 What's shaking? My name's Cam. Welcome back to another video. I don't have much of a structure for the video today, but as you may have guessed, we're talking about NaNoWriMo. It's just a chill video today. No solid plan. We're just gonna free ball it. That's not right. It's almost that time of year guys. November is approaching, or it will be November when you're watching this actually, but I'm filming this on October 30th. November is approaching, which means that all of the writers on here are equal parts scared and excited, like the feeling of farting in public. NaNoWriMo or National Novel Writing Month is a 30-day period where we all try to get down at least 50,000 words. Now, I have done a math or two in my life, so I crunched the numbers and what you're looking at is roughly 1,600 words a day for 30 days. So I'll give you an example. This is basically what 1,600 words looks like. This is what you're aiming to get down within a month. Depending on how quick of a writer you are, how much spare time you have in your day, how your writing is already going, 1,600 words a day for a whole month is either going to seem completely out of reach, or it's gonna seem easy peasy, Carl Weasley. I'll have the link to my NaNoWriMo profile in the description below if you want to add me on there, but I also want to add really quickly that during November I will also be doing November. I do it every year in memory of my father and basically what that means is that during November I will be growing a glorious hairy female repellent on my lip to raise money for a foundation that helps prevent suicide. I'll also be doing a livestream every single week during November and all of the donations that I get on those livestreams will be going straight to the November foundation. It is truly devastating for me to admit this, but the last couple of years me doing NaNoWriMo hasn't gone so well. They've been complete failures, if I'm being completely honest, which actually is pretty on-brand for me. But you know what? To hell with that, man. Not this year. Not this time, NaNoWriMo, you pastel-colored turd, negative stress. This year I'm going to crush it because this year I have a plan. By the way, if you're not following me on Instagram, you should as well because I'll be doing a lot of NaNoWriMo updates on my story there. As for what I'm planning to write during NaNoWriMo, you might remember a few videos ago, a little while ago I said that now that I've finished my psychological horror novel, I'm working on an anthology of horror short stories. That's what I'll be working on and I do want to show you how the planning of that's going so far. It's really, really difficult to talk about a work in progress without giving too much away, and that's especially true when it comes to anthologies or short stories. I don't want to give anything away, obviously, but I also don't want- I also don't want anyone to nick my ideas. I'll do my best though. I think I can tell you at least a bit about what I have planned and what I've done so far. So originally all of the short stories in the anthology were going to be based off of my own personal phobias. I thought that was like a fun theme. I thought that was a bit of a creative way for me to face my fears. From the safety of a keyboard, of course, and a lot of the stories are still based on my most intimate fears, but a few of them aren't so much anymore, so that theme kind of melted like a sex doll on the beach. There's going to be about 10 short stories in the anthology and all of them are going to be around 5000 words, except for one. There's one particular story that's going to be probably closer to a novella. It's going to be a bit longer, but I'll get to that in a minute. Ultimately the entire anthology I'm expecting at the moment will be around 60,000 to 70,000 words. Assuming I do well with nanorhymo, that means I should be able to either finish the whole darn thing or hopefully come close. When it comes to planning what I usually like doing is I'll use a write mapper. You can find like plenty of them online. I think they're called like mind maps maybe, stuff like that. That's what I basically use. You can find a bunch of free versions. I just think that's the easiest way to keep everything organized and everything within reach. Basically what you're creating is these little solar systems of an outline. Like you can have a circle that will say characters, and when you click on it, it'll bring up more circles that have the name of each character like Harry, Hermione, Ron. Then you'll click on one of the characters. Let's say click on Ron goes into it. It'll have information about Ron like hair color, eye color, that kind of stuff. Or you could have a circle that says like chapters. Click on it. Chapter one, chapter two, chapter three, all in narrowing little circles. Click that. And then you've got an outline for the chapter in that. It's like a solar system. Basically is what I'm saying. And to be clear, this video is not sponsored. So I'm going to tell you about some of the short stories that I have planned for this thing. And you're going to have to forgive me in advance if I'm being a bit cryptic. Like I said, I just, I can't be too specific. So I'm probably going to sound more vague than an entrepreneur telling you what they actually do for work. So one of the short stories I just finished was about a young man who is just bored to absolute death with his monotonous life, his day job, his basically everything about his life just bores him to almost a very painful degree. And one day while he's cruising through his game console for something to do, a game to play, he finds something very, very mysterious. And the more he looks into it, the more interesting things get. He's finally having fun. But the question is, is it dangerous? Another one of my short stories I really enjoyed writing was about a very small town in a rural community, and a lot of young people are going missing there. And the story follows a couple of their residents kind of coming face to face with an immediate danger while all of this is happening. And I really can't say anything more about that one. There's another short story that is based entirely off of my very real claustrophobia. I'm very, very claustrophobic. One of my favorite things in the world is going to concerts, but it's also a very uncomfortable experience for me at the same time because the whole time it's hard for me to breathe just because I feel very claustrophobic. But I keep trying to put myself in those situations to, I don't know, get used to it, maybe make it easier. I'm not too sure. Anyway, that's not what the story is about. The story is about two young kids who are playing hide and go seek while their mother is at work. And one of the kids finds themselves in a very interesting and terrifying situation very quickly. There's a bunch of other short stories, of course, but the last one I want to give you a brief rundown on is the one that's probably going to be closer to being a novella. And that is a story about a young man who is making a long road trip to go see his brother and his brother's new baby. And along the way, he breaks down and he runs into some very interesting individuals. He becomes absolutely enamored with these people, in particular a young woman who is part of that group. The more he learns, the more he realizes that things aren't quite as they seem. And yet, he just can't bring himself to walk away. At least not yet. I'm really having a good time writing short stories because the last year and a half to two years I've been working on a full-length novel. And writing short stories is just a very different feeling, not necessarily easier. I want to make that clear. It's just different. I actually did a video not too long ago talking about some of the great things about short stories that people tend to forget. I'll leave a card up there if you want to check that one out. So like I said, by the time you watch this, it's already going to be November. Nanorimo has already started, hopefully I'm doing well. But right now, it's October 30th. It's nearly Halloween, baby! Oh, by the way, look what finally arrived just in time for Halloween. Local haunts. I wrote one of the short stories in this book. How cool is that? So that'll just about do it. Add me on Nanorimo. Donate to Movember if you can. If you have some spare change. All of the links will be below in the description of course. But good luck to you if you're doing Nanorimo as well. Listen, don't take it too seriously. Like don't get too stressed out if you've already got too much going on in your life already. A lot of people can kind of get inside their own heads a bit and really, really get miserable if they don't hit the 50k words mark for the month. And it really just, it doesn't matter that much. It's just for fun, really. As always, thank you so much for watching guys. Especially if you've watched this far on the video. I really appreciate it. Have a good day. Catch ya.