 What's shaking? My name's Cam. Welcome back to another video. I have been writing for a pretty long time now since I was a kid. It's been 84. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But this year, 2021 in particular, I have been doing things in new ways. In ways that have been purposefully challenging, because why not make writing even harder than it already is? Partly because I know it'll improve my ability to write and my writing, but also because I just wanted to try something fresh and exciting. I wanted to step outside of my comfort zone. Call me Rick because I've been experimenting, you know, like, like, like Pickle Rick. OK, look, I want to chat about a few things, writing wise, including a style of writing that I never really thought I would give a go. But first of all, I want to talk about one of the most challenging things I've done so far as a writer, collaborating with other authors. Be warned. I'm about to plug myself in Indie author, plugging themselves. What the fuck? I know, crazy. So last year, I collaborated with other writers for the first time on a writing project when we made the horror anthology Local Horns. Well, that doesn't seem like a bad omen. And you know what? Getting involved with this was actually very easy. I sat down, daydreamed a little bit, came up with an idea, wrote it down and sent it off. B-Bizangan. This year, however, I wanted to take it a step further and do something that I've wanted to do for years, quite frankly. I wanted to curate my own anthology of horror short stories. I wanted to do it a long time ago. I just never could think of a way to deal with the royalties. I thought it would be way too much effort to just be indefinitely splitting profits and sending them out to the authors involved. But inspired by Local Horns again and all of the profits going to charity, I thought maybe I'll do that as well. Just have the profits go to charity because I don't really care about making money from the anthology so much. I just wanted to do it. And it was with that idea in mind that I came up with We're Not Home, a horror anthology, a collection of horror short stories exclusively from booktubers and author tubers here on YouTube. All of the stories involved themed around vacation and travel because I figured what better time is there to scare people out of traveling than during lockdowns? I've been talking about this anthology for a while, so you probably already know about it. But this is the first video I'm making with the actual paperback with the finished product. So if I wasn't being clear enough, it's finished. It's done. It's actually available for purchase right now. Obviously, I'm going to have links in the description below, but you can find it on Amazon just by looking up We're Not Home Anthology. I want to show you something, though. See here, there's a little badge that says A Shade of Grim. The purpose of this badge is to, first of all, let you know that any book with this badge on it, all of the profits will be going to charity. But this one, the profits will be going to a charity called Books in Homes. It's an Australian charity that provides books and educational material to communities that don't really have easy access to that. A Shade of Grim is basically a series of collections of horror short stories that I'll be releasing every six months to 12 months, involving a bunch of different writers all around one central theme again to raise money for charity. Obviously, there's only one book in the series now, but as time goes on, as the years go on, hopefully we can build up a pretty big catalogue of horror short stories that will be supporting a great cause. I'm really excited about it. A Shade of Grim. I promise this whole video isn't a plug for this book, but I have to tell you about it, you know? I'll also leave in the description of the video below a list of all of the authors that are involved, fellow YouTubers and links to their channels. I have already read the whole book, all of the short stories involved, and I know it's going to seem like I'm obliged to do this. I get that, but I have to say all of the short stories here, all 13 of them, well, all 12, I feel like I can't really count myself there. That's a bit pompous, but all 12 of the stories by the other writers are truly fantastic and they all span over a lot of different sub-genres of horror, so I feel like there's something for everyone. It goes from the pretty dark and gloomy and gory all the way to the more aesthetic and classically chilling types of horror. Kate Kavanaugh's first stab at writing horror genuinely impressed me. It's an exceptionally creepy story involving a one of those like video doorbells. Dane Cobain has a story in there that reminds me of one of my favorite Goosebumps books, A Night in Tarot Tower. I haven't been able to stop thinking about Jason White's story since I read it, a story about a creepy little town filled with creepy people. I could go on and on about what I love most about each of the stories involved, but in another video. The point is if you want a great spooky read in time for Halloween, if you want to support some of your maybe favorite YouTubers and you also want to support a great charity, We're Not Home might be the book for you. But what was the difficulty in curating this collection of horror short stories? Well, I'll tell you just just hang on. Writing my short story for this collection was actually pretty easy. It was an idea I had quite a long time ago about a couple that find a bit of a mysterious speech. Submitting a story for an anthology is most times pretty easy, but corralling 12 authors to work together with you is a whole different story, especially when half of them take a million years to answer their emails. Guys, I emailed you. So here's how it went. First, I selected the writers involved. This was done through an application process on Google Docs. I posted that up on Twitter and on the community tab of this YouTube channel. So if you want to be involved in the next volume in the A Shade of Grimm series, then you have to make sure you're keeping an eye out for it. I did it through an application process and also by talking to some writers that I'd already discussed this with in the past or some writers that I've already worked with in the past up in particular, local haunts. Once I had the list of writers that were going to be involved with the project, I had to email out a very long and detailed document covering pretty much exactly where, when and how I needed them to get their stories back to me and the theme that their stories should basically follow. The word count, the deadline, that was the easy part. But during the time of waiting for people to send their stories back, that's when some of the difficulties started arising. I had a few people that had the dropout from the project, which is fine. They had their reasons, but it did, you know, make things a lot more tricky. I had to find replacements. And then because those replacements were coming in so late, I had to extend their deadline, which in turn kind of pushed everything else back. After all of that, once I finally had all of the stories back, I then had to get contracts drawn up, arranged and sent out to them. The purpose of those contracts is to both protect the author's rights to publish their short story wherever else they'd like, and more importantly, to make sure that I am legally obliged to send all of the profits to charity. Not that I wouldn't have done it anyway, but for the comfort of everyone involved, for the comfort of the readers and for the comfort of myself, I would prefer to have it noted down in a legal document. I'm actually still waiting to get a couple of the contracts back, but at this point, the book's out, so I can't make any changes. It is what it is. From there, it was pretty standard self-publishing stuff, finding a cover artist. I wanted to go with a bit of a different cover style. I really, really like Cameron Rowe Beak's artwork that he did for this and he does for a lot of other self-published books on YouTube. But what I wanted for this, first of all, I wanted it to be noticeably separate from Regina's series of anthologies. I wanted it to be its own thing. And I also just kind of wanted a different art style, a bit more of a 3D rendered style. So so I hired Fisiha Zulfika and she created this and I'm really happy with it. Because the theme of the anthology is vacation and travel, I wanted to divert a bit from the dark and gloomy horror covers and do something a bit more bright and colourful while still trying to be creepy. So obviously it's meant to look like a family photo on the beach, but plot twist, the children are dead, the dad is crying and he's got blood on his hands. Formatting this book was one of the least favourite experiences I've ever had involving writing. I haven't been a big fan of formatting when it comes to any of my books, but this one in particular was very challenging because and it's completely my fault for not specifying this in my original email to all of the writers, but when everyone sent their stories back to me, they'd already formatted it. I think that might have been a misunderstanding on my part because when I sent the original email, I asked them to do as much of their own editing as they could. I was more so referring to like grammar and spelling, that kind of stuff. But a lot of the people that sent it back, sent it back formatted. And I can't have everyone's stories formatted differently. So I had to go through and reformat everything. And it was just it was probably the closest I've ever come to wanting the stick of fork in each of my eyes. But again, that's my fault. Anyway, against all odds, we managed to get it out in time for Halloween. That was always the goal, although I set the deadline way too tight. It wasn't easy. I'm not going to lie. This is probably one of the most stressful and difficult things I've ever done when it comes to writing, but I don't regret a minute of it. At the end of the day, it was a very fun experience. Most of the difficulty was just because it was the first time I've ever done it. Next time I do this for the next volume in the series, I know a few tricks to make the process go a lot more smoothly. But for now, I am glad that it's done. I think in particular next time, I'm going to make sure the publication date is not so close to the submission deadline. But yeah, check it out if you'd like. Again, I'll leave links in the description below. Supports charity, supports some YouTubers and up-and-coming writers. It gives you a great spooky read for Halloween. It should, at the very least, make you a bit more scared of travelling, which, ironically, is pretty helpful during a pandemic. On a separate but really quick note, I have also basically finished my own separate collection of horror short stories. It'll be a book of short stories with all of the stories written by me. And I was planning to release it at the end of November. Technically, I could do that, but I don't think I will. The thing is, We're Not Home is coming out or has come out now towards the end of October. And then I also have a short story in Regina's next anthology, the follow up to Local Haunts. The next one is called Served Cold, and I have a story in that one, and that comes out in December. So I think having a book come out this month, next month, and the month after that is just a bit much. That's a lot of marketing I would have to do on my end. And also it's just it's just a lot. So I think it would be much better for me to kind of keep the collection that I've basically finished in my back pocket and then just release it early next year. Split them up a bit more, you know, although I have to say I am super, super excited for people to read that collection because some of the stories in there I can say without a doubt is some of the best writing I've ever done. Some of the stories in that are the creepiest and just best horror I've ever written. If I'm allowed to sound a bit cocky for a minute. As for the writing style change that I mentioned at the start of the video, you may remember me mentioning a few times that I exclusively write in third person past tense. That's just the only way I've ever really felt comfortable writing. But with my horror collection that I just mentioned, at least two or three of the stories involved are first person. I wanted to try and do it because a lot of other authors do it. A lot of popular books now are in first person and I wanted to challenge myself. It was tricky. I'm not going to lie. It kind of felt like I was writing fictional diary entries rather than telling a story, so it was pretty difficult to stick to that structure. Like in third person, you can use lots of beautiful, descriptive imagery, metaphors and similes to describe people and places. But in first person, it's basically an internal monologue. I don't know about you, but I don't really walk into a room and think to myself, light is dancing off that window like a flame on clear water. Feels like a weird thing to say in a first person story, but would feel completely natural in a third person one. I don't know. It's just hard for me. That's what she said. Well, that's it for now. Let me know what you think of the new anthology. Are there any other YouTubers that you watch that are involved with it? Or, hey, have you experimented going from third person to first person or past tense to present tense? I don't know if I will ever write in present tense. That's that's just a bit too much for me. Anyway, that'll do it for today, but I'm excited to show you my next writing video, which should be next week all about fantasy world building, because that's what I'm really sinking my heels into right now. And I'm having more fun than I've had in a long, long time with outlining. And I've also been using a very, very cool online tool to help with that outlining that I'm excited to show you about, not sponsored. It's so much fun. It feels like I'm playing a video game basically, but I'll tell you about it next week. In the meantime, the video is just about done. So what are you still doing here? Go do some writing. Catch you.