 Hello and welcome back to my channel. Today it is the 28th of March and I'm planning to get a head start on the Canton Araymo project today. If any of you hear, my name's Jaggy by the way. So to give you an update on where life is at the moment, I have been working from home for the last two weeks and my company has instituted a mandatory remote work policy because of coronavirus and it's been interesting because I've worked from home before. In fact, when I was doing my business full-time, I actually did it full-time from home for three years. So I know that working from home can be really good for focused work. However, I've been struggling with the lack of structure a little bit so I feel like I just feel a bit like a blob in both the physical and mental and metaphorical sense. So because there's no routine, like I don't get up and walk to work in the morning, I can't go to the gym at lunchtime because gyms are closed, I wake up and I lounge in bed reading my Kindle or watching YouTube. Then I transfer to the couch or to the dining table and do more stuff on the computer. Then when I have a break, I stay on the computer so it's all very sedentary, which I don't think is good for my mental health or my creative output. So as of today, I'm going to be turning over a new leaf because even though I'm not going to deny the serious of the current coronavirus crisis, like it is a crisis, it's spreading dramatically. We all know this. However, I think there's opportunity here as well. So I know one of the things a lot of people complain about is, you know, I don't have the time to do the things I want. I don't have the time to write. I don't have the time to learn the language or learn how to sing. And most of us who are staying at home at the moment have more time than ever before. Like I don't have my, you know, hour and a half at the gym taking up time. I don't have my half hour walk to work taking up time. I don't have all of those conversations that happen around the office mean taking up time, which means I can get work done more effectively. So why not use that time to write a book? So today, 28th of March is me getting into a new routine. And one of the things I think is important for me at least is to get out of the house and move a little bit. Fortunately, as you can see, the streets are very quiet at the moment, especially in the morning. So I think I can do that without putting anyone in danger. So I'm going to get out and do a walk each morning and also start the writing process today just because even though it's not technically April yet, it is the weekend, which means I can spend a little bit more time to get into the project. Whereas I think if I wait until April, which is Wednesday, then I'll be back into like I'll be working again. So it'll be really hard to separate my work and my writing given there's no change of environment. So that's the plan for now. So I've just gotten back from my walk and it was really nice to get out, especially since it's a beautiful sunny day. When it comes to COVID-19 restrictions in Estonia at the moment, everything is closed except for supermarkets, pharmacies and post offices. Though even though those things are open, there are measures in place. So at the pharmacy, for instance, everything is cordoned off and the staff are wearing gloves and masks and you need to ask them for what they want and they will get it for you and bring it back to the checkout. There are also like stickers on the floor telling you where you can stand so you're not too close to anyone else. The same thing at the supermarket actually. So at the checkouts and at the deli, there are now stickers on the ground so you can't stand too close to anyone else. Other than that, as of yesterday, we are now not allowed to go out in groups of more than two people and you're supposed to keep two meters of distance between you and other people at all times. So on my walk, I think I passed five or six people and everyone's respecting it. So on the path, we would just go like as far to the side as we could so we maintained social distance. The only place where I saw some more people was Town Hall Square but that's quite a large square and everyone was very far away so not really counting that. So now it's time to start riding. So behind me, you can see where I set up my home office because I've been working from home for the last two weeks. And the way this has developed is on the week of the 16th, I just had my laptop and I was working for the couch or just using the laptop on the dining table. And then the following week, so Monday the 23rd, I believe, my right arm was starting to ache a little bit. So I have had RSI in my right arm in the past. And in this case, it was because I was using the touchpad and the arrows too much with the one hand. So I started trying to do some self massage and I overdid it and everything seized up on Monday afternoon. So I checked with HR whether it was okay to pop into the office and just to grab my external keyboard and mouse. And they said, yes, so went to the office, grabbed my keyboard and mouse. Then when I got home, our boss said that the work at home period was going to be extended probably for another two or four weeks. And I thought, well, it's probably, even though I can work on my laptop, it's not the ideal setup. So I asked, can I go to the office and get some monitors? The office manager was actually nice enough to say, yep, take a couple of brand new ones, they're already boxed up. So I've sent up the dining table with my two monitors and laptop. Unfortunately, one of the monitors I can't actually connect to the laptop because the laptop and docking station are too old. So it's just a decorative monitor. Then the other thing I realized was that the dining table, it's actually the perfect height for me to use as a standing desk. So now I've got everything set up with my laptop propped up on a bunch of books. And one of the monitor that I can connect propped up on a box. So everything's the perfect height for standing desk workings. So for the last few days, I've been mixing up my time with working all standing, sitting at the dining table and working and then removing the laptop and sitting on the couch and moving around. So it's actually been really helpful to have those options and just, you know, good for my back and good for my arm, given that I'm not as active as I usually am in terms of the gym and working out. That does raise a small problem though, in that because there are so many things on the table now, it's going to be difficult and annoying to disassemble the whole setup. Yet I would like to use the table for my camp nano stuff. So I need to figure out the best way to do that. So step one, move the keyboard and mouse. Step two, make a hot chocolate because I'm feeling, I've just got that sort of anxiety procrastination feeling where I don't want to get started on the project. And I know that's just because it's been a couple of, well, three months now since I last wrote. And I know it's going to be like that really awkward phase when you start again and I want to avoid that. But logically, I know that as soon as I get through that phase, hopefully in a week or so, I'll be feeling much better about writing again. So I just need to get through this next week. It has been an hour and a half. And all I have done in that time is create a playlist for my book, which I understand isn't the best start to this project. However, I opened a document to try to start writing and I had some songs on in the background and I found that like I was just stopping and listening to the songs really deeply. And I thought, and as soon as I noticed this, I thought, OK, this could be a really useful exercise for getting into the vibe of this book considering I haven't written anything for it before. And then that set me down a little bit of a black hole looking for other songs rather than like the three I had saved off the top of my head. So now I have my playlist. It has 19 songs. I think it's ordered nicely to follow the way the story progresses. But I haven't written anything. So now I've put on some sweet potatoes in the oven for lunch so they should be done in about half an hour. So I have half an hour to get some words written in this story. So wish me luck. I'm not making much progress. So it it's only been 15 minutes since I filmed that last bit. So it does feel like it's a little bit early to be throwing in the towel. But no, I can't seem to I can't seem to settle on anything to write. Like I have all of these images in my head from all of the thinking I've been doing about this story and I've been looking at my spreadsheet which has a number of scenes I could be working on. But yeah, I don't seem to have enough of a scene to start and I don't seem to have enough of an image to write about if that makes any sense. From here I'm going to actually smells like my potatoes are done already so I'm going to get the food before it burns. And I think I might just try doing some like scribbling for a little bit and see where that goes. I mean the good thing is is that what is it now like almost 20 past 12 which is usually usually I'd be getting home from the gym on a Saturday around 12 so even though I haven't achieved much, if this was pre-quarantine I wouldn't have achieved anything at this point on a Saturday anyway. So the benefits of having extra time is that there's extra time to waste and hopefully that is not going to be the model of this video but for day one that seems to be the way it's tracking. Hello and welcome to Teleskivi Creative City, usually one of the most bustling parts of Tillyn which at the moment as you can see it is not for reasons we all know about. So today is April 2nd and my camp and Araymo is not going well which you can probably gather from the fact that I last filmed on Saturday which is what five days ago. So what's been happening? Well on Saturday and Sunday I tried to do a bit of writing each day and just really struggled to write anything and oh nice that there's still music even though there's no one here to enjoy it. Anyway so it was really struggling to just get anything written and part of me wonders if maybe I missed the opportunity to make the most of the enthusiasm I had about this book like just a few weeks ago because I knew that this book would be a struggle. I knew that I probably wasn't a good enough writer to pull it off. I knew that if I wanted to seriously pursue it I would probably need to revisit it in a number of years. I was still really excited about doing it though so I decided to make that my project and then of course I had probably about two weeks after I completed the story clock and when I started to write which was this weekend and it did not go well like I just I don't know like I have these images in my head and then I try to translate them onto paper and they just don't work like I feel like it would be much easier to do this as a film and then there are things where it's like I know a few weeks ago I came up with phrasing that I wanted to use I knew what the first sentence of the book was going to be and now I don't remember what it was like I know it was something that Lace and Kara and how she always wears it but the combination of words isn't working or maybe I have remembered the combination of words but actually seeing them on the page means they're not as good as what I thought they were. When it comes to what I've written the I've done about four or five hundred words at the first meeting which I quite like so far but it's like everything I think of I've got these moments and I don't know where to go from there so I've got this moment when their arms brush and when Cecily is like noticing everything about Kara and like how she bites her lip and the freckles on her nose and the like line of lace from her bralette that she can see when her shirt gates over and all of these details because she's intensely watching her and that's fun to do but when it comes to conversation and what they actually talk about like I don't know and I'm finding that with any time I try to think about and nail down a scene I'm finding the same problem I have these moments but I'm really struggling to flesh them out and part of me thinks I probably should have done that in March when I was preparing and this links back to my last video and how do you know you're done like I thought I was done I completed three plotting methods I had over 30 scenes listed and yet I still feel extremely unprepared and ill-equipped to tackle this book so on Saturday I did about 600 words I think on Sunday I did like 218 maybe and then I haven't written since then and part of it is because I have been in a bit of a slump state for the past few days but I think it might actually be because I've been in a reading slump so rather than reading books as my preferred form of entertainment I've been indulging in a bit too much YouTube and Netflix which I also love but they're a more passive form of entertainment then yesterday I read Recursion by Blake Crouch which was a lot of fun and it got me a bit enthusiastic again so today I'm feeling better and it's a good reminder to myself to keep reading and try to keep reading good books because there are you know books that I enjoy reading like they're not the best quality though and it's you know it's like eating a beautiful healthy salad or grilled vegetables or something that's delicious and you know it's good for you but when you're feeling really bad you just want to get a doughnut even though the doughnut won't make you feel good afterwards so because I'm feeling better today and I don't have any meanings at work today I think I feel more prepared to tackle the book or at least a scene I know which scene I want to work on I'm hoping it'll be easier because it's a Cecily scene rather than a Cecily and Cara scene so I can just focus on one character rather than trying to get the dynamics right we'll see how it goes it is now Friday the 3rd of April and after all of my talk yesterday about how I was going to get back on track I did no writing yesterday the good news is though that I actually did some writing this morning before work and I'm actually quite proud of myself because when I woke up this morning I woke up I was going to go out for a walk and it was raining and it's been like raining and snowing all day and I sort of went oh that's not really conducive for a good long walk so I lounged about in bed for another two hours so it wasn't the best start to the day it wasn't really good for getting motivated and then I got onto my computer and thought well you know most of the office isn't going to be online for another hour and a half to two hours so why don't I just try doing some writing and I did about 40 minutes or so I think I got about 900 words in that time so I've actually made some progress which is good the scene I ended up working on was the one I mentioned yesterday which is Cecily interacting with other characters she has captives and she is interacting with the captives I'm not quite sure like I want her to have a different dynamic with each of them but one of the things that that's difficult is to explain why she's keeping them around given that she's not in the throes of obsession anymore like she's going to be with Kari in this book however that's a question for another time like the goal of this month is to just get stuff written so what that means is now it's a third of april I have a 30 hour camp nano-rimo goal and I've done 40 minutes so that's two hours and 20 minutes behind I don't know how I'm going to go this afternoon so at the moment it's about lunchtime I'm just waiting for my lunch to cook on the stove and then in about half an hour I've got a meeting so I'll see how I feel after this meeting it tends to be the most draining one of the week it's this marketing manager's thing scheduled for an hour but often ends up being an hour and a half last week it was three so I'm always a little bit drained after it so I'll see how I go this afternoon I might have capacity to do some more writing today if not then that means this weekend I need to catch up on an extra two hours and 20 minutes that's four hours and 20 minutes of writing this weekend which I think is doable I think if I keep falling behind it's going to obviously get more challenging to catch up but if I can get a big weekend of working on this book done then I'll be on track for the rest of April and the other thing actually is because it's a time goal rather than a word count goal despite what my camp nano profile says it doesn't actually need to be writing time this weekend it could be like more planning and outlining time which I think will be helpful for hopefully getting me through this really awkward beginning because as I mentioned yesterday even though I have my list of scenes a lot of them I still don't feel like I know enough about what happened what's going to happen so I think I'll spend a couple of hours of my time this weekend just mapping out the upcoming scenes I want to write I mean the other approach is maybe I could just try and do the whole 30 hours this weekend maybe I could try and do the whole 30 hours this weekend I'm not going to do that to myself I'm tempted but no I don't think I'm going to do that to myself maybe I should just try and see how I go anyway stay tuned I will check in again later when I've made my decision and potentially have another video if this weekend turns into some insane camp nano challenge so it's coming up to 5 p.m on Friday and I'm about 90% sure I won't be writing anything else today we just had an emergency communication come up so if you're new here then you probably don't know that I work for a financial trading company which means things are very busy at the moment because the market's all over the place so the oil price is at or a couple of days ago it hit its lowest in 17 years so there's a lot of volatility and they're taking measures to prevent people from losing more money basically and they're expecting more volatility because there's an OPEC meeting like an emergency OPEC meeting coming up so I had my big management meeting then had a few different things happening with my team then had this emergency communication and my brains a little bit fried so I'm just hanging out until we get this thing published and then I can sign off for the week so since this is probably the end of my camp nano activity for the day and I have not yet updated the camp nano website because I haven't done anything in April until today I thought now would be a good time to update the website so let's take a look so this is more of a project spreadsheet rather than just a camp nano RIMO spreadsheet which is why it's going to go beyond April so I did my first two days on the weekend which as I mentioned earlier not much 618 and 231 words and then today was 991 words so obviously not nano levels time is not what I wanted to be doing either but it's an improvement and hopefully it'll keep improving from here what's funny though is if we go to the charts tab with the writing efficiency so you can see there's this big gap already um same thing with my daily words what's a little bit scary is that I've got this set up until the end of May because powerless took me two months I thought let's aim for two months with this as well and just looking at this chart makes me realize the end of May isn't actually that far away like two months isn't that long especially considering how little progress I've made so yeah actually it's a little bit depressing thinking about the lack of progress I've made because when I did nano I think by the time I got to the end of week one I was almost at 10,000 words and this technically is the end of week one and I'm not even at 2,000 words so things do not bode well but anyway let's look at the nano website so I'll add 991 words this session this actually today actually went pretty well better than the weekend at home everything's going to be assuming everyone for the entire month of April will be at home I was writing on a laptop so I've got 991 out of 20,000 words now as I mentioned in my camp nano prep video I don't actually want to do a word count goal for this I really just want to get back into writing which is why I've personally set a 30 hour goal but because of COVID-19 the nano rhymer website people couldn't set up times and lines and other types of goals so everything's translated into words so in theory what I could have done was just 30 words or 1,800 minutes and done it that way so rather than clocking words I'd be doing like each word as a minute but I didn't do that and I can't figure out how to change it so we're doing a 20,000 word count goal as well so that is all from me for today it is 5 20 a.m on Saturday morning and I'm probably not going to do camp nano rhymer this weekend so I was really fixated on the idea and then this morning I woke up at eight past three not intentionally but I woke up and I couldn't get back to sleep so I thought well I might as well get up and start writing and because I was up so early I thought you know it would actually be possible to do 15 hours today and 15 hours tomorrow and achieve that but when I started writing I started to think that that probably wasn't realistic for a couple of reasons one is that I don't know if it's still because I'm not really into this book yet or just because it's a harder book but I'm finding that I can't do writing sessions of the length that I'm used to so in the past whether I'm writing for work or even powerless like I could potentially do a couple of hours at a time of just focused writing whereas with this book for the last week or the four days I've actually written in that week generally I get to 15 or 20 minutes and then I'm done and I need a break which is really unusual so that's element one element two is that I really haven't been sleeping well for the past two weeks I think it's because of working from home and just having the lack of structure and one of the things I've realised is it's different working from home at the moment because when I used to work from home in the past the world was still open so I could go to a cafe or a library I could go to the gym like there were other things I could do to break up the day which other than walking at the moment that really isn't an option so I think the lack of activity probably the amount of food I've been eating lately and just the lack of routine is contributing to me not actually getting enough sleep because I keep going to bed at my normal time which is usually 9 30 10 p.m. but I've been waking up at three or four every day so even though I was up earlier today and had this extra time that could have been put towards my book given that I don't seem to be able to focus or have as lengthy periods of productive time and the fact that I'm feeling quite tired I don't think 30 hours is realistic for this weekend so I'm going to continue with Camp Nano as per normal so I've done two little sessions so far one was from 352 until 404 and that was 319 words so that's a pretty good word per minute ratio in fact let me look up what that is so that's 29 words per minute which is pretty good the next session so I had about a half hour break so from 435 I was writing and I gave up at 520 and then I did 661 words so that's dropping down to what is that 45 minutes so that's like 14 and a half words a minute which is much lower and what's interesting is that so what I've done yesterday today is this sort of series of vignettes where Cecily is visiting each of her captives and the first three weren't too difficult and the last one was that one that took a long time what's interesting is that the last one was the one I knew the most about like that was the one that I thought about the most I had the most in my head yet it was the hardest to write and I'm finding that with this book in general that it's the bits that I'm clear on that are harder to write than the bits I'm just sort of I know something needs to go here and I need to make it up and I think I'm not sure why it is but I suspect it's that when I picture something so clearly in my head it doesn't translate into text and anything I write is a really poor imitation of how I see it in my mind and that's always going to be the case because what you see in your mind is perfect and unexamined and if you're like me cinematic and text is a translation of that and the translation is probably never going to be as good as the original but your job as a writer is to try and get as close as possible so other people can see the same story play out and that's a struggle at the moment the good news is though is that it's coming up to 5.30 I've still got the full day ahead of me so there's plenty of time to write some more and continue chipping away at my camp nanotarget so for now I'm going to have a shower and I think edit some footage from yesterday which is just going to give my mind a little bit of a break and then I think I'll I need to pick some other scenes to outline because I've gotten to the end of this little series I have no idea what I'm going to work on but you're going to find out in about three seconds so I'll see you then it's coming up to 3 p.m and I've now done four little sessions today so two of them were in the early hours then after I had my shower I did like some brainstorming type of writing and then I just had some time off and went for it well I did the grocery shopping all of the weekend chores and I've just finished doing about 45 minutes so all in all I think that brings me to about an hour and a half maybe a little bit more today so let's add this to my spreadsheet and find out I was originally planning to do just one row a day in this spreadsheet however I like the idea of doing individual writing sessions just because once you average it out over a whole day you don't have as much insight into how you're working like one of the things I said this morning was that I did two sessions one of them was put 24 words a minute one of them was 14 words a minute so averaging those out means you don't actually know which time is more effective or which scene was easier to write so I'm going to start doing individual writing sessions which means each day we'll have multiple rows and in the charts each day we'll have multiple columns but I think it'll be more usable for me when I'm looking back at it so Saturday first session was 3.52 to 4.04 am because I'm a crazy person who cannot sleep properly it was 300 productive time was the entire time so that's 12 minutes and 391 words I don't actually know how to so this morning the two sessions I worked on were two more of those vignettes each of them is between 400 and about 700 words so it's not like they're complete scenes on their own but I wouldn't necessarily put them all together as one scene maybe I should just I'm just going to put them all together as one scene so that means yesterday I did 0.5 and then each of the sessions this morning was 0.25 so the reason I'm adding things here is just because all four of these rows were me working on the same scene so the scene length is whatever the sum of these four word counts is and the time to complete the scene is the sum of the minutes spent on this scene yeah I think that's right okay so the next session this morning was okay then the next session today was 7.55 to 8.10 a.m now this session was just outlining so I'm going to put that here productive time was 15 minutes the reason there's a session time column as well as a productive time column is because sometimes I might have a session that lasts for say an hour and a half but I don't spend all of that time actively writing or outlining or doing whichever activity it is for that day so an example of that would be if I attended a live writing those generally go for an hour and a half or two hours but there might only be 45 minutes to an hour of actual sprint time in there when you're focused so that's what this is here for when it comes to the work I've done so far on this project I've only really been counting the focus time just because I haven't really had sessions that go beyond the focus time and when I've been making notes because I'm time tracking generally like I write down the time I start something I write down the time I stop and then I go and do something else it's not like I go and get distracted by Google or something and then I come back to this like I feel like when I stop I've actually stopped the session so I'm curious to see whether that keeps up throughout the rest of Camp NaNoWriMo and then the last one was the one just now so 1815 that's not too bad that would be a possible normal NaNo day now let's go to the Camp NaNo website now one of the annoying things about the NaNoWriMo website is that it does words per session so if I wanted to add my total words for the day I would need to do the session from 3.50am until what's the 2.44pm so that makes it look like I was writing for what 11 hours which obviously I wasn't doing and when it gets to like my word per minute that's going to be less than one but then having to enter multiple sessions is a little bit annoying so what I'm going to do is I'll do my total words for the day and how much time did I spend today in total so it's 116 minutes so basically 2 hours 11.10 I'll make that 3.10 so then we've got 2 hours and update progress so I'm up to 2,806 words that is not particularly good progress for one week of working on a project at least it isn't for me however it is progress and that's the main thing like I'm starting a new project it's been a bit awkward and difficult haven't been sleeping well in fact I feel really jet lagged at the moment so I might have nap this afternoon so circumstances aren't ideal so even though it's not as far as I would like to be I'm still calling that a win and hoping that next week will be better so that is all from me for this week in the comments please let me know are you doing camp NaNoWriMo and if so what's your project and how did your first week go other than that I'll see you next time bye