my personal spreadsheet. This is because I only add the books I'll be rating highly - OR that I didn't read for other reasons, such as for a contest or for crit. Thus, 29 of those 47 have five-star ratings. Definitely a skewed sample.

To determine most memorable reads, then, I looked at my personal spreadsheet. This was fun exercise, because I went through and highlighted the ones that stood out most strongly in my memory. (Or that I remembered at all - several I couldn't dredge up any details in my mind.

I initially highlighted six books as the ones that stood out most. Two were easy to eliminate from my top three because one I DNF'd (did not finish) because I hated it so much. (And it was a much lauded book, so that was just me.) The other I hated because it didn't have an ending. (The author calls it a cliffhanger, but it's really the story stopping in the middle of the arc.) I'm not about the hate, so I didn't want to discuss those. Other people loved those books, so it's all good.

Of the remaining four, I gave Grace Draven's RADIANCE honorable mention. (Though top billing with the cover above.) The main reason for this is, of my top four, two were books not published in 2015, which means I can't nominate them for any awards. For 2016 I'm going to make a concerted effort to prioritize books written in that year, so I *can* give them nominations boosts. Hopefully the new TBR spreadsheet will help with that effort! Anyway, RADIANCE is up for Best Fantasy Romance of 2015, so it's getting love.

Thus, my picks for three most memorable!

THE ART OF ASKING

I loved Amanda Palmer's TED talk on this topic and the book is even better. I've gushed about it in a number of places, especially as jewels come back to me. I really think every creative, and maybe everyone who thinks they aren't creative, should absolutely read this book. If you have an aspiring writer on your holiday list, give them a copy of this book. They'll thank you for it.

PRINCE OF SHADOWS

 I read this book *very* early in 2015, entirely because reader/reviewers I trust recommended it so highly. And WOW! I loved this book so hard. I would never have picked it up on my own from the description. It's a retelling of Romeo and Juliet from Benvolio's point of view, which does nothing to tell you how freaking compelling this book is. Just ... go read it and then we can squeal together, okay?








THE BEST OF ALL POSSIBLE WORLDS

 This is another book I picked up on recommendation. Okay, the recommendation might have said something like "slow burn romance with a Spock hero" and I was instantly sold. What can I say? Star Trek shaped my pre-adolescent brain and I'm weak. Then the opening blew me away. It's a wonderful, unusual science fiction story. I can't praise it enough.

Three Inspiring Thoughts on Writing

Before I share my three favorite quotes about writing, I have to twirl a bit over my big news this week. THE TALON OF THE HAWK was nominated for Best Fantasy Romance of 2015 in the RT Book Reviews Reviewers Choice Awards! I'm so honored to be in the company of such amazing writers, many of whom are my very favorites from way back. Such a thrill!

My three favorite quotes about writing.

There is in each of us an upwelling spring of life, energy, love, whatever you like to call it. If a course is not cut for it, it turns the ground around it into a swamp. ~Mark Rutherford

I found this quote in the book WALKING ON ALLIGATORS, a book of meditations for writers, by Susan Shaunghnessy, which I bought back in 1993 when I first set my cap to being a writer instead of (or, in addition to, as it turned out) being a scientist. I've come back to this quote over and over, to explain to myself why I get depressed if my breaks from writing are too long. Ye olde swamp. Yes, exactly.

Tons of great quotes in that book - I highly recommend!

Take the donuts!

Okay, if you haven't read Amanda Palmer's THE ART OF ASKING, you won't get this. Also, this is an amazing book for any kind of creative. Maybe for anyone at all! Seriously, this book lit up my life and answered questions I didn't even know I had. Anyway, she explains this so much better than I could, that I'm copying from the book. Some of this might not make sense because she references previous thought threads, but that's all the more reason to read the book!

Thoreau wrote in painstaking detail about how he chose to remove himself from society to live by his own means in a little ten-by-fifteen-foot hand-hewn cabin on the side of a pond. What he left out of Walden, though, was the fact that the land he built on was borrowed from his wealthy neighbor, that his pal Ralph Waldo Emerson had him over for dinner all the time, and that every Sunday, Thoreau’s mother and sister brought him a basket of freshly baked goods for him, including donuts.

The idea of Thoreau gazing thoughtfully over the expanse of transcendental Walden Pond, a bluebird alighting onto his threadbare shoe, all the while eating donuts that his mom brought him just doesn’t jibe with most people’s picture of him as a self-reliant, noble, marrow-sucking back-to-the-woods folk hero. In the book An Underground Education, Richard Zacks declares: Let it be known that Nature Boy went home on weekends to raid the family cookie jar.

Thoreau also lived at Walden for a total of two or three years, but he condensed the book down to a single year, the four seasons, to make the book flow better, to work as a piece of art, and to best reflect his emotional experience.

Taking the donuts is hard for a lot of people.

It’s not the act of taking that’s so difficult, it’s more the fear of what other people are going to think when they see us slaving away at our manuscript about the pure transcendence of nature and the importance of self-reliance and simplicity. While munching on someone else’s donut.

Maybe it comes back to that same old issue: we just can’t see what we do as important enough to merit the help, the love. Try to picture getting angry at Einstein devouring a donut brought to him by his assistant while he sat slaving on the theory of relativity. Try to picture getting angry at Florence Nightingale for snacking on a donut while taking a break from tirelessly helping the sick. It’s difficult.

So, a plea.

To the artists, creators, scientists, nonprofit-runners, librarians, strange-thinkers, start-uppers, and inventors, to all people everywhere who are afraid to accept the help, in whatever form it’s appearing:

Please, take the donuts.

To the guy in my opening band who was too ashamed to go out into the crowd and accept money for his band:

Take the donuts.

To the girl who spent her twenties as a street performer and stripper living on less than $700 a month, who went on to marry a best-selling author whom she loves, unquestioningly, but even that massive love can’t break her unwillingness to accept his financial help, please…

Everybody.

Please.

Just take the fucking donuts.

And my most recent favorite, that I have tacked up next to my desk:

What would you write if you weren't afraid?

This one isn't cited to anyone that I can find. It's interesting because when I mention it to some people, they come right back with "I'm not afraid of anything!" Which is great. More power to them. Other people though, particularly well-established, multi-published authors, nod and say, "Oh, yes." It's not fear precisely, but that works well as a good umbrella term. It's caution. It's those voices of the marketplace whispering that something like it has been done. Or has never been done. It's the comments of critique partners warning that readers won't like something. It's the ever-present doubt in one's own instincts.

Whenever I hesitate on going somewhere in a story, I look a that quote.

And I write as if I'm not afraid.

Working Up My TED Talk

I always say that one of the best perks of being an author is befriending other authors I love to read. Here's me and the amazing Jennifer Estep at the RT Convention. I have mad love for her assassin heroine Gin and her Elemental Assassin series. And not only because she's up to 14 books in that series. The woman is a powerhouse. Dayum. We got to sit and have a long conversation, which is just my favorite things about conventions - picking each others' brains, hearing other perspectives on both our art and the business.

It's like having a week's worth of intimate TED talks.

I'm fascinated by TED talks and listen to/watch them over the internet from time to time. Which is saying a lot because I really don't like to spend the chunks of time that can require. My days are pretty packed and stuff like that feels like a diversion from the work I need to accomplish. But I also love the concept - "Ideas Worth Spreading" - and some of the talks have really opened my mind. Some favorites are Amanda Palmer's The Art of Asking, Stella Young's incisive breakdown of "Inspiration Porn," Eli Pariser's eye-opening discussion of online "filter bubbles," and Elizabeth Gilbert's wonderful discussion of creative genius.

(Apologies if I just sent you down a rabbit hole of TED talk watching...)

At any rate, I contemplate sometimes what I would say, given the opportunity to give my own TED talk, which is why I suggested this topic for the Bordello. I figured it would make me think about it in a more focused way and I want to hear what the other Word Whores would say.

But when I sat down to write this post, I still didn't have a clear idea. I have about ten-thousand pieces, but not a single, concise thought. Which left me feeling daunted until I realized that's partly what the TED process is about. A colleague of mine - from the day job - did a local one on drinking water. She told me that she worked and reworked her talk with extensive coaching from the TED people. They kept telling her that they didn't really feel her passion for clean drinking water and that it was a revelatory process for her to dig into what that really meant to her.

The point then, I suppose, is that I wouldn't need a perfectly clear concept to begin with. That's how essay-writing always worked for me. I started with a nugget of an idea, a pivotal moment, and explored it. That's how I cemented my process of writing for discovery, no doubt.

I think I'd want to talk about balance, the concept of the middle path. In my bio, I used to say that I'm a fence-sitter - something I later took out because people interpreted that as me being indecisive, neither here nor there, which isn't very accurate. No, by that I mean that I'm a right-down-the-middle person. On most tests, I come out balanced. I'm equally right- and left-brained. My writing voice is equally male and female. I'm neither Type A nor Type B, but an equal measure of both. Though I come out as an INTJ on the Meyers-Briggs test, I'm mildly so on all four parts and could easily tip into the opposite designation.

Which is why it should be no surprise that I'm both a scientist and a writer of romance and fantasy. Once I told my agent a true story that involved me using a pendulum to dowse and how I inadvertently caught the attention of something vengeful and not-quite human. He exclaimed, "My God, Jeffe - you're a scientist!"

Yes, I am.

And as such, I'm a believer in empirical evidence. This is why I double-majored in college, in biology and comparative religious studies (another two-sided aspect) - because I see both sides of the world. That which is material and that which is immaterial.

That is what I'd talk about.

Wouldn't it be fun if I got to, someday?

Crushing on Neil & Amanda

by Jeffe Kennedy

I'm not hugely into celebrity crushes. Some of the blogger gals do boyfriend of the week. Sister bordello-occupant Allison Pang has her Midnight Man Candy. There are actors I particularly like, but looking at the pretty pictures just doesn't do all that much for me.

I need a story.

I know, I know - I'm such a girl.

See, even this meme with Ryan Gosling doesn't really light me up. They are funny, with the "Hey Girl..." followed by some sort of impossible female fantasy. There's even one on Twitter now for the Gosling Literary Agency, with the profile tag line: Hey Girl, your manuscript made me cry. I can see how they're amusing, with lines like Hey Girl, gonna negotiate your contract now. No, no, you go get a coffee. I can't...I don't want you to hear me raise my voice.

But this is the one that grabs my little writer-girl heart:


I admit it: I have a total crush on Neil Gaiman. More, I have an uncharacteristically bi-crush on both him and his wife, Amanda Fucking Palmer. If you know nothing about her, watch this video at least. It's not entirely safe for work, though it's all suggestive with nothing really showing.



I love that these two very different, creative and off-beat artists found each other. I think that it's great that they managed to put together this marriage where they're both off intensely doing their own things.

I confess that I worry about them.

This is the true celebrity crush, I think, where I feel like I know these two. Like they're already my friends. And, like the worst of nosy friends, I worry about them. I want to ask if they spend enough time together. Are they happy? I want to invite them over for wine and dinner so we can all dish about our latest projects.

I read their blogs and mentally respond.

When they were in Santa Fe visiting George R.R. Martin and I didn't find out until afterwards, I felt irrationally hurt. I mean - they could have called!

Still and all, I don't think this kind of this is particularly unhealthy. It's good to have people who embody certain goals for us. In the past, it used to be the nobility, the kings and queens and descending royals who we admired and emulated. Or the church elders or great philosophers. Today the pundits snark that our new royalty are the Hollywood stars, implying that these are empty people to look to.

I'm not sure it's wrong. It's all part of the fantasy, crushing on the hot guy, fantasizing about being as beautiful as Keira Knightly, thinking that Johnny Depp would probably totally fall for me, if he only just took the time to get to know me. That Ryan Gosling would make the best literary agent ever.

And, you know, if Neil and Amanda had just called me, I would totally have had them over for dinner.

It would have been a wonderful evening, too.