A Year Ahead with Jeffe

This week at the SFF Seven we're taking a look at the future! We're asking: "What does your writing life look like for the upcoming year?" That includes book releases, WIP’s, retreats, cons, signings, etc. 

I just had my annual planning call with my agent, Sarah Younger at NYLA, yesterday and my year ahead is looking pretty damn busy!

Book Releases

First release of 2022 is the audiobook of DARK WIZARD, Book #1 in Bonds of Magic. This is Baby's First Self-Published Audiobook (TM) and I couldn't be more delighted about it! Book #2, BRIGHT FAMILIAR, and Book #3, GREY MAGIC, will also be releasing in audiobook this year, probably in March for both. Whee! 

Next up is GREY MAGIC, the current WIP, slated to be out February 28. After that, the long awaited finale, THE STORM PRINCESS AND THE RAVEN KING, Book #4 in Heirs of Magic, will be out in April (I hope!)

Those are my only slated releases at this point, but there's lots more coming!

WIP's

GREY MAGIC, then THE STORM PRINCESS AND THE RAVEN KING, as mentioned above. 

Does it count as a WIP if it's out on submission? I have one of those out.

I'm going to finish a science fantasy I started two years ago. Super excited to get that out!

I may be doing a ghostwriting project :D

I'd like to begin a new trilogy in the Bonds of Magic world.

I have a new shiny idea that I'd love to write, that Sarah is excited about too!

If this sounds like more than one person can humanly write, it probably is. Ever in motion is the future!

Retreats

I don't do retreats because I do my best writing at home.

Cons

I'll be attending SFWA's Nebula Conference in May!

Also the Jack Williamson Lectureship in April, Apollycon in July, maybe ChiCon in September and possibly World Fantasy Con in November. 

Signings, etc.

Dependent on in-person events - cross our fingers!!

Confronting Failure - and Learning from It!

Did you see the cover for THE LOST PRINCESS RETURNS yet? I'm so in love with it for so many reasons, but mainly because it so perfectly captures Jenna/Ivariel in my mind. Especially everything she's feeling about returning to Dasnaria after all this time.

I'm glad everyone nagged me to write this story! The novella turned out to be a short novel, and releases June 29. You can preorder at the links below at a special sale price or here. Yes, there will be a print version; it should be available for preorder later this week.

Our actual topic at the SFF Seven this week is confronting failure. Not just the occasional downturns of fortune which is the lot of every writer, but also being able to take an honest look at what is just not working.

I recently signed up to be mentored during SFWA's Nebula Conference. (Salient note: because the conference was online this year, we've been able to keep it going. For a reduced price, you can avail yourself of the recorded panels and workshops, along with ongoing chats and discussions!) I've always volunteered to mentor others, and I've always joked that I *want* a mentor. While I know I have an enviable level of success compared to many, I'm also invested in evaluating what's NOT working in my career (Spoiler: I am not a millionaire) and how I can do better. I ended up having a fantastic conversation with Laura Anne Gilman. She took my questions and ramblings very seriously and gave me some great ideas for how I could "level up," career-wise. (She did say she thought "leveling up" applied mainly to craft, and I could see her point.) Amusingly enough, by the end of the conversation, she said she needed to write down some of her wise insights for herself.

I think taking a hard look at what is not working for us career-wise is just as important as taking those hard looks at why a manuscript won't sell or isn't grabbing people.

That kind of work never ends!

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  Or Buy the ebook Direct from Jeffe

More than two decades have gone by since Imperial Princess Jenna, broken in heart and body, fled her brutal marriage—and the land of her birth. She’s since become Ivariel: warrior, priestess of Danu, trainer of elephants, wife and mother. Wiser, stronger, happier, Ivariel has been content to live in her new country, to rest her battered self, and to recover from the trauma of what happened to her when she was barely more than a girl.

But magic has returned to the world—abruptly and with frightening force—and Ivariel takes that profound change as a sign that it’s time to keep a promise she made to the sisters she left behind. Ivariel must leave the safety she’s found and return to face the horrors she fled.

As Ivariel emerges from hiding, she discovers that her vicious brother is now Emperor of Dasnaria, and her much-hated mother, the Dowager Empress Hulda, is aiding him in his reign of terror. Worse, it seems that Hulda’s resurrection of the tainted god Deyrr came about as a direct result of Jenna’s flight long ago.

It’s up to Ivariel—and the girl she stopped being long ago—to defeat the people who cruelly betrayed her, and to finally liberate her sisters. Determined to cleanse her homeland of the evil that nearly destroyed her, Ivariel at last returns to face the past.

But this time, she’ll do it on her own terms.

Which Should Jeffe Vote For?

Our topic here at the SFF Seven this week is: books vs movies vs games vs comics.

I suppose that, with everyone hanging out at home, social distancing all responsibly, we've all been indulging in our media of choice.

For me it's books and movies. I tried comics - grudgingly - and they just never quite grabbed me. In college a couple of my artist friends set to convincing me to love graphic novels. I still have the copy of Maus by Art Spiegelman that one gave me. I found the combination of drawings and stories powerful. One of my roommates took me out for dinner at our favorite Chinese restaurant as a bribe for me to sit and read a graphic novel. (One of the Dark Knights? I don't remember.) I enjoyed it, yes, and groked why he loved it. (Plus, the crab Rangoon was amazing.) But it never led to me picking up more.

Much later in life, I acquired the Sandman Box Set by Neil Gaiman, which I also love. At least, I love the first book, Preludes & Nocturnes. I confess - with a fair amount of chagrin - that I've never gotten around to reading the rest. It's not that I don't want to, it's just that... I haven't felt compelled. I've found it takes a while to wrap my brain into reading text that weaves around images. I enjoy it, but I love plain reading more.

Because it's not that I don't read at all. I've read 41 books so far in 2020, and I've read all or part of all the 2019 SFWA Nebula Finalists for Novels. (I'm still reading as I have until the 31st.)

Games... I just have never gotten into them. I don't know why. Could be for the same reason as graphic novels? I'd rather have text than images. Even with movies, I think I don't appreciate them visually like many film buffs do.

In fact, this is where you all can help me. I have no idea which game writer to vote for in the Nebulas, and have no way of deciding. Which should I vote for from these?

Best Game Writing 

Outer Wilds by Kelsey Beachum, published by Mobius Digital
The Outer Worlds by Leonard Boyarsky, Kate Dollarhyde, Paul Kirsch, Chris L’Etoile, Daniel McPhee, Carrie Patel, Nitai Poddar, Marc Soskin, and Megan Starks, published by Obsidian Entertainment
The Magician’s Workshop by Kate Heartfield, published by Choice of Games
Disco Elysium by Robert Kurvitz, published by ZA/UM
Fate Accessibility Toolkit by Elsa Sjunneson-Henry, published by Evil Hat Productions

Feel free to offer suggestions in the other categories, too. Cheers to you all!

Remembering Vonda McIntyre

Our topic at the SFF Seven this week is In Memoriam: a tribute to a writer you admire who has left us.

At SFWA's Nebula Conference in May, I was privileged to moderate a panel to remember Vonda McIntyre, her life and work. I was super excited about the opportunity because I'd never gotten a chance to meet Vonda - who died after a sudden illness in March 2019 - something I greatly regretted because her work had been so formative for me. The panelists were Asimov's editor Sheila Williams and authors Eileen Gunn and Connie Willis.

I figured that it didn't matter if I was kind of an impostor, since I couldn't personally contribute to remembering Vonda, since all I had to do was turn those powerful women loose on the topic.

Turns out, they all felt similarly - that they hadn't known Vonda as well as they'd have liked, and felt inadequate to the task of memorializing her. Eileen had known her best and brought little sea and alien creatures made of beads and wire that Vonda liked to create and give to friends.

But it was lovely to hear about the kind of person Vonda was. How she'd been pivotal in the early days of SFWA in getting female authors recognized and women treated with respect in the organization. She possessed a spine of steel and fiery determination - qualities the panelists found amusing to recall in retrospect, as Vonda had also been small in stature and quite gentle in personality. She baked cookies and gave them out freely. She helped people with websites and self-publishing before those were even much in use. Everyone remembered her as a warm and generous person.

They also pointed out how groundbreaking her work was. Early in my reading life, I'd been struck by her books - especially DREAMSNAKE - and their powerful female protagonists, their easy enjoyment of their sexuality, and the vivid, exciting, and unusual use of animals in her stories. The panelists spoke of how Vonda had been nearly unique in her biological approach to science fiction, how her biochemistry background illuminated her worlds in such different ways.

No wonder her work spoke to me.

Speaking of work, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention my own - and that THE ORCHID THRONE is available for preorder!

Preorder at any of these wonderful retailers!

         

Show Me the Money! (Or at Least Don't Make ME Pay)

Our topic at the SFF Seven this week is Lit Cons, Fan Cons, Comics Cons: What’s Best For You?

I imagine there will be a variety of replies to this topic - and maybe someone will take on defining each - but I'm taking a bit of a slant and talking about the stance I've taken on conventions in general.

Aside from professional conventions like the RWA National Conference or SFWA's Nebula Conference, which I attend for my own networking, craft improvement, etc., I've established a personal policy of not attending conventions that ask me to pay my own way.

Now, there are some gray areas here. The panel above - where everyone is clearly RAPT by the wisdom I'm sharing - is at Bubonicon here in New Mexico. It's a "local" SFF convention that I attend most years for various reasons. They don't pay my travel, but they do comp my registration. And it's close for me, and staffed by a lot of people who do many things to support my books.

That tends to be the model for a lot of smaller fan conventions: they invite authors, comp the registration (or sometimes only reduce it), and provide opportunities to network with readers. Unless you're a GOH (Guest of Honor), however, that's as far as it goes.

Romance fan conventions tend to offer a much worse deal. I can speculate on the reasons for it (though I won't), but a number of "reader conventions" sprang up in the last decade or so that not only required authors to pay all their own expenses, not only never comped or discounted registration, but also required authors to pay full registration or significantly MORE than readers paid, and then repeatedly urged authors to chip in even more money for gifts, meals, promo, etc.

In essence, these cons sustained themselves on the author's dollars, relying on them both for content and to pay for the con. In return, they offered exposure to readers, but very often even that fell flat, with the con mostly attended by other authors and the readers that did attend were frequently regular attendees or existing fans.

I stopped doing these.

Not because I didn't have fun - I often did! - but because I was paying a sometimes HUGE amount of money to gain maybe a few new readers at best.

I have come to see this as a matter of treating myself as a professional author. I don't pay anyone to publish my work. Money should flow to the author. Thus, I won't pay anyone to have me at their con.

The other day I shared a tweet thread from Seanan McGuire on the topic

This is a terrific thread. +10000 on every bit of it https://t.co/tDuAMMNXUu

— Jeffe Kennedy (@jeffekennedy) April 18, 2019

She makes really excellent points. Which I'll bullet a few salient points in case you don't want to go to the tweet thread, though she puts it better.

• I go where I am invited. I don't (usually) charge an appearance fee, but I'm a full-time author; I can only afford travel that's subsidized in some way, usually by a convention.
• When we appear at a con near you, it's because someone said "hey, invite _______," and we were offered travel costs, room, and a certain amount of cash for food in exchange for being your hired entertainment.
• I don't go to cons to "have fun." I enjoy myself, absolutely, but I am all too aware that my presence has been paid for, and I want the con--and its attendees--to get their money's worth. I'm not insulting your con by not having fun. I'm doing my job.
• If you want me--or any author!--to come to your area, you need to ask for us! Suggest us to your local conventions; suggest us to your local libraries. We are like vampires. We go where we are invited, and where the food is.

That about sums it up for me. I love going to cons, but I have to budget where I go. I don't expect to make money off of attending. At the same time, I won't come away in debt.

A Better Answer to: Where Do You Get Your Ideas?

Last week I attended SFWA's Nebula Conference and got to meet our 2018 Grandmaster, Peter S. Beagle. I legit teared up when we talked and he signed my battered old copy I received forever and a day ago. I felt like a teenager again and all those feelings that led into my early love of fantasy rose up and swamped me.

The conference in 2019 will be at the Marriott Warner Center in Los Angeles. I highly recommend it! It's become my absolute favorite gathering of SFF writers and industry professionals.

Our topic this week at the SFF Seven is "Where do you get your ideas - the least popular question ever."

Whoever suggested this topic added the subtitle because a) writers get asked this question a LOT, and b) it's really hard to answer. One reason is because we don't actually KNOW where we get our ideas. We often laugh off answering it, or glibly say something like "Getting the ideas is easy; it's having the time to write them that's the challenge."

Which is a really terrible way to answer an earnest question. People who ask this get nothing from us assuring them that ideas are common as grass. They want to know where we get GOOD ideas. How to know which ideas to run with. What story to tell when they're looking at a blank page or screen. They also want to know how they can get an idea like Twilight, or Harry Potter, or Hunger Games.

Something we'd ALL like to know!

I recently listened to an interview with Neil Gaiman where he talked about this very thing. (Yeah, it's a few years old. So what? The internet lives forever!) He was asked to talk to a group of schoolchildren and one asked this question. And Gaiman said it occurred to him that it wouldn't be fair to give them the usual non-answer, because kids deserve better than that. Really, anyone who asks this question deserves better than that.

So, where do *I* get my ideas? Here's three.

I pay attention to my dreams and write them down. If there's an image/feeling powerful enough that I remember it clearly when I wake, I know there's something to it. THE MARK OF THE TALA, the first in my Twelve Kingdoms/Uncharted Realms series started with a dream. So did ROGUE'S PAWN from my Covenant of Thorns trilogy.

I enjoy my daydreams and give them time to spin. As we grow up, we're talked out of daydreaming, like it's a bad thing. We're told to pay attention and engage with others. But daydreaming is where a lot of my stories come from. They entertain me and give me good feelings, so those naturally become stories I enjoy writing. This works especially well with erotic fantasies. PETALS AND THORNS, SAPPHIRE, and UNDER CONTRACT came from erotic daydreams.

I get a lot of ideas from reading other people's books. No, it's not plagiarism if someone inspires you. I once heard a Famous Author on a panel proclaim that she doesn't read. (She called it a dirty, little secret of authors and seemed to think others thought the same way. Spoiler: we don't.) She believed reading somehow spoiled her own creativity. In the bar after (where all the best writer conversations occur), another author said "We're rich because we steal from the best houses." And, no, it's not really stealing. Art inspires art. Good books - and great movies - suggest ideas to me all the time. Don't go and replicate someone else's plot, but if something inspires you, run with it!

As much as we may riff that we get ideas all the time, most writers are always looking for new and better ones. They may be common as grass, but there's a lot of grass out there. We're all looking for something more special than that. Don't let any writer convince you otherwise.