Adara VS July 23: 50th Video! Neutered Kittens, CampNaNo + Threads
In this video I look back over July’s CampNaNoWriMo, and how kittens derailed the first week completely by defying every vet expectation. Also: I’m Instagram now. Is Threads good?
Visual Description:
Shows Adara sat on a chaise longue by a window typing. This footage is interrupted repeatedly by footage of two black cats walking around two small pens, sitting on her lap while she types, and jumping around in a tent wearing space themed cones. The ending image shows a dark starry sky above a forest canopy with the words ‘writing my story one word at a time’ in the stars.
Transcript
Hello and welcome to The Canopy! My name is Adara, and I'm a chronically ill writer, documenting her journey to publication. I write Y.A: urban fantasy, paranormal romance, and sci-fi. You may also, every now and again, get a cameo from a couple of black kittens.
This is my 50th YouTube video on AuthorTube! That is astounding. I have no idea where the time has gone, but if you think my journey is interesting, then please subscribe and follow along. I have written one novel so far and that is on the back burner to be published, and in the meantime I'm currently drafting my second novel. And last month being July, it was Camp NaNoWriMo, so I think it's time to check in with how I got on.
I set myself the goal of it aiming to write for 30 minutes every day during camp. Now that should be 31 days. I miscalculated. I thought there were 30 days, so a half an hour every day... It should have been 930 minutes in total, I aimed for 900. But meh! It worked. And the goal behind that wasn't to knock something out like a full 50 000 words like for real NaNoWriMo. The goal for this was to try to re-establish a writing habit. I had spent so long doing the final rounds of edits and some formatting for my first novel, that I really needed to just get back into the idea of sitting down and writing words. And it is my New Year's resolution to finish writing the first draft of the second novel, which is a sequel to the first novel which I've written.
So to achieve my 30 minutes every day, it didn't exactly work out being 30 minutes every day. Some days it kind of was. Some days things cropped up and I majorly had to put it off, and then I had to jump in and do a lot more to kind of... build up where I was at. I'm happy to say that I did finish Camp NaNoWriMo. Did it give me comparisonitis? Yes! On the last day of July people were posting: I achieved 80 000 words! I achieved 20 000 words! I achieved 50 000 words! And what did I do? I did just over... what? Just under 10 000 words? But I did do what I set out to do. With my chronic illnesses I do have a limited amount of energy before headaches start creeping in, I get too tired, and building that around everything else going on, including looking after two kittens, I think I did pretty good. So I'll take that!
You can see from the first parts of the month, the first week, was essentially a washout, and the reason for that was kitten related. My two kittens Kuriboh and Thelonious, turned six months old on the 4th of July, and then on the 5th of July, because they were then kind of old enough, they went to be microchipped and neutered. I had heard from many people that they would be drowsy, docile, and not want to move around a lot, and to make it so that you had to kind of contain them so they weren't going to jump around or move a lot, for about the first seven days or so after they had had the surgery. Mistake number one was the vet told me that they wouldn't need a cone. They did. So in true sci-fi loving style, I bought them cones which looked like the universe, it was space themed, and that was cute. Second was I had bought two small pens to put the cats in, and one of them managed to tear their way out of the pen. The other one managed to make theirs into a beach, with cat litter everywhere and pouring all the water out of his water dish. And then so we had to move them into a tent that we have. Like, it's a fabric mesh tent that we normally use when the cats are outside to keep them safe. Unfortunately, they were quite hyper from whatever the painkiller was that they were taking, they were the complete opposite of sedative, so they were literally hanging from the roof of this tent, and quite often it will be brought down on top of them. So around about my seven days my first days were spent downstairs, morning and night, trying to make sure the tent didn't collapse down on top of them. Then we bought a couple of cages, quite large dog cages, to put them in at night time so I could get some sleep upstairs in bed. After that I was behind by about three hours, and that is where live writing sprints on YouTube really came in clutch.
I was able to catch up on my target a lot, and that kind became a bit of a theme whenever something happened. For example a medical appointment, or a flurry of medical appointments came up with me or other people in the household... I would take time off to deal with it, and then I would come back with a vengeance and hop in to various other writing streams. And it worked. So I'm thinking maybe if as long as I keep up that level of dedication, I'm still on track to finish this novel by the end of the year. It is my New Year's resolution. I'm not as far through it as I wanted it to be, but I'm almost there. I've also made the decision this month to cut two chapters out of my novel plan. I was originally aiming for 80 000 words. Now I'm aiming for 75 000 words, and if I start writing today I've worked out that I can get this finished by the 31st of December if I write 300 words a day. I had originally plotted out for 333 words a day based on a calculation of the original 80 000 word goal, but I realized that these two chapters really were not serving me whatsoever. They weren't good. They weren't adding much to the novel. They would have essentially just been a lot of fluff. They weren't doing much, so I picked out the important details from those two chapters and I've managed to shoehorn them into the ones coming up, and I think that works in terms of piercing a lot better. It was always going to change in revisions. I do it now, fair enough.
Also I've decided to stop tracking my time worked as well as the words, because I am a planner and a plotter, and I think that time needs to be acknowledged. Even when I decide- hello. Even when I decide that I would like to-
Okay, cat interruption. This may happen quite frequently. Yes. Yes it will. So. I have plotted every single one of my chapters out beforehand, however, I do like to just then address what happens scene by scene when I get to the point of writing that chapter. So before I start every chapter, first of all I have to go back see what the characters were doing in their particular scenes. This book is going to be multiple POV, so there's a lot of stopping rereading, getting back into the headspace of the new character, and then I have to rearrange the notes that I have for the chapter in chronological order to fit the dates that I have written down, and that takes some time to split what I want to write into scenes, but it works and I'm getting there. And it does take me a lot of time. It means I'm writing this much slower than most other people do. This would have been a fair bit quicker if I had only had one main point of view character like I did in the first novel, but I think this one deserve the two protagonists. I've said that before and I will maintain that this is a two person story. It really is.
That's it on the writing front. The other thing to mention is for a long time I've been on Twitter. Threads suddenly burst into existence. Am I the biggest fan of it? Not really. I go there, I do my duty. I kind of replicate whatever I was going to put on Twitter. I find the lack of hashtags quite poor. But to do that, to create a threads account, I needed to create an Instagram account, and the Instagram is essentially my way of showing off my cats, alongside some writing related themes, daily updates... all that sort of stuff. So if you like the idea of following what I'm up to day to day, two black cats as well, then you can follow me now on Instagram and Threads @AdaraSpenceWriter.
And that's it for today. I have to go now as I have novel two to write, as I continue to write my story... one day at a time.
Credits:
Thumbnail and ending image created free using canva.com
Music credit 1: 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/omTgn4GQcKAMusic
Credit 3: 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
