Adara VS July 2022
In today’s video I look back over July, including querying, a heatwave, hints of being a writer in my school reports, and plotting book 2 to make sure book 1 wasn’t just a fluke.
Visual Description:
The video is primarily Adara sat in front of a bookcase. It occasionally breaks away to show her working, and the times she wrote during July written in a notebook with gold stars on the pages. Other footage includes a mini video of Adara gathering paper with the words synopsis, first 3 chapters and covering letter together, threading them together, and casting them out repeatedly like bait on a fishing rod. Later there is footage of the garden wheelchair path, and miniature sunflowers in a pot.
Transcript
Hello and welcome to the Canopy! In today's video: Adara versus July: a month of two halves!
This month has been, quite honestly, a month of two halves; interrupted by a heat wave, medical appointments, and a trip down memory lane in the middle. So in July, like every month, I set myself a rewards tariff. This month: for every 20 minutes I worked I could reward myself with one gold star, and then at the end for every 10 gold stars I can trade them in for the right to buy myself a new book. It's very very good motivation.
First this month I completed my rounds of querying, my first round for my first novel, before cutting it off for the summer holidays. Looking back at the query process, I figured it was a bit like going fishing.
Speaking of, I also have TikTok. That was very unexpected, but here we are. But back to writing!
It was slow going this month, due to a lot of medical appointments daily for two weeks running for myself and other household members. I'm also heat intolerant which was not good with the record-breaking UK temperatures. I didn't have any spare energy to think straight to taking on board anything new, so this month I only read two new books, and instead I re-read some old favorites via audiobook.
I foiled all of our south facing windows to keep the temperatures down and the house quite honestly looked like something out of Flight of the Navigator.
At the end of the heat wave though was the amazing part. The garden came to life! I got a wheelchair path in my garden, and it is transformative. Literally transformative. I have been out there, combined with the thankfully lower temperatures, so much more than I have been. It's been brilliant. We even managed to have a barbecue out there.
I also had a bit of a spurt of energy in terms of creativity, so I closed the chapter on querying when the schools broke up for summer, and I swapped gears and I started plotting book two. I'm currently working out who my main character is, what their world is like, their family, and how to begin their tale.
I now have an incredibly large extended family tree going back around five generations that hopefully I can fill in the gaps alongside my plot, but it is incredibly messy. So I believe it's time now to put it into some sort of software. We'll see what I can find.
I also dug out my resume, which is the first time since around five years ago when I first became ill. I'm actually astonished I have things to put on there, but here we are. Amazing life goes on without us noticing.
I also dug out some old school reports. They were fun. Primary School. I suppose in the US that would be elementary school, and then high school and the equivalent, and it was fun looking back through a lot of the comments, English and other subjects.
In PE they said I had good imagination.
Apparently I'm good at seeing other people's points of view reflecting on them in Religious Studies.
In geography I came up with a brand new map of a world and I managed to use the correct terminology, apparently, to label it. I don't remember this but hey ho, for the day I finally have to create a world map.
And in history apparently I can indicate a bunch of causes that lead to something and pick out the most important factor for what led to something.
All of these skills I think are transferable in being a writer.
But ICT said I was industrious, and that I made a plan and followed it through to complete my work. Industrious... good word.
Why didn't I add all of that together at the time to start writing? Maybe because I was blinded by one thing. I didn't like everything that we studied in my English class. But my teacher did. And me being little autistic Adara at the time, little teenage Adara, thought that the world was black and white, so if my teacher thought that something was good then it must be good. Objectively, I thought this must be a good work if we're having to study it. Subjectively, I didn't know that my teachers actually had different tastes; they were human and that I was allowed to have different tastes; that I didn't have to like anything. I thought if I don't like this, then English must not be for me. Subjectivity didn't even cross my mind at that age. I don't know if it was just me being a teenager, the autism, I don't know... but I thought "I don't like this. I don't like this individual thing, therefore it must not be my subject." Now I know that teachers are human, and they have their own likes and dislikes and they use those likes and dislikes to pass work onto us.
It's an important lesson that I've learned, which is you cannot please everyone, and I'm no longer trying to, but back to the present!
This month I worked for 430 minutes in total, which works out at just over seven hours. Considering I took the equivalent of two weeks off for the medical appointments and the heatwave the pace it works out roughly at the same pace that I was working last month, which I'm really really pleased about. I'm back on track! I also had 26 stars. In the end that's two new books for me.
And lastly, back in February I decided that we would plant sunflowers in the garden, miniature sunflowers, so we did, and they have loved the heat wave and they have thrived. So here are some footage of my sunflowers.
So on to next month. In august I'll be continuing my planning with fingers crossed for cooler weather. I'll also be celebrating my five-year wedding anniversary. I'm aiming to read a lot, and I am going to keep my rewards tariff at the one star for 20 minutes worked. I think that's a good balance when I'm not trying to overdo things. There is a lot more space going on in the work that I'm doing, just letting ideas stew in the back of my head. I am counting that as thinking time towards this. Although I am a planner and a plotter, I do need the space to let these things grow and knit together, and it takes time to come up with that, even if it's a world that I know already. I need to let it grow and make it into a web.
Well clearly I was in survival mode for a lot of July due to the heat. Do you survive or thrive in the heat, and what good things did you come up with in July? What did you achieve? Let me know if you feel up to it!
Well I have to go now. That's it for this video as I have a character to get to know, as I continue to write my story...
one day at a time.
Credits:
Music credit 1: opening and ending theme – Adara Spence
Music credit 2:
Beloved - Sakura Girl https://soundcloud.com/sakuragirl_off...
Creative Commons — Attribution 3.0 Unported — CC BY 3.0
Free Download / Stream: https://bit.ly/3ji1zZc
Music promoted by Audio Library https://youtu.be/omTgn4GQcKA
Music Credit 3:
Piano and Guitar by myself and Mr Spence – thank you for playing with me!
Music Credit 4:
Soon We'll Fly by Ghostrifter Official https://bit.ly/ghostrifter-sc
Creative Commons — Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported — CC BY-SA 3.0
Free Download / Stream: https://bit.ly/35reep7
Music promoted by Audio Library https://youtu.be/q2vomZqSJuE
