 Good morning and welcome back to my channel. My name's Jackie and it is now 7.05 am on the 1st of July, meaning it is the start of Camp Nanorhymo. So I'm going to start my day by trying to get my revisions in and then I'll touch base hopefully before I need to start work. So it's now been an hour and I have... How many words do I actually have? 2,821 words in my revision. So if you haven't seen my Camp Nanoprep videos in this camp I'm going to be revising my Nanorhymo project from last year which is powerless. Powerless has 68,812 words. So originally I was hoping that I would get the entire manuscript revised this month however I am also starting a new job today. So I decided to set a 50,000 word goal and if I get the full book done that's my stretch goal. So I also had 1045 words before I started today because I wanted to add a new scene to the beginning of the book and I decided to work on that yesterday or the day before just because I was inspired to write and I wanted to get it out of the way and Lindsay Puckett was doing a live write-in so why not? So that means for today's progress I need to take 1,045 words off which gives me 1,776 words. So yay 1,776 words of 50,000 words means I'm on track because like Nanorhymo the target would be 1,667 words a day. In terms of how I feel about the progress oh it's okay there are moments I like in the new little scene like I like when Hannah's sort of very so Hannah's the main character I like when Hannah's introspective she's in the lab doing her experiment I like when it works I like some of the description I don't love the interaction with her father because one of the reasons I wanted to add this scene was to create more just more about their relationship and there isn't really much there and I don't know how to fit it in without stretching things out when it comes to the existing scene so what I've looked at is new chapter one and chapter two which was the existing chapter one I don't like the stuff I reworked that much I could do more with it I feel like some of the conversation just feels like it's going through the motions if you saw my last video you'll know I was using Story Grid by Sean Coyne to try and rework these scenes which says you need an inciting incident progressive complication crisis climax and resolution for every scene and trying to hit those points in this scene it does feel like I'm dragging it out without adding that much of interest or value though I'm not sure how to improve it because I don't think the original one was that strong either having said that the end of the scene which didn't really fit into those five points I'm still really happy with like when you meet the other siblings so having seen what I've done so far I'm not sure how far I'm going to get this month in revisions just because I know I I feel like the plot is good or it makes sense I know there are problems with character relationships and build-up and tension and so on but I'm not sure how to fix them and I don't know if I'm going to magically know how to fix them as I go through this book other than that though I am starting a new job today so the new job is in Switzerland I am not in Switzerland because immigration is not closed anymore but now they're only processing applications from March because everything was on hold for three months due to coronavirus so I'm probably going to be working remotely for the next three or four months so today I'm starting remotely which does it makes me a little bit nervous because even though I've worked remotely in the past it was either in my own business or from mid-march to late may in my previous job when everything was closed down so even though I've worked remotely I haven't started a job remotely before generally I've started in person and if I needed or wanted to work remotely I already knew who everyone was and how everything worked and what my job was so I'm a little bit nervous starting something from scratch where I don't know any of those things and I'm worried about not being in the office to pick up on who's who and what's what but it is what it is and I'm sure they've been hiring people over the last few months I'm sure they've had other people start remotely so fingers crossed it'll all go okay in terms of what I've got on I know I've got a meeting with my boss at 10 a.m which feels really late to me but it's 9 a.m his time so time differences and then I have a meeting with HR at 11 which I assume we'll go through I assume between both of those I'll have a plan for the next few weeks and who I should talk to and what I should be working on. In terms of Camp Nanarimo one of the things I've been thinking about a lot and I'm not sure if I'll do a separate video on this is the fact that I need to get my act together so the past few months have been very unstructured let's say due to having worked from home and then by the time I got back to the office I'd resigned and they decided not to replace me which meant I divvied up my role between five different people so it meant there wasn't a lot of hand over to do because most of those people were already familiar with the processes because we've had to step in for each other when we've been on holidays so for the last four weeks of my job I really had nothing to do so I've had all of this time being really lazy and watching lots of youtube and doing youtube as well and preparing for camp but it has been very unstructured so now that I'm starting this new job I don't have the luxury of being unstructured anymore which means that I need to be quite disciplined in what I'm focusing on what I'm spending my time on and how much time I'm spending on each thing so in terms of camp because my working hours are going to be from about nine to six which is a bit later than I prefer I think I'm going to aim to do my writing sessions in the morning before work each day and then that leaves after work for unwinding time and leisure time so that's when I can have a bath or do a singing lesson when my singing teacher gets back in town or go for a walk or go out for dinner and socialize the one thing I'm not sure how I'm going to fit in is the gym because when I was working in the office I used to go to the gym at lunchtime because I have a membership at a franchise and one of their studios, gyms, was across the road from my building now there is one close to my house it's about 500 meters away the problem is I know it's impossible for me to get to and from the gym within an hour even when it was across the road from the office I usually took an hour and a half those days and then didn't have lunch like I didn't take a lunch break on the other days but because this is a new role I don't know if I have that flexibility and I don't think it's realistic for me to try and squeeze both writing and gym in before I start work for the day so I'm not sure how that's going to work I might try to do like a home workout at lunch anyway the most important takeaway from this ramble are I've hit my words for the day so that's good and I need to get ready to start this job good I'm excited nervous it is it is strange to be starting a new role remotely it's quite different to already having a role and then transitioning to be remote like with coronavirus but I had a chat with Bastian this morning which went well so I have an idea of the different things to focus on at the moment I think it's just absorbing information of meeting people so I've just had introductory meetings with my new boss and HR and I think this company is going to be really fun so it's a cryptocurrency startup and one of my first assignments to do in my first week is to try and buy 20 euros worth of crypto but not using their app so the idea is their app makes the process much easier so if I'm not using the app then I can see how people who don't know about it don't have access to it have to struggle to get their crypto so um yeah let's figure out how to buy crypto it is just past five o'clock and technically I should be working until six the hours in my contract said from 9 a.m to 6 p.m estonian time but I wake up early this morning I was up at 5 45 and I was ready for work around 8 30 so I'm going to leave Slack and everything open in case anyone contacts me that honestly most of what I've done today is just reading and trying to figure out how to buy cryptocurrency so my brain's a little bit sapped I'm a very active learner I like to do things as opposed to just passively taking in content so I don't know how much value there is in me just reading more articles for the next hour so instead I really want to get back to my book because I don't know I'm just feeling motivated so I should make the most of it while this feeling's here so I want to look at the next chapter in my book I'm guessing it's about 1500 words they all tend to be around about that much and I know there is a little flashback I want to add to it there's also more that I need to add that relates to the new beginning that's been added so this one could have a little bit of reworking which should be fun the other thing is that tomorrow morning I'm actually having a call over zoom with one of my friends from Australia who is a sciency person she has a phd in neuroscience or neurobiology I think and I asked if she'd mind me picking her brain about some of the sciency things this book refers to because I have no knowledge so I might not have the same amount of time to write tomorrow morning which means it would be great if I could get ahead of my word count goal now hello hello to the block so the original idea I had was just this scene where this girl who's in a family of superheroes but she doesn't personally have powers is getting forced out of the house by her siblings like they're using their powers to force her out and they say don't bother coming back until you have powers so that's how it started and then obviously I needed to create a whole plot and world around that and the idea for the superpowers was like you've seen it was a gene mutation and she has the mutation but her powers haven't developed so it's this big mystery and how do we get them to develop um and the reason like I thought of the hormonal side of things or the adrenaline rush was because that gives me an excuse to torture her and put her through all of this crap that people try to do to like get the powers out I've just had my sciency chat with my friend Chris in Melbourne and I think it's going to be really helpful I'm not sure how much of it will end up in the book just because plot and character and that stuff is more important but I think it's important for me as an author to have an understanding of the logic that underpins the sciency stuff in the book because I do try to have a sciency explanation for the superpowers and other events that happen so she is now going to take away my list of requirements and put together some logic that might make it plausible so I'm curious to see what she comes up with and whether or not I actually understand it other than that I did do some revisions this morning I did another 1,213 words of revisions so that brings me to 3,404 for the month so far at this stage I think I'll probably pick it up again after work just because I didn't get to the end of the scene I was working on because this scene had a little bit of new content that I added so I'd really like to finish the scene before the day's done however we'll see how I feel when I get to the end of the day when it comes to work if I check my calendar I think I have four meetings today if it ever loads yeah so I've got four meetings today um so I think it's going to be a better day than yesterday yesterday I had two meetings in the morning and then nothing for the rest of the day and that meant I spent the rest of the day one learning about crypto kitties apparently you can have a cryptographic kitten and two reading various things that came up in Slack and reading articles and so on and I'm a very active person I like learning by doing generally if I want to learn about something I need to write about it so passively reading isn't it's very draining for me so today I'm really glad that that's going to be broken up by a few different meetings so I have my four meetings I need to read the employee policies and sign them and then I want to go through some of the existing marketing stuff so there are some social media reports I can look at I want to look at some of the email results and even though I know no one's expecting anything from me in the first week I still feel like I'm a bit worried about this job I have been ever since I interviewed because the company's already doing a lot of things right when it comes to marketing and if a company's doing things wrong it's very easy to make improvements you just go in and clean everything up and make sure they're doing the basics right whereas when a company's already doing the basics right it's a lot harder to look for areas to change so at this stage I'm not really sure what I'm going to be working on so even though I know they're not expecting anything yet I still do want to take a look at everything that's happening so hopefully in the next week or so when they are expecting me to start leading some things I I'll have some context and hopefully some ideas but for now it is time to get to work good morning it is the third of July and I don't know what my hair is doing I got this is not writing related I got a haircut about a month ago and um before I got my haircut my hair was straight pretty reasonably straight and since the cut it now appears to be wavy and I'm not sure what to do with it so just random things anyway it is the third of July I have not done any revising yet today just because I was really exhausted when I woke up this morning which is interesting because I've only had two days of this new job and I haven't really done anything yet but just um yesterday in particular I had a few meetings and was just getting my head around how much was happening and I'm not really sure what my role is and what the gaps are because it looks like they've got a pretty big handle on everything so I think there's a little bit of anxiety going on in my head going oh is there actually a job here for me which um is leaving me feeling a bit worn out but today I'm hoping to touch base with my boss because I didn't think I was the head of marketing that the other marketing people seem to think I'm their boss now so that needs to be cleared up on the writing front I'm hoping that at the end of the day I'll still have some energy left and I can get into some revisions however if it doesn't happen today I'm not too worried because it is Friday and this weekend it's going to be raining or weekend which is the perfect weather to be inside and working on a book oh it's lunchtime and I'm going for a walk in the forest because walking in the forest is faster than going to the gym even though the gym is closer to home so I have no writing updates but I've been doing my assignment I mentioned which is buying the company's token or crypto coin now if you want to buy bigger coins like bitcoin and ethereum my impression is that it's fairly easy there are lots of places where they're accessible but if you want a smaller coin it's a lot harder to buy it especially if you're not allowed to go through the people that created it which I'm not originally my plan was to go to google where can I buy this coin and then go to whichever site I could buy it from I only found one way you could buy it directly and it's only for people in Canada so that didn't work then plan two was well I'll buy some crypto somewhere else then there's an exchange website called hit BTC which has this token so if I buy bitcoin or ethereum or another crypto I can go to this site and exchange it for the first site the minimum deposit was more than the budget we've got for this task which is 20 euros the second site they don't accept credit cards in Estonia or they don't accept my Estonian credit card the third site they wouldn't verify my identity because my passport and utility bills are from two different countries so because obviously utility bills are in Estonia passport is Australian so I ended up finding a way around that which was I could use my national ID card as an ID rather than my passport so I got my account verified I bought crypto and then I went oh there's no way to withdraw this so it looks like I have this asset now but it's locked to that site which means I can't move it from this site to the one where I could exchange it for the one I need so this is a lot more complicated than I was expecting I knew it would be more complicated than using the company's app because that's why they're getting us to do this exercise but at this stage I've now got to find like another website where I can buy it which has a withdrawal exchange functionality so surprisingly challenging hello it is the fifth of July and I have not done any revisions today however I have just done a little bit of book related work which is reading through all of the stuff that Chris sent through so she's been awesome basically beforehand my science in the book was explained that the supers had a gene mutation that was causing all of this and that it was triggered usually around puberty um due to the stress response so that's how we justify Hannah being tortured in the book and to me who knows nothing that seemed believable but I don't know if to a phd chemistry or biology student that's going to be believable so the reason I wanted to speak to her was to basically see if there was some hope of making this plausible even though clearly it's not based on real science so it looks like now we're going to have a special type of DNA and we're just figuring out how it gets triggered so it's going to be interesting to see how much of this I can include in the book without weighing down the plot or getting in the way of character development but also this still feeling like a superhero story so if any of you know any like hard sci-fi superhero stories please let me know because I'd be interested to see like how they tackle science and delivering this information in what is essentially an action book aside from the sciency stuff the revisions are okay like I'm getting through the book I just don't feel like I'm making it better and that didn't frustrate me too much at the beginning because if this book never ends up being good enough to publish that's fine it's a learning experience but the more people are introduced to this book in this world like the more of them seem excited about it it does seem like a really cool story when I talk about it so now I'm getting more frustrated at myself not being able to turn it into something good and that's not to say I expect things to be perfect after a single round of revisions I'm fully aware that revising is a multi-step process and that it could be four five six ten rounds before I get to the final product however even though this is the first revision I should expect to see some changes being made that move in in the right direction and honestly even at this early part of the book it's still feeling like I'm just I'm not really changing anything this is where the expression polishing a turd feels apt because the work I'm doing is polishing but I think the book needs more than that so we'll see happy Monday that is a lot of echo anyway last week I mentioned that my new job was going to be remodeled until relocated to Switzerland and it turns out they've actually organized a co-working membership in Estonia because there's another employee here so I'm working from here today it's such a cool place I'll see if I can get some footage since there's no one else in yet if I do any more filming though I think it's going to have to be in another room because this is ridiculous and happy Tuesday I don't know if you can hear that beeping in fact let me turn up my volume and I can't turn up hang on I need my other hand for this um yeah hear that I'm leaning I'm leaning closer to my laptop so you can hear that is the sound my laptop has been making all day I think the keyboard's broken because it's not working either and this sounds a little bit like the sound the computer makes if you like hold the shift key or something for too long so my keyboard doesn't work my computer keeps making this sound that's not actually too detrimental to writing because I do have an external keyboard I can mute the computer I don't know how I'm going to edit this video though I am tired I don't want to work standing up I don't want to work even sitting at the dining table I want to be sitting on the couch with my laptop on my lap but I can't do that if my laptop's keyboard is not working so I'm going to try fixing this keyboard again because I tried a little bit before I started work today and then used my husband's computer for the day which is a surface so it doesn't really work for lap typing um but yeah I'm going to try and fix this now and hopefully I get it figured out with enough time to do some writing today because I'm pretty sure my first week's word count is below where it should be I am not going to be doing any writing this afternoon I've decided I might do some thinking in brainstorming because I do have some ideas I want to play with but I can't figure out what's wrong with my laptop so I've so symptoms in case you're an IT expert I have a Lenovo Thinkpad Yoga 1x I think and this morning I turned it on and the computer was just beeping steadily and the keyboard would not work an external keyboard works thankfully but the built-in one does not work I have restarted it several times now I have restarted it in safe mode I have tried to install the device drivers I've done a Windows update I've done a Lenovo update I'm not sure what else I can do I've like held down all of the potential sticky keys I've turned off sticky keys and toggle keys and whatever else is in the advanced keyboard settings I don't know what else I can do I do have a ticket with Lenovo support but that isn't going to help me the good news is that I muted keyboard sound effects so at least now I can listen to things without the beeping happening so I should be able to edit this video without my keyboard but I cannot use the laptop for typing unless I have an external keyboard attached which is very annoying and I'm just feeling a little bit drained which is interesting considering that I'm not working that hard yet at work I mean I've been in fact I haven't really done any work it's mostly just been meeting with people and talking and learning but yeah I'm feeling a little bit sapped so I'm going to call it a week so in the first week of camp I revised 8,240 words and that is minus the 1045 I had when I started that is significantly less than I was expecting I thought I'd be able to get at least 2,000 words a day done I think there have been a couple of issues that have led to me making much slower progress than I'd expected one is that when I'm going through scenes I've found that I haven't been changing much and that's probably dampened my enthusiasm a little bit because I don't want to just I don't want to just read through the draft to not do anything I mean what's the point of that so that's one thing the second thing is this whole science discussion I had with Chris last week so I think I mentioned on the weekend that I'm probably moving from a gene mutation to a special type of DNA and there is a scientific way we could make this work in theory the problem is that I'm struggling with the first scene so the scene where Hannah does the experiment or what I've changed it to is she messes up she accidentally knocks some chemicals on top of her work and that triggers the superhuman response and I think one of the issues I'm having is that this scene is not reflective of the tone of the book and this is something Brandon Sanderson talks about in his lectures on writing which is that when you start a book you're making a promise to the reader you're making a number of promises to the reader about what sort of book it is and what ride they're in for and one of the big promises you make at the beginning is the tone so if you're reading the first scene in a thriller or a romance you would expect those to be very different to an action superhero book which this is supposed to be and now it doesn't feel like an action superhero book in the first scene it's way too quiet and introspective so I need to think about how to address that and I'm not sure I've actually tried writing this scene twice now so I had the original version which was she was doing the experiment and it worked now the second version I was working on yesterday which is she knocks stuff over and accidentally discovers this thing but it doesn't feel right for the book and I'm not sure what to do about it especially because I think there's merit in having this here because this discovery has an impact on later parts of the book so yeah I'm a little bit stuck and that means I don't really want to progress because yeah I'm just stuck though part of me is thinking maybe I should just skip part one do the rest of it and then go back to part one because I have a feeling the rest of the book like it will need minor changes but I think it's pretty solid it's the first 25 percent that will need the most reworking so maybe I should do that but when it comes to doing major reworking I feel like I need a weekend to do that and I wish I'd thought of this stuff on the weekend that just passed because I could have been doing this and during the week I don't feel like I've got as much time for deep thought like it's I feel like if I only have say an hour a day when I can put towards writing and revising I should spend that actively writing or revising something I shouldn't spend that thinking so that's where I am at the moment I do still think I can hit my 50,000 word goal by the end of the month but that will rely on me having a very productive weekend I think so unfortunately this first week wasn't as successful as I'd hoped I hope that your cabinet arrival has gotten off to a great start though please let me know how you're going in the comments below whether you're on track to achieve your goal or whether like me you're running a little bit behind from here I'm going to see if there's anything else I can do to fix this laptop please give me a thumbs up to send good vibes my way and I will see you next time bye