Adara VS May 23: Longlisted & Record Breaking!
In this video: I review my progress towards publication in April 23, talking about balancing writing, editing & two new kittens.
Visual Description:
Shows Adara sat on a chaise longue by a window with a green note book and gold stars where her writing progress is listed, speaking to the camera and interrupted every now and again by two black cats. It then shows Adara in her writing area reading and writing in front of a window, typing on a laptop with a black cat on the windowsill every now and then. There is then footage of the cats playing with toys in the sitting room, then in a garden in a black mesh tent, then cuddling with Adara on the sofa. 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! In today's video: Adara VS May: the month of ambition!
An embargo has been lifted. I can now tell you that my first novel 'Vermilion Rising' slash 'Drawing Red', was long listed for the MsLexia's 2023 Children's and Young Adult Novel Award!
I am over the moon with that. I didn't expect to get listed it was a pleasant surprise to be listed, especially because that was before edits. I now have the edits back, so that's giving me confidence to enter more competitions. It took a long time for me to get those results back, and the reason they said was it took them such a long time to get back to me, was because my novel kept getting voted as a yes through so many rounds towards the shortlist, and that is really really heartening, and a very very big confidence boost! I am thrilled that I can finally put that out there. MsLexia is a writing organization and a magazine specifically- specifically targeted towards women's writers, but anyone can kind of read it - based in the UK in the north of England. I applied on a whim and it was a good whim.
So now that that is out of the way, and now that my final edits have been completed this month from my editor, I decided to enter more competitions. Now I've entered competitions with this novel in the past, but I can see where it was failing, where some of the strings needed to be pulled tighter, by some of the grammar especially on the first page and some of the phrasing wasn't quite right. But after having the editor go through it, I think it is in a much much stronger place.
And what I found fascinating is where once upon a time, for example, if an independently published authors were entering competitions they would just be excluded. It would be for traditionally published novels only, or people going towards traditionally publishing. Now though for debut novelists especially like myself who isn't published yet but kind of working towards it, even if you have self-published you can still enter some of those works; some of them stipulate you know as long as you haven't sold more than 500 copies or something, which I find very very good. It shows that there's a really a direction of change in the wind going on there.
So what did I have to do for some of the other *contests? First of all to finish the edits. A lot of competitions end on the 31st of May. Maybe it's so that people can then get prepped to look at them over summer, I don't know, but that was a deadline that I was aiming for, that I really really went all out to get those edits finished. And then I had the extra things to do because every competition wants something extra, whether it's a certain amount of words, a full manuscript, a cover letter addressing this question this question and this question, just a general cover letter... and because my novel is YA I've kind of had to play around a lot with those cover letters, because some competitions were for children and young people, somewhere for YA which would have adult crossover. And I think my novel has an appeal - a very broad appeal - to a lot of different people, so I think that will put me in good stead. But it did mean rewriting the cover letter a lot. Thankfully my editor also said that it worked very well as a young adult novel, it was very strong that way, and it would have adult crossover, so I didn't have any concerns there. I also think with how clean it is (I say clean in terms of no real swearing, any violence is fictional, things like that) that it would be suitable for children as well. Well, I say children... teenagers, mid-teens... kind of around there... young adult is a very... it depends on the child. Some are a lot more mature than others. I would say the biggest problem I had, other than the cover letters which the overarching question of why would your novel appeal to kids or why would it appeal to young adults with adult crossover, was by far trying to chop down my synopsis. Some of them ask for a page synopsis. That is fine. Some of them want a 300 word synopsis.
That is a lot less than what I originally had, but I think coming to it from fresh eyes with edits: right we can cut this, we can cut that, we can cut that... I was a lot more ruthless, and I think I managed. I got it to just 300 words exactly.
So the next question is if I'm aiming for Indie publishing why enter novel competitions in the first place? Obviously if an agent can give me, you know, a good pitch for why traditional publishing would be good, I'm still willing to listen, but first and foremost it's money. If I can get money, if I, you know, win something to then go towards my own publishing journey, that would be fantastic. It does cost a lot to put out a very very high quality product, and that is something I'm working towards, and it's something I do not want to skimp on. The other thing is prestige, so I can now say that my novel was longlisted for the MsLexia Children's and Young People's Awards. That is something I can now put up on Amazon as a selling point for my book. That even in Indie publishing is still industry recognition. You can still get that but in different ways. And I'm so thankful for MsLexia, but I think now that it has actually been edited it could go further in other competitions, so I've taken the plunge, and now I just have to sit back and wait. That- that- that's the long and short of it. Just wait. And in the meantime, do something else.
Now for a long time I think my editing has been the 'something else'. My goal this year, my New Year's resolution, was to write the first draft of my second novel. Now the question is have I just been trying to pursue a different goal while the opportunity kind of arose, or have I gotten distracted, or have I been procrastinating, because I haven't written an awful lot of novel two. I've still done some words, and I put that entirely down to attempting the fabulous Joey Paul's idea of separating each day specifically for a different project. That's the only reason I got any work done at all this month admittedly on novel two. For some reason it's like pulling teeth. The last time I had this with novel one during the drafting process, it was because there was something wrong with the novel, i.e. the plot wasn't working; it wasn't strong enough; the relationships weren't there; it wasn't so in depth. And I know that it's not, and it's not going to be. Not yet because that comes with revisions, and for me revisions are magic. It's what turns a story into a book. I just keep having to push through to get there.
So in what ways have I potentially got distracted or procrastinated? I wrote a short story and entered a completely different competition that wasn't even on radar. Yep. I just found a short story competition online. The deadline was the next day. I wrote a short story. I quickly edited it, and I sent it in. It was nice. It was a palette cleanser. Completely different to what I'm doing now, quite a bit more philosophical I think, a bit more metaphors, kind of unreliable narrator going on... That was fun.
And then the other big distraction, back to novel one after the edits alongside sending it off to all the competitions... I bought the software Atticus, which is kind of a stripped-down version of Vellum. And what Atticus does, is it lets you format your novel in different sizes, trims, to lay it all out on pages to get it ready to export as PDFs, as ePub books, and I've been having a lot of fun with that, both for in the interior of a paperback and a hardback, but also for the interior of a large print book, which I am really set on, on- on producing. That was a lot of fun. But once again, I've gone as far as I can with that until I can hire a proofreader and a cover designer, which I'm saving up for so that's on hold.
I have to get to the point of getting back to novel 2, and getting into that. So let's see how much I did accomplish this month. Every month I track the words I write, any fresh words that I write for any novel or short story in this case, and then I also track any time I've spent on anything else writing related, for example editing or rewriting the synopsis or novel competitions, things like that, and I write it in this notebook. So at the end of the month I can go through, tot up what I've done, and reward myself according to a tariff. The tariff this month was for every 500 words or every 20 minutes that I've worked on something else, I could give myself one gold star, then for every 10 gold stars I could give myself the reward of trading it in for one more book that I can buy. Or as it were since I'm saving up, one more book that I can ransack from the library or request that they buy in.
So you can see that I kind of started out well with going from project to project, kind of bouncing around there. So one day I'd do words, one day I'd do minutes, one do you do words, one day I'd do minutes. And whenever things came up, so like larger things in life, you can see where there's gaps, is unfortunately where I would have written words. Is that something to look at, is there has been a definite bias towards getting the edits done, and then the edits just exploded. In terms of productivity. You can see how much I really got into them, pushing forwards. Originally I was doing things like I'll try to do one scene a day just edit one scene a day, and that's fine, and then the momentum built up and then it became a chapter, and then it became more chapters. Then after that I decided to throw myself into formatting, and throw myself into novel competitions. And this is what happens with the autistic hyper focus. Yeah. Lots and lots of editing, synopsis rewriting, cover letters, you name it. Novel two went out the window in favor of novel one, and that is just astonishing. I worked for over 32 hours on other stuff this month. Word count is down there at 2579 words. But around five/six hundred of those were for a short story. 99 stars. That is record breaking. Absolutely record breaking. That's the equivalent of nine new books. I'm gonna have to go online, see what the library has digitally, see what I can get in person and when I can get there. And now on to the new month. We will draw a line under that record breaking month. I'd say I- it was very very productive still, even if not towards my New Year's resolution, but that's for next month.
Now I really need to get back into getting words, so multiple sprints. What I've been doing this month is just sitting down writing for how long I feel like it, when I get bored just kind of leaving. That normally lasted about 20 minutes, half an hour... I need to knuckle down to get this thing written, so I'm thinking: right. I'll do- what I'm going to aim for an hour a day, and I will split that up if I need to. So I might do one 20 minutes, one 40 minutes, one 60 minutes... try to push myself through to get to the end of this scene, to get the end of a chapter, and maybe start the next one just to build up that momentum again. I think I'm going to be doing that partly in my own time. You might see me more on YouTube jumping into live write-ins again. Novel two is where my concentration needs to be at, and I need to get my head back into that story, so to do that I'm going to be lowering my tariff as a bit of a- an incentive. So instead of for every 500 words I'll get a star, I'm going to lower that to 400 words. For every 400 words I'm going to get a star, and my goal will be: OK, three stars a day - 1200 words. That- I want that three stars to be at least an average, you know, the regular five star system when you're rating things from zero to five stars. Five stars would be incredible you know, things like that. If I can get that in my head, the zero to five stars for how good of a day of writing has been, then I think that might be psychologically a way forward for me.
And now for the part you've probably all been waiting for. If you'd seen last month's video: a kitten update! If you weren't aware, I took in two kittens as part of an emergency rehoming situation last month, and I say last month... now we've had had them for just over a month, and they're nearing five months old. They will be turning five months old on the 4th of *June. They are now sporting new bright orange collars, and we seem to be settling into a rhythm now of them living here. They seem to like the house, everything we've done for them. There's a couple of cat towers, some cat grass which needs a bit more water some, you know. They come and join me a lot now when I'm writing. I've also managed to get them out safely into the garden for their age in a tent, to enjoy the fresh air, and to see them enjoying and trying to catch bugs and things has been really really fun.
I've also taken a DNA test because I don't know where these cats came from. I got them from someone who ended up rescuing them from another situation. They were taken from their mothers early, so they were bottle fed so they are very used to people. they are very very good with people. On the other hand they can be a tad clingy.
Um, on the other hand though, that is very cute, and I'm essentially never without some sort of a lap kind of cat now. So we DNA tested one of the two cats. Their names are Thelonius and Kuriboh. Hello. Speak it- speak of the devil! This is Thelonious just joining me at the window. You can see the nice new orange collar there.
Oh!
[Beckons to cat]
Oh yes. The purrs. Mhm, all the purrs.
So - they - this one is Thelonious. Just another brief explanation of the names. The name Kuriboh comes from the very very very fluffy dual monster from the franchise Yu-Gi-Oh! And Thelonious, you can either say it comes from two places: either the jazz musician Thelonious Monk or the executioner in Shrek. Either way it is a fantastic name, and Thelonius over there has really taken to it. It does have- has a bit of gravitas about it. Kuriboh on the other hand is quite a bit more fluffy in his coat than his brother is, even though they're both all black cats. Kuriboh's is fluffier, and this came back in his DNA results, that he had one allele for long hair; which I expect if we then DNA tested for Thelonius here, would just come back as short.
Now the breakdown for Kuriboh. He is 55% British domestic cat, which essentially means a moggy. He's... um... average house cat. He is very very mixed heritage. He is 23% American domestic cat. 12% European short hair. 8% percent Norwegian Forest cat, and 2% Scottish Fold.
OK then. Interesting. Thankfully no inherited health conditions, which we are very very thankful for. But we have been taking these guys to the vets, getting them their vaccines, things like that, and shortly we're going to be taking them to get microchipped, and some other things.
And that's it for my month. Did you get any good news? Do you have any good news to share? Any achievements that you've done this month? If you have, let me know in the comments and I'd love to hear from you. And that's it for me. I have to go now, as I have novel two to write... 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
Credit 4: Roundup music from Adara Spence and Mr Spence
Credit 5: Xmas Song by Mr Spence
