 Hello and welcome back to my channel. If you're new here, my name is Jackie and I'm an aspiring writer and I have decided to attempt to write a book in a week because I hate myself. No, I don't actually hate myself. So why would I do this to myself then? Well, there are a couple of things. First, I did not achieve any of my writing goals this year and it would be really nice to finish the year with a bang and get something done. Second, I have been trying to finish the anatomy of story to plot out a couple of book ideas and it's taking a long time. At the time of filming this video it's been about three months since I started and admittedly I haven't been working on it constantly since that time but it's still a long time to be focused on one plotting method and I feel like I'm getting really impatient to start writing again. I'm so sick of thinking about writing. I just want to create something and third, one of the projects I am attempting to map out with the anatomy of story is actually a book I've already written. It has no title at the moment. I've been referring to it as my fantasy hot mess. You can see it here. It is 111,000 words and it needs a lot of work and I was hoping that with the anatomy of story and maybe some other plotting methods I could figure out what's wrong with it and fix it. The problem is now it's like really stuck in my head and I think part of that's a combination of having been thinking about it for the past three months but also because it was an existing idea so there are these legacy thoughts that are in my head and that makes it harder to focus on other projects and other ideas so I almost feel like I need to get this done in order to get it out of my head and be able to write some new stuff and finally I actually have this week off work. So today is the 21st of December. I have the whole week off work and I'm not going anywhere because COVID which means I have a whole lot of time to relax and hopefully write so why not make the most of the opportunity especially since it's going to be a couple of months before I have another week off. That is the why now the what. What am I actually planning to do this week? Originally I was thinking I would just try and rewrite it off the top of my head from scratch not even looking at the old document however I have actually been thinking about it a little bit over the past few days since I had the idea to attempt this and I haven't read through the old draft but I've done a little bit of skimming just to get a better sense of where everything was and what was wrong with it and I've realized there are some things in there that I like there are a couple of scenes there are certain paragraphs and I think it would be stupid not to use those especially if at the end of this process I'm going to have two drafts and I'm going to be looking at how I can merge them. So rather than writing something from scratch or from what I remember in my head with a potential new structure in mind I'm going to be writing it but using the existing draft as a reference and if there's something that fits if there's a paragraph that I'd like to keep I will copy and paste that into the new draft so of the words I need to write this week not all of them will be new I'm expecting that at least 50 percent of them will be maybe more so that brings us to the big question which is how much do I actually need to write this week well as I said the current draft is 111,000 words I'm expecting the new draft will be a similar length so let's go with 100,000 words for the sake of round numbers I have seven days so that is about 14,000 words a day I have written more than that in the past I have a background in non-fiction writing I've done a lot of non-fiction ghost writing and generally when I write a non-fiction book I do have a very detailed outline so that means I can write a lot if I need to in fact when I wrote my book book blueprint how any entrepreneur can write an awesome book I did the first draft in three days and I remember the first day I did 16,000 words and some change the thing is I had a 10,000 word plan when I started that so that's a little bit different to trying to write something where you might have a list of scenes that you want to do the other thing is that I did write the first draft of that in three days similarly when I go straight in books it is a little bit longer because it's not my knowledge there's more research obviously but it's not unusual for me to write 40 to 60,000 words in say two weeks but that's generally a couple of days at a time then a break I've never done seven straight days of writing at those levels I've done have I done seven straight days of writing maybe I haven't even done seven straight days of writing before even if I have though I haven't consistently stayed at that level like I might be able to do five or six thousand words in a day and then the next day I need a day off to recover so doing 14,000 words a day for seven days straight is going to be a challenge even if like some of them are coming from the original draft the next question you might have is what have I already done in preparation for this challenge well this wasn't specifically in preparation for this challenge but as I mentioned I have been looking at the anatomy of story over the past three months and trying to do the exercises for this book at the time of filming this video I've done the first four chapters so that's up to the moral argument honestly I'm not sure how much that's actually going to change the book because the other thing I did which was specifically preparation for this challenge is that I started looking at the old draft and I didn't read through it in detail I was just skimming I started on Friday and it was more to get a sense for what I'd actually done because with the anatomy of story I was trying to map out a new plot and I'm not sure if it's because of the method or because of the book but I was struggling to think of what should happen and I thought okay I'll just take a look at the existing book to see how it's laid out and refresh my memory and what I realised is that I don't think the existing plot is too bad which is sort of crazy to me because the last few months I've been calling this my fantasy hot mess I've been saying it's such a tangled web of crap that I can't even think of a code name for it because there's no one clear story but when I went through it I had an epiphany where I figured out what was wrong so my preferred approach to story structure comes from story engineering which divides a plot into four equal parts so you've got 25 percent 25 percent 25 percent 25 percent the first part is the setup so that's where you get to know the world the characters the objectives and so on the second part is the response and that's where at the approximately 20 to 25 percent mark something happens which sets the plot in motion so part two is the reaction to that and usually the hero is not passive here but they're sort of on the back foot while they're dealing with whatever happened the midpoint something happens they get more information something changes in the world and then part three the next 25 percent is where they go on to the attack so they're actively working against the opposing forces and then part four we have the climax and the resolution so either returning to the old normal or discovering what the new normal is for this world now when I was looking at the draft what I realised is that from the 50 percent mark of the book onwards I feel like things are pretty coherent so at 50 percent of the book there's like a coup is staged by the majors and I feel like everything here works really well there is the coup the various events that happen as part of a coup and then this leads to the regrouping and then suddenly the like white hole the building where they're hanging out I guess is under attack and they need to retreat to the dungeon and that's where the final battle scene happens so all of that works well then the second 25 percent so part two that is way too long depending on where I start counting words it's anywhere from like 40 to 54 thousand words so that is more than 25 percent of the book I think the focus is okay though so that part of the book has sort of two parallel focuses one is the search for the macguffin that was stolen and one is the uprising of the majors and they're preparing for this coup so I think fundamentally that's the right focus for that part of the book I just need to figure out how to how to make it neater how to tie them together rather than having like one magic class that's eight thousand words which I actually have all in all the foundations are there it's just execution the epiphany I had was that all of my problems are in the first 25 percent of the book because there I'm not really sure what to do with my characters once the plot starts things get easier because this event has happened we've got to write about the event happening got to react to it and so on the event that happens is that the macguffin gets stolen so there's a sequence of scenes where it gets stolen and the aftermath of that and then that's what leads to the two parallel plots so the bad guy has the macguffin he's leading the uprising the good guys want to find the macguffin so that's all logical and I feel like this is a pattern for me as a writer where once that turning point event happens the plot sort of starts to happen by itself it's very logical what happens in response to whatever the event is but the beginning it I really struggle with and that's because the plot hasn't started yet and this might sound contrary to some writing advice you get which is that you should start in the middle which can happen in theory but what most people do if they genuinely start in the middle is they have sort of a scene from the middle which is a flash forward and then they go back and the reason for that is because you need to care about the characters in the world before anything starts to happen otherwise it's just a whole lot of action that as a reader you think so what why do I care if this person's dreams get shattered or their macguffin gets stolen or if there's a revolution because you don't know who these people are so that's why you do have this setup section where you understand their life and what they want in someone the problem is in order to make this interesting to read they either need to be like really interesting people doing interesting things or the world needs to be interesting like there needs to be something to hook the reader's attention and I don't think that's there in the current draft so the good news is I had an epiphany I know what is wrong with this book it is just this first 25 percent and I think if I get the first 25 percent right then the rest of the book like will actually flow I think I could get through the rest of it fairly easily the problem is I don't know what the solution is I am a bit worried that until I find a solution this book isn't going to happen and that is going to throw a bit of a spanner in the works when it comes to writing 100,000 words in a week so that is my status it is actually Monday afternoon I have been procrastinating today about getting started writing but now I filmed the intro to this video I've already been to the gym today the only other thing I have today is my French conversation exchange I meet with a French guy once a week and we speak in English and French to both improve our skills and that's until six so I've got I've got a couple of hours I don't know if I'll write for the couple of hours because I really don't want to but I can't keep filming this intro I've been procrastinating long enough so let's um yeah let's try writing something just to get started so I'm about to head out to my conversation exchange but I wanted to check in I did not go that well today so after I recorded my singing teacher actually gave me a call to ask if I could do a lesson this afternoon and I said yes because I'd prefer to do a lesson this week because she's about to go away for a couple of weeks so I don't want to like I'd like to reduce the size of that break so I went out for my singing lesson which was you know two hours if you include the walking time there and back and that meant I only had about an hour to write because now I need to head out for my exchange the good news is that I did do some writing I did a new first chapter which is 2698 words I believe so I'm happy with that progress obviously that is a lot lower than it needs to be for me to hit my 100,000 words this week but I feel like I've got a solid start to this book so I'm hoping now that I've broken the ice tomorrow and in the following days I'll be able to make much more progress so I'm yeah off to speak very bad French and I will see you tomorrow happy Tuesday so I've just got them back from the gym and had some lunch and now I'm ready to get into writing for the day I did attempt to do some writing this morning before the gym I thought since I know what the next scene is like it's not going to be that hard to write it and admittedly it probably wouldn't have been that hard to write it but my brain was my brain and it was in my way telling me everything sucked so I thought rather than continuing to persist it would be healthier just to get out of the house do some stuff and then come back to writing so it is now 12 30 p.m which means I have five and a half hours until I need to go out this evening for a Christmas reunion dinner with some of my ex-colleagues which is not a lot of time in hindsight but having said that yesterday I only ended up writing for about an hour and I had over two and a half thousand words so if I get a good like three four hours of writing in there then I'm still not going to be on track um but I will have more words so let's see how this goes and in fact I might even have enough no I won't have enough I was going to say I might even have enough to be through part one which is the part I was most worried about it won't be enough because if this is a 100 000 word book part one should be 20 to 25 000 words and that's only going to be you know 10 to 12 000 words but it's more words so let's focus on that so now I'm going to get to writing and see how I do today so it's obviously the end of the day and I just wanted to check in because I'm heading to dinner with my friends now so I did chapters two three and maybe 60 percent of chapter four so that was another 8 000 and 70 words so much better day than yesterday um obviously I'm still running behind but today has filled me with confidence because I feel like from here things are going to continue getting easier like I've broken the ice I'm starting to build momentum um I know that the next couple of scenes once I finish the current one which is new I know the next couple of scenes are existing ones that I want to keep so I should be able to get through a few thousand existing words tomorrow um so yeah all in all I'm feeling optimistic I still don't know if I'm going to achieve my 100 000 word goal by the end of the week and I still think it's a possibility because you know today I did like three times better than yesterday four times better and I could continue increasing over the course of the week so I think by about Thursday I'll know whether it's realistic or not so at the moment it's a possibility no idea what the chances of success are but I know there is a chance of success something I forgot to mention earlier though is that obviously this week it's Christmas which means I can't actually make this my whole life I will have things on and that's okay like this is the holiday season and even though I do have this goal for this week I don't want to make the entire week about writing I had singing in my exchange yesterday today I've always seen going out for dinner tomorrow I've got a call with a friend for back home and then there's obviously Christmas day when we need to call both of our families in Australia and I think Dru and I might go to the Christmas market and have some mulled wine and mini pancakes so you know I'm not devoting every waking hour to this book but it's going to be interesting to see how well I can do in a balanced way and I think balance is really important for this challenge because I had a really busy end to the year like if you've been following me you'll know that I did have a lot of freelance work on in September and October November wasn't too bad but the last two weeks of this year were just insane like we launched a new product at work and we also changed our payment providers and both of these projects like were being unrolled in batches to different clients so that meant multiple versions of the communication I think there were like five different versions for both of them that were being triggered at different times and yeah just a lot of work so at the end of last week I was feeling extremely worn out and maybe it's a good thing that I didn't get anything done on the weekend because I do feel better now but the reason I say this is because even though I have this goal of 100,000 words this week if I get to the point where I'm running myself ragged to try and achieve it then I'll stop because this is the last week I'll have off for a couple of months and I do feel like I need to recover from the year a little bit and that recovery is more important than writing this week so something to keep in mind at the moment though I'm feeling good I'm feeling optimistic and I would check in tomorrow as you can see I'm out walking it is now the 24th and update on yesterday is that unfortunately it wasn't the most successful writing day and I think I am definitely not going to finish this book in a week maybe two I think that's still possible if I can get through this next section but um yesterday wasn't as successful as I'd hoped so I wrote about 8,000 words all up and then I ended up cutting 3,000 of them and maybe half of what I wrote was new and half was rewriting what I already had and the cuts were because one of them was just trying to find the most interesting place to end the chapter because I always like to end the chapter on a little little cliffhanger a little reveal something that will hopefully compel the reader to turn the next page and the scene was one where Perry the protagonist steals the MacGuffin which is like a stone that sits on top of the dome at the highest point in the city so there was this scene where she was like climbing up the side of the dome and she got the orb and then she got back down and I'm like where do we end this did I go home what happens and then I decided um let's cut everything after she gets the orb like she's going to cover it and then all of the lights in the city go out so something's gone wrong so that was a thousand words gone and then the other one was from um some of the old content I was working in where there was basically 2000 words of exposition and backstory which I still think is interesting I think the story is interesting but 2000 words is a lot in one chunk so I'm definitely going to split that into two bits and I'm trying to figure out the best place to put them in the book because Sean Coyne has this really great saying which is to use expositions and munitions so you include your exposition at the point in the book where it will have the most power and the current chapter isn't it but I yeah I'm not sure where it would be though or if it's necessary at all but I mean a lot of the stuff with backstory is it's helpful for the author to know where the characters came from but the readers don't really need to know as much so that was yesterday today I started working on a new scene and it just wasn't flowing like I did maybe 500 words but oh it's been months since I've walked here and um these little like black igloo things are new I wonder what they're for so today's scene wasn't working so I started doing Susan Dennard's magical cookie exercise which is something that I did a video on back when I first started this channel it was filmed on a potato I'll include the link but I'm sorry about the quality um and the magical cookies exercise is basically a way of ensuring that everything in your book is something exciting and that you're something you're excited about writing something that you genuinely want to be there and what she says is that every scene should be a magical cookie scene there shouldn't be some that are just functional that are there to get characters from A to B because what I realized was the current scene I'm working on is a scene to get characters from A to B so oh stabbing terrain a bit so the first step of the exercise is to list all of the reasons why you're excited about writing this book and then the different things you imagine happening in this book that get you excited and I was writing all of this down and what I realized is all of the things I love and are really excited about are already in the book they're the bits that I want to keep like the dungeon battle scene and so on and that means what I left with now when it comes to the new stuff is trying to build the foundations of the scaffolding that helps make all of the exciting bits come together the problem is all of this scaffolding shouldn't just be scaffolding it should also be exciting stuff that people want to read and because all of the things I'm excited about should happen later in the book I'm not sure what to put here hence the walk I thought it would help to clear my head a bit though this is an eight kilometer circuit I'm about halfway through and um I haven't had any new ideas so that's not promising however there's something that someone said to me back in 2012 I'm gonna say which brought me comfort then and I'm choosing to let it bring me comfort now which is that you wouldn't want the things you want if you're not meant to have them and the logic behind that is not everyone wants to be a writer not everyone wants to write books not everyone wants to win an oscar not everyone wants to compete in the olympics not everyone wants to have children and get married like not everyone wants to have a mansion or a yacht or whatever your thing is that you want you are there may be many people who want it but there are billions of people in the world and the majority of them don't want the same things as you and the logic is that you wouldn't want it if you weren't meant to have it if you weren't meant to have it you wouldn't want it and just because you want something it doesn't mean you are going to get it obviously there's hard work involved obviously there's often luck involved but the fact that you want it is a good sign that if you do the work and have a little bit of luck you can have what you want and in this walk I've been trying to apply that to this story because this story has been in my head for it's actually 15 years now I've always been I've been saying more than 10 for a while but yeah as of now December 2020 it's 15 years it was December 2005 I think when I wrote when I started the first draft so this story's been in my head for 15 years and there are other stories that I wrote before and I wrote after that are not there are things I wrote that I never want to revisit in fact there's a full fantasy book that I wrote when I was maybe 16 that is similar length like over a hundred thousand words and I have no interest in revisiting that so rather than questioning whether there's ever going to be any value in this story if I could ever make a work or if I should just give up what I'm telling myself is if I was meant to give up if I was meant to treat this as a learning experience and move on to something else it wouldn't still be in my head I wouldn't keep wanting to write it so yeah it doesn't help practically but it is comforting to know that the reason this has lived in my head and in my heart for so long is because I am meant to write the story and maybe I won't figure it out this week or next week which would be really depressing I'd really like to figure it out and give it out the backlog but even if I don't figure it out this week or next week like it will continue to live in my head and continue to be something that I am meant to write when I can for today though I'm going to finish my walk go back to the dining room table attempt the magical cooking exercise again and see if I could figure out what to do with these new scenes in the book I'm now back home I have one hour left in the monster battle that I was in the middle of when I left so it is time to figure out this book good morning and merry Christmas it is a at the moment it's just a dark day in a stone year it's what 20 past eight and the sun hasn't come up yet but um no snow yet it is on the forecast though so I still have hope I've got an hour before we have a call with my family to exchange gifts over zoom so I'm going to see if I can get through a scene before that so we had our google meet with the family which was great I have four new books to read so very excited about that and then I did a bit more writing in the afternoons so I actually got to the turning point moment which was one of the bits I knew I wanted to keep which meant today was a fairly high word count day I think it was about 10,700 words all up which is not bad for one day but obviously a lot of that wasn't writing I think between one and 2,000 words that was new most of it was just like retyping what I already had there's still one scene before this that I was really stuck on so I tried looking at it yesterday I tried looking at it today and I just couldn't really get anywhere and I think there are two problems one is that I don't really have anything that needs to happen here I just think we need something to get the character from A to B like I was talking about yesterday from where she was before to where she needs to be for the turning point and the other thing is there's no real emotional transition like where I started was she was super stressed about stealing the macguffin and potentially getting caught and it doesn't really go anywhere from there so I need to think about what to do in this scene to make it worth it to make it a magical cookie scene but I'm not sure what to do other than that I feel like the other stuff I've got in this first 25% of the book is solid I just don't know if it's enough because at the beginning of the week I was saying that I realized the first 25% was a big weakness and if I got that right the rest of it would probably start to flow and I don't feel like it's achieved everything it needs to and I don't really know how to make it achieve everything it needs to without adding a whole lot of padding like they were just there's so much backstory and so many relationships and how do you communicate them when you haven't had a chance to show all of the characters are interacting with each other yet so I'm really not sure what to do whether I try and find more scenes to add to the beginning part of the book whether I just try to incorporate some of the characters and backstory and so on into what I've already got or whether maybe I can continue introducing it in the next part so from here I am done for the day I'm feeling even though a lot of today wasn't writing I am feeling a bit spent so um yeah I'm going to take the rest of the night off and then tomorrow I think I really need to start figuring out what I'm going to do with part two tomorrow hopefully I get a good chunk of writing done but I think most of it's going to be trying to unravel this part of the book and figure out the best way to organize everything and what needs to be cut what we get to keep and what if anything needs to be added it is the 26th and we are interrupting scheduled broadcasting for a book review so yesterday one of my presence was one to watch by Kate Stamen London and it was hilarious I loved it so if you haven't heard of this book it is about a plus-sized instagram influencer slash fashion blogger who gets chosen to be the in-universe version of the bachelorette so she's on a show and has 25 eligible bachelors she gets to choose from and what I really loved about it was that maybe two-thirds of it is normal prose but there's one third which is a mix of articles from things like Buzzfeed and Mashable and so on chatroom transcripts text transcripts emails and so on and what the author did really well was capturing the voice of all of these types of media so like with the chat transcripts you have these you know the teasing back and forth and then these emoji threads that come out of it and it just felt like you know there were genuinely four unique people having this conversation rather than the author just talking to themselves there was also this quote from one of the fake articles that I loved so this is from a viral roundup of the week that's supposed to be written on Mashable and the final sentence is read on for the rest of the week's viral content including a can't miss tweet storm detailing the conspiracy theory you never knew you always needed about Hillary Clinton's dogs and I was just like that's so true that this like if you think of Buzzfeed and Mashable and all of those online publications that's just a perfect representation of the tone so it was so much fun and other than just gushing over this book the reason I wanted to bring it up is because I feel like there's so much value in reading books that nothing like what you're trying to write and of course there's also a lot of value in reading things that are in your genre and that are targeting your audience but I feel like sometimes there's this element of almost competition when you're reading authors who are writing similar things to what you want to write or even when you're ranking yourself going oh yeah I could do better than that or oh my god this is so good I'll never write anything like this and even though you can still love these books sometimes it means it's not as pure and enjoyment so an example for me is I recently read the renegades trilogy by Marissa Meyer which I loved I thought it was fantastic and I thought it was necessary to read some more superhero books because I've never really read a lot of superhero books and yet I am writing powerless which is a superhero story so this was a perfect fit for me it's for the same audience it's in a fictional superhero world the themes are quite different but the internal struggle of the character the fact that she's sort of trying to play both sides that's quite similar to what I tried to do in powerless and when I read renegades it made me realize that even though powerless might have some promise there was a long way for it to go before it had that level of depth and complexity and the gap between where I am now and where that book is almost feels like so wide I'll never be able to pass it so reading something like this where it's just for pure enjoyment it reminds me of why I love books and why I love reading and what I want to do like as a writer and what I mean by that is not in the style that I'm writing but what I want to do from the perspective of bringing enjoyment to readers like that was just so much fun so yeah if you haven't read this highly recommend it so to get back to business I did have a bad night of sleep last night because I've been going to bed and trying to give my brain a mission while I sleep which is to figure out my fantasy hot mess and I'm like I'll leave my subconscious to do it the problem is when I try going to sleep without thought I just lie in bed thinking about it and trying to unravel it which is not conducive to falling asleep so um yeah there was that but when I was thinking about it last night I realized that the problems are still there and I don't really know how this can be surprising I think it's just when I was looking at the book last week and sort of thought oh structurally this the sequence of events still makes sense and what's happening when still makes sense and if the structure's okay then maybe I can just rewrite it and I don't know what I'm thinking because I still feel like the sequence of events is okay and I'm not sure how to bring in all of the character development and interpersonal dynamics and so on that need to be in the book for the later parts to have the impact that they need so today the main focus is doing some planning and brainstorming and thinking because I'm coming to the end of the turning point or first plot point if we use story engineering terminology and after that we've got the next what should be 25 percent of the book where there are two parallel plots the search for the macguffin and the uprising of the mages and one of the things that I'm not sure what to do about is I'm worried there's too much from the opponents point of view right now because the turning point sequence it happens from both the heroes and the opponent's point of view so the hero has the macguffin she and the ally get into a bit of a scuffle and lose it the opponent's sidekick steals it and then the opponent's sidekick like runs into another character who ends up joining forces with the opponent yeah I'm trying to keep things as vague as possible for obvious reasons so what happens is we have our scuffle with the heroes and they realize they've lost the macguffin then we go on to the opponent's side where there are sort of two point of view characters there's a sidekick and the opponent and we've got chapter from the sidekick's point of view and then the opponent needs to come find him and get the macguffin back and when I was doing the last draft I knew at the time that having like multiple chapters from the point of view of that side was too much but the thing is interrupting what happens with the sidekick and what happens with the opponent feels like I'm just taking momentum out of the sequence I'm already worried that I'm taking momentum out of the sequence by having a bit of an interruption between when the heroes lose the macguffin and returning to the sidekick's point of view and this is making me wonder whether I should have content from the opponent's point of view at all because in powerless it's one point of view just the protagonist you don't have anything from Artdem's point of view and I feel like it works and I feel like everything feels scarier a bit more desperate because you only see what's happening through the protagonist's eyes and in this book I worry that one there's too much focus on the opponent and two it's giving too much away so even though the characters don't know stuff the readers do and that takes away some of the tension or suspense so yeah I'm not sure if I should just remove the opponent's point of view entirely but I really like this character I don't know what to do like it would fundamentally change the story if I remove the opponent's point of view because there are key moments that happen from his point of view so today is a brainstorming day I think I'm going to try and like do a summary of the story from each of the point of view characters just to see like what it is if I'm not inserting scenes from the other characters and then I'm going to attempt to like outline the second part of the book and see if I can fix some of the things that aren't working I've now done the summary of the plot from Perry Orbury and Jared's perspective so Perry is the hero Orbury is second pov character slash ally Jared is the opponent and to be honest I should do it from Inza's perspective as well because here's the opponent's sidekick he also has a few chapters but in the three that I've done I've um had a couple of epiphanies and if you're familiar with this channel you'll know that epiphanies are not always a good thing for me so one of the things I realized is that there are events that are supposed to be significant and I haven't done all that I can to make sure they're significant for instance one of the things I was struggling with earlier in the week is what can I have happen before the first 20-25% moment so before that plot point that sets the plot in motion and this is something I struggle with because I just want to get into the story but you do need to have set up to make your readers understand the world and identify with characters and so on and what I decided to add in was that Perry was going to steal the MacGuffin before it got stolen from her and this should be a significant event because the MacGuffin is supposed to be an important object and at the moment that isn't communicated through the scene like there's sort of a moment when she takes it and everything plunges into darkness but the next day they wake up in the morning and it's sort of like business as usual so if this was such a significant event there would be longer lasting ramifications and I think one of the reasons I shied away from that is because if I have too much now then like is it getting into the plot now when this is just the lead up so that was one thing and I noticed this with a couple of different things like in Aubrey's story so his first chapter is escaping a tower in the castle where he's been locked up for the last decade and in the second chapter he gets caught by someone and there's this conversation where if you've seen imposters I highly recommend season one that's a lot of fun there's this character called Lenny Cohen who's like an enforcer slash cleaner type of character for some bad guys and in fact let's step back and give some context so imposters is a show about some con artists so it's a woman and a couple of partners and the woman basically makes people fall in love with her and then the day after the wedding or a month after the wedding she disappears and has taken them for all their work and she has done this several times and in the show three of her exes team up to track her down and try to take their revenge lots of fun anyway the season follows the exes trying to track her down at the same time as she is doing a new con on someone else and while she's doing this con she also meets a guy who she is genuinely interested in so there's this push and pull where she's supposed to be making this guy fall in love with her and at the same time she wants to pursue this other relationship independently so things aren't going as well as they usually would then I can't remember exactly when I'm getting somewhere around the midpoint of the season Lenny Cohen shows up and Lenny Cohen is this cleaner slash enforcer type character and there is this amazing scene where no outright threats are made but it's clear that serious stuff is going on so Maddie gets home Lenny Cohen's already in her apartment making an omelet and there's this whole interaction where she basically forces Maddie to acknowledge that she isn't doing her job and if she doesn't do her job Lenny will be forced to do her job which we're not sure what it is but we know it's bad like probably disposing of Maddie in some way so there's this scene where this conversation is very calm no screening no fighting it's so intimidating and the stakes are immediately raised and that was the inspiration for this scene in Aubrey second chapter where this guy turns up who's like the king's enforcer if you like and he basically says you know my job is to protect King's interests if I'm here it means his interests are under threat and if I believe they're under threat I will do my job I will dispose of you in some way the problem is it doesn't work and even though I would love it to work it doesn't because it's too vague and we don't have any clear understanding of consequences so this is another one of those scenes where it should be really impactful but it's not and I was reflecting on imposters and the reason that works is because before Lenny is officially introduced I think it's at the end of the previous episode we see her in a bar some guy comes up and starts flirting with her and I can't remember exactly what happened because it's been a couple of years since I watched this but I think maybe she grabs the back of his head and smashes his face against the bar or punches him or something or I don't know stabs her his hand with a knife but she messes him up and it seems like an insane overreaction to him just being a bit of a slimy flirt but the thing is she messes him up and she walks out completely calm cool as a cucumber and you go okay this is someone we don't want to mess with then the next episode you get this scene where she's like completely calm cool as a cucumber and says you don't want me to do my job and the reason translating this into my book doesn't work is because we don't have any of this context for that character so we can't just imply that something bad will happen this is you know all brief second chapter it's what chapter five of the current version of the book we don't have enough contextual clues to know this is bad so we've got to be basically upfront and we need to be overt with what could happen it was a bit of a longer ramble than what i expected to go into about that scene the main point i wanted to make is that i realized there are scenes that should be important and should have impact and they don't at the moment so i need to fix them one of these scenes is at the midpoint of the book when the mages stayed a coup and i was writing a summary and i just had one night they stayed a coup and i'm like one night is a bit random so what can i do to make this more impactful like when you know when would it be a more powerful moment to stage this coup and i went well they're having this international exhibition so maybe we should make it the opening of the international exhibition and oh what if it's the international exhibition and in the evening they set up the whole hall was like a ballroom and all of the rich and powerful people come and we could even have the king visiting so it's going to be like this really high stakes thing and then the mages attack and i was like yes this works the problem is if i do that that means i need to rework everything i've done so far over the last week because at the moment the book starts with the first day of the international exhibit so i have 28 000 words that they don't need to be thrown out but they need to be seriously rethought and on one hand i'm really happy to have had this idea because i think it's going to work really well on the other i'm like oh my god what am i going to do instead now for this first part of the book so um that's where i am it is now the end of the week in fact it's technically monday so the week ended yesterday i did not do any writing on sunday and that was partly because i got into one of the other new christmas books i received which was the 15 lives of harry august and i really wanted to see how it ended but um the bigger part was more laziness like i did intend to write yesterday and then my husband had a bit of a blob day where he didn't do anything and i find when his home and not doing anything i'm much less motivated to do stuff and admittedly that's just an excuse because if i was determined to like i could shut myself in a separate room and just put in my earbuds and focus but between that and the book and the fact that it was my last day before going back to work i just thought let's be lazy i'm not going to finish the book this week anyway so my final word count at the end of the week was 29,509 words and even though it wasn't what i originally had planned for the week i'm actually really happy with how it went because for the first time since probably since i got my beta reader feedback so since september i feel like i'm making concrete progress towards being a writer i was actually writing something for the first time in a while i was writing something sort of new not technically new but i was writing something for the first time since i did count nanorimo in march or april whenever the first one is so that felt really good and almost 30 000 words in a week is a pretty good amount of content i also am really happy with some of the epiphanies i had even though that means i'm probably going to have to throw out most of what i wrote last week but i think that how i'm changing the midpoint of the book so it is like going to be this opening ceremony there will be a whole lot of like powerful political people and rich people and industrial magnates and so on present i think that's going to make it much higher stakes which will be a lot of fun it means i have no idea where i'm going to start the book now but yeah that's the problem for future jackies so from here my next step is to continue trying to outline this book a little bit i'm using the story engineering structure method i think i mentioned earlier which divides books into four parts and then has key events that happen at certain percentages of the book and i'm fairly confident i can map out from 37.5 percent to the end of the book 37.5 percent is the first pinch point this is a moment when the antagonist rears his ugly head and it could be anything just as long as it as long as it makes the antagonist presence known so could be a shadowy figure in the corner could actively thwart the protagonist in my book i thought perry could overhear or be eavesdropping on the initial meeting about the major uprising and i think that would work well because that means she can then go and try to tell the headmaster slash her father figure about it so that gives us an opportunity to build that relationship more yeah there just could be a little bit more involvement on her part because she was very separate from that plot until the midpoint of the book originally so this helps her become involved a little bit earlier so i think from there 37.5 percent to 50 percent i need to figure out but that's not that big a leap and then from 50 percent until the end of the book i feel like i can work with the existing structure i just need to redo a lot of things but i think the sequence of events works so i think i can map that out and then i can start writing on 37.5 percent i'm not sure what's going to happen at the beginning of the book and one of the things i'm a little bit worried about is that i might need to throw out my turning point sequence of events so that's the sequence of events usually around 20 to 25 percent of the book that launches the plot in motion in my case based on a hundred thousand words it's from 20 percent to 30 percent so there's a sequence of scenes that happens here which is when everything gets moving and this was one of the things i wanted to keep i was going to keep this and i was going to keep the dungeon scene at the end of the book and i still really like that sequence of scenes i just don't know if it works with the rest of the story and i'm having a little bit of a i know it's not my identity crisis but an identity crisis for this book because i think without this sequence of scenes this won't be the same book or won't be the same story it's a fundamental change so i need to think about that a little bit more in any case though i feel like there was some good epiphanies i've been doing some writing which just feels so good after not writing for so long and yeah i'm progressing to getting this book written so that is all for me for this week if you like the weekly writing vlogs let me know and maybe i'll continue doing weekly blogs while i'm working on this project because i haven't done that for a while other than that if you like this video please give me a big thumbs up as it's i think going to be the beginning of 2021 when this comes out tell me what your writing resolutions are for the new year in the comments and i will see you next time bye