 What is shaking? Hello, my name's Cam. Welcome back to another video. All right. Damn, it's been a while since I uploaded on this channel, obviously. I haven't even been streaming on Twitch for quite a while, sadly. So it's with that in mind that the first thing I want to say to you guys, aside from Merry Christmas, Happy New Year. I hope it's been a great transition for you. The first thing I want to say is thank you all so much for sticking around this long. Thank you for all of the support that you've given me over the last year. And I'm sorry. I'm sorry that I've been away. I mean, I've still been kind of around. I've been uploading videos over on my book review channel quite a bit still. But that other channel is quite literally me just talking about the books and stories that I love. But this one I talk about my writing and my personal life's kind of effect on my writing, that kind of thing. I just want to say it has been a pretty tough couple of months for me for quite a number of reasons, but nothing like super serious. Like I'm okay. My family is okay. There's just, it's been all, it's been a lot, man. This year is just last year. You know, I will be back streaming on Twitch very soon. So if you haven't already, you should go check out my Twitch channel. You can find it in the description below. Otherwise, it's just, it's this one right here. When we're back to the regular schedule, it'll be like three to four streams a week, where we just pretty much just chat and write together. It's like a big writer's club. It's a lot of fun. So I'm going to do my best to make sure this video is not just a total fucking drag, man. A few of the things I want to talk about today are going to be a bit of a bummer. But then on the flip side of that, a lot of it is actually really great as well. So I mentioned before that I have a separate YouTube channel where I do my book review kind of stuff. It's where I do all of the reading side of stuff, whereas here I upload all of my writing side of things. The reason I've been uploading on that channel a lot more than I have here recently is because it's been a lot easier for me to use that as my creative outlet. This YouTube channel that you're watching me on right now, it's, it's kind of dying. Like I'm not just trying to be dramatic. I'm not just trying to be, you know, clickbait or anything like that. It's, I don't know, man. I don't know how to describe it. First things first, I want to make it clear that I'm not looking for sympathy. I'm not looking for advice on how to fix this. The reason I'm talking about this at all is because if you're watching me on here, then chances are you're subscribed to this channel and I think you have a right to know kind of what's going on with this channel. I made this YouTube channel like five plus years ago and it's had a lot of different names. It's done a lot of different stuff. It's looked a lot different from time to time. But one thing that's kind of stayed the same through all of the years is that I've always been extremely proud of it. I'm not for a second saying that I expected to get rich and famous off this YouTube channel at all. But the thing that kind of always encouraged me on and pushed me on when it came to YouTube is seeing progress, you know, seeing growth. And when it comes to this channel, that's just, it's just not happening. And you know what? It's okay. It's actually fine. At first, I was pretty upset about it. I guess seeing, you know, this thing that you've been working on for like half a decade just progressively and more significantly grind to a bit of a creative stop. However, I think I'm okay with it now. Being that I can use my other YouTube channel, my reading channel as a creative outlet, and that channel is actually doing surprisingly well. And there's also a really positive side effect that has come out of it as well. And that is that there is a lot less pressure on me now to upload at specific times and make sure the content that I upload is extravagant and all this stuff like that that was really stressing me out before. I just don't really worry about that anymore. When it comes to this writing YouTube channel now, I pretty much just upload whenever I have a video to make. And when I make the video, my focus is more on me kind of having fun with making it rather than how cool and spectacular it is. So what does all this mean? Nothing. I'm not going to stop making videos on this channel. Pretty much nothing is going to change. I am going to be uploading more than I have in the last like month or two. But this channel, Cam Wolf is writing, is going to be my primary outlet for talking on a more personal level about how my writing is going, which is still my major passion. Writing books is still what I want to do with my life. So this channel is still very much relevant to me. So I am going to still be uploading. I'm still going to be interacting with all of you guys. And I still will very much be over on Twitch doing a lot of writing there as well, because that's just a whole different type of fun. I did try writing vlogs, that kind of thing, but it's just, it's not for me. I feel like I was making plans to live my life in a different way so that it's more entertaining on video. And I just don't want to do that. The simple factor the matter is, is that my life outside of these YouTube channels is not that exciting. I like my life being like that. And when I say not exciting, I don't mean that I have a boring life. It's just that it would probably be boring to watch, but I have a lot of fun living the way I do. I like making videos where I analyze the mistakes that I've made in my writing before. Videos where I look at maybe how my writing has changed or how the industry of writing and publishing has changed over time. What's trending? What's popular? What isn't working anymore? What new things are people adding to the ever-growing list of overused tropes and cliches? Anyway, that's all I really want to say on this channel. I hope it wasn't too much of a drag. There isn't really a whole lot to take away from anything I've said. Like I said, nothing's gonna change. This is just how it is. I don't expect a lot from this YouTube channel. It never was my plan to get rich and famous from these videos. This channel will always be the first place that I talk about what I'm writing, when it's coming out, all that kind of stuff. So if you have any interest in my writing, my books, or even my writing journey seeing me kind of hopefully work towards a career in writing books, this channel is still the place for that. But anyway, let's move on from the depressing topic of a dying author tube channel to my actual writing, how the last year went, and my plans going forward. This is where the mood should really pick up because the last 12 months of writing for me has been the most significant in my entire life. And that's not an exaggeration. Not counting the urban fantasy books that I took down years and years ago, before last year, I only had one published piece of writing up. And that was my short story in, it was my short story alone among the gum trees in local haunts. That was all I had up so far. Just a fun little campfire horror story that I am really proud of. And I'm also really proud of how well this anthology did, that this anthology arranged by Regina from Regina's Haunted Library. It raised a lot of money for charity because all the profits for this, and the profits for the other anthologies I'll be mentioning in a minute, they all go to charity. It did really well, but I was kind of like, ah, man, I wish I had more. So that's what I was working towards. That was my goal for 2021 was to have more published works. I gotta tell you, I kind of succeeded. Three books in which my writing exists. Or if we're talking about as of right now, that's four. Before 2021, I had one. Now I have four. I have a short story in local haunts, a short story in the follow up to local haunts. And this is the most recent one that came out actually came out not too long ago. Served cold. Another anthology I have a short story in and an anthology I am extra proud of because I was the curator of this one. Something I always wanted to do for years actually was get a lot of the people on author to even before it was called author to I wanted to get a lot of people involved in a group project, something like an anthology of short stories. And I never knew how to actually do it almost primarily because the logistics of indefinitely splitting the profits was very complicated. But when local haunts came out, I was inspired to simply just have all of the profits go to charity because that's easier and it's obviously helping a great cause. So I finally decided to do something I always wanted to do and I curated my own anthology of horror short stories involving 13 different authors. It's called we're not home. The theme is vacation and travel. I have a short story on this one called head in the sand. It was a lot of fun to write. I'll be talking more about my plans for writing going forward but I'll mention now you'll notice on the back of this anthology there's a badge that says a shade of grim. A shade of grim is the title I have given to this series of anthologies because I will be making more and the thing that every shade of grim horror anthology will have in common is that all of the profits will be going to charity. The fourth and final book that I published in 2021 is the one that took the most out of me and that is because it is a full psychological horror novel. It is a book that I've been working on for years. Writing this was extremely emotionally draining. It really did take a lot out of me because I had to go to some pretty dark places. It's a story about a middle aged man whose life is at rock bottom and he's really bitter about it. He used to be super successful with a beautiful family and a nice house and now his life is in the pits and he lives alone in a cheap apartment and one day this insane storm rolls through his city and he finds himself trapped in his apartment building and with the storm has come a lot of nightmarish horrors from his past. Of course it has its issues that I'm sure people have pointed out in reviews as they have every right to do so but at the end of the day I really do think this is the best it could have possibly been at that point in time. This book was published on the 25th of January 2021 so we're coming up on the year anniversary of this book and all I'll say is I have something kind of special planned for that. That was my 2021 in writing and looking back on it even now I'm like you did pretty good Cam. None of the writing that I did in 2021 was perfect but it was the best I've done so far and hopefully I just keep getting better. That is my hope and that is what I am going to be aiming for. So 2022 what are my plans? If I was to set myself a goal it would be to be involved with at least four more books during this year which may sound pretty ambitious. My 2021 in writing was literally entirely horror so I want to move away from that a bit and this year I'm actually going to be working on quite a bit of fantasy. First and foremost I am working on the first three books in a long-running episodic fantasy series. Three books may sound extremely ambitious but it's kind of complicated. See when I say that these books are episodic what I mean is that they're actually going to be quite short maybe around the 30 to 40 thousand words mark so really three of those books together is almost the equivalent of one or even much less than one traditionally epic fantasy novel. The reason I'm doing them that way is because although there will be a major plot connecting all of these books I was really inspired by the episodic format of stories like The Witcher and Del Torre quest and I wanted to do one myself. This series that I'm starting as of right now actually doesn't even have an end in sight. My goal is that I can write these books kind of indefinitely. That could be in a year, two years, it could be in 30 years I don't know. A lot of it is still in the outlining stage but as it stands the stories will be about two guys who grew up together in this fantasy world. They grew up together and ended up joining this large group of Robin Hood style outlaws but at the beginning of this story that's in their past and the story actually starts with one of them breaking out of jail. Each book in the series will be about these two guys who are effectively sell swords or mercenaries having a different kind of self-contained adventure in each book all the while learning more and more about a greater conflict that actually threatens the larger world. That's the plan so far like I said it's still very much in the outlining stage but I'm having so much fun writing it so far. Going from writing horror to writing fantasy is such a refreshing thing. Don't get me wrong I love writing horror but when you do it for like a couple of years and you're writing horror exclusively getting to go to something a bit more light-hearted and much more imaginative like you're making up so much stuff like locations and monsters it's just fun is the word I would use but aside from the fantasy series I'm actually also going to be self-publishing this year my collection of my own horror short stories that I've been talking about for quite a while. It's actually pretty much done like it's almost ready to go I just got to get it professionally edited and then yeah it's good to go but I'm gonna wait a bit to put that out mainly because Served Cold like literally just came out so I want to give it a bit of time before I release another collection of horror short stories and then the last thing that I have planned so far to write in 2022 is the next anthology in the shade of grim series that I mentioned. Anyway that's about as much talking about myself as I can stomach for now that's absolutely as much self-plugging as I'm comfortable doing in one video I would love to hear how your year and writing has gone what are your plans for the next year in writing and before I go I do just want to say thank you one more time especially to you guys who are still watching the video right now thank you for sticking around for so long even when I don't upload as regularly as the other author tube channels even when my content isn't as interesting as like Kate Kavanaugh I appreciate all of you guys who have not only stuck with me but have stuck supporting me through all of this it is so much appreciated hopefully I'll see you over on Twitch soon and we can do some writing together otherwise have a good one take care and I'll see you next time catch ya