 What's shaking? My name's Cam. Welcome back to another video. So listen, today is the 31st of August. It is officially my birthday. I'm 28. Yay. There's been no shortage of people reminding me that I am now officially closer to 30 than I am to 25. Just as when I turned 26, people liked to remind me I was closer to 30 than 20. I imagine it's going to get worse as time goes on. I'm learning to live with that. Anyway, today's my birthday and chances are it'll still be the 31st of August when you watch this. So technically, it'll still be my birthday then. Which means you have to be extra nice to me. Please. Now this video isn't all about that by any means, but I do want to show you quite a few things today. Just some fun stuff and also more importantly, I want to do a bit of a cover reveal for that orthotube anthology that I've been going on and on about. Allow me to go on about it one more time. Basically, myself and a bunch of other YouTubers that you very likely know and love are working together on an anthology of horror short stories themed around vacation and travel, basically just being away from home. On the current timeline, it's probably going to come out towards the end of October or mid-November and all of the profits will be going towards charity, specifically booksandhomes.com.au which raises money to send books to areas and communities that don't really have easy access to books. They might not have libraries in the area or they might just not have the funding. So that's the anthology and I'm going to be showing you the cover for it today because the book cover's already done. I think it looks mind my fringe, but fucking spectacular. I think it looks great, but I'll show you that a bit later. I want to be just a little bit self-indulgent today, if I may, for my birthday and tell you about what I did, what I had going on and show you some stuff. So over the weekend, I celebrated my birthday with a bunch of my offline friends as I like to call them. Cheers, by the way. It's just, it's sarsaparilla because I'm still pretty hungover from the weekend. That's what being in your late 20s is now. It was really, really good. I woke up pretty much had a drink put in my hand right away. We had a massive barbecue and I would love to show you photos or videos of the day, but I lost my phone for pretty much the entire day. So I don't have any photos, so hopefully these stock images will fill the void. We had a great big barbecue. It was beautiful. Lots of glorious meat, a lot of vegetarian meat for the few vegetarian friends I have. I shared a bunch of it with the dog, of course, because I have to. We played a lot of drinking games, a lot of beer pong, King's Cup, all that kind of stuff. And then as soon as the sun went down, we started up a bit of a campfire in the front yard. That way I could try something that I've always wanted to try ever since I watched the sandlot. I wanted to try s'mores. And I did it and I got to say, it was pretty good. Maybe the sandlot oversold them a bit for me, but it was still very enjoyable and something I look forward to doing pretty much any time I'm around a fire in the future. That's one thing you Americans have gotten right. S'mores are pretty good. I'm willing to forgive you for the whole Fahrenheit and messed up measurement system. So you guys have in lieu of s'mores. It was a really, really good weekend, probably one of the best birthdays I've had in quite a long time. I had a lot of fun and it kind of took the sting out of turning 28. Then yesterday day before my birthday, I wanted to give myself a bit of a birthday treat. So I booked myself in for some tattoos. I went in and got some more work done on my forearm, like sticker sleeve I have here. So that one there was a Courage the Cowardly Dog, of course, one of my all-time favorite Cartoon Network shows, which I'm pretty much obliged to get at some point in time because I'm a millennial. It's either that or I have to get a Harry Potter tattoo. And unfortunately, the Harry Potter tattoos, they're not aging that well anymore. And I also got an Alice in Wonderland tattoo, the white rabbit inside of a big stopwatch. I think it looks really good and I think it goes along really well with all of my other story-themed tattoos. Speaking of which, I don't know if I've actually shown you guys my new keyboard in a video yet because I'm very excited about it. I'm showing pretty much everyone I can. I made a post on both Twitter and Instagram, links below. But I want to show you as well. It's like a really retro keyboard and has a really, really nice kind of click-clacky sound. So just check this out. This is from my Instagram. My full-time job involves sitting at a computer all day and pretty much all my hobbies include sitting at a computer all day. I might as well treat myself and get a nice, like kind of expensive keyboard, one that lasts and one that, you know, I like, one that's like aesthetic and sounds nice. Check this out. So then it got to about 11.30pm last night, half an hour before my birthday and I thought, you know what, why not count it in with people on Twitch? Because I'm going to be awake either way. So rather than just counting in the last seconds of me being 27 on my own, why not do it with other people? So I went live on Twitch and a bunch of people showed up. People really showed up to celebrate my birthday with me there as well. I was showered with an extraordinary amount of love, which honestly, there are no words to describe. I'm completely baffled by the kindness and generosity. A lot of people were throwing like donations, that kind of stuff, probably mostly because I told them a little story about how my cake got ruined and they really wanted to get me another cake effectively. So I got a lot of donations. Oh, so get this. I had an ice cream cake and I was going to have a slice of it when it ticked over to my birthday. But we have a fridge downstairs for all our drinks every time we have a party or something. And I put my ice cream cake in the freezer and some dingleberry went and turned the fridge off yesterday. And I opened it today to get my ice cream cake out and there's just a big puddle of ice cream in there. So I don't have any cake. So much so in fact that we even got a hype train, which on Twitch is kind of a big deal. So I wanted to do something special for them and I played a clip that I had made a very special clip just for hype trains that had never been used before. I'm a bit hesitant to show it in a YouTube video but you know what? You can see it too. Here it is. We had a lot more fun on Twitch as well. Actually that's where I initially did the cover reveal. Everyone that tuned in on Twitch has already seen it. The link to my Twitch channel is in the description below but basically I stream there about three to four times a week doing writing with you or just chatting with you. Basically it's like a writer's social club. We all just hang out and have fun and sometimes get some work done. I prefer that to streaming on YouTube just because there's a whole lot more functionality there. There's a whole lot more you can do and a lot more interesting ways to interact with people in the chat. Yeah, but anyway, we had a hype train. I also did... It was a very strong request which I wouldn't have done otherwise but I did a dramatic reading from... How am I going to explain this? A long time ago I made a video kind of poking fun at Bizarro Erotica. You know, like the Chuck Tingles stuff mating with the Raptor or that kind of stuff. I said that you could write one of those in a day and just knock it out and it would be easy. And I wanted to prove that. So in that video I tried it myself. I wrote a one-day Bizarro Erotic story. It's called Love Comes in Three by the critically acclaimed Wolfface Stiffly and on the Twitch stream last night I did a dramatic reading from it and that went about as well as you can expect. And I'm so sorry. It made his heart pulse and his c**k throb against his tight slacks. Irving nestled further into the warm safety of Bruce's monstrous arms and closed his eyes against the world and the growing pit in his stomach. At least he still had her. At least he still had his Sasquatch lover. Yeah, we just hung out for like nearly two hours on the stream. Everyone counted in my birthday with me. It was very, very sweet and made the day again. A lot more enjoyable than it probably would have been otherwise. Three, two, one. You know, looking back at the five years that I've been on YouTube and AuthorTube because I joined YouTube pretty much days after my birthday way back in 2016. Looking back on it, it's kind of strange. It's incredibly strange because in one way it was basically it feels like it was just a couple of months ago but in a much more real way. It was a long time ago. I was 23 when I uploaded my first video. 23. And over the five years I've made a lot of videos. About 230 videos and I'm just noticing this just now but my channel, Cam Wolf is writing over the many different names it's had. In total, it has gotten over one million views. What? What? Over one million views total on my channel are over 100,000 hours of watch time. Nearly 14,000 subscribers. And if you saw that kind of recent video of mine talking about some of my struggles with YouTube and AuthorTube in general you'll know that it's had its ups and downs but at the end of the day I have always stressed how grateful I am. It is no small thing that at over a million points in time someone has clicked one of my videos. That is just... I've learned a lot about writing. I've learned a lot about publishing. I've developed, I feel a lot. I've changed a lot. I've seen my style change. I've seen the way I approach writing change. I've seen the way I approach reading change. I've seen the way I approach conversations and communities involving other readers and writers change. Over these five years everything has changed and I've also made quite a lot of friends over the five years doing this. Old friends that maybe I'm not in touch with as much anymore. New friends that I still talk to quite regularly. That's why before when I talked about having my weekend birthday party I referred to those people as my offline friends rather than my real friends because I have real friends that are pretty much just in the online spectrum which for now I'm willing to blame on COVID. The point is it has been quite a wild five years and while it feels like the time has completely flown by I also appreciate that I've kind of achieved a lot in this last half decade and a lot of that success I guess if you could call it that I owe entirely to people like you that watch my videos and I really appreciate it. Thank you. So anyway what you're probably most interested in right now is seeing the cover reveal for the author tube anthology. So I'm gonna go ahead and show you that it's gonna be a snippet from the Twitch stream I did so don't mind the little avatars running around on the bottom of the screen it's just it's a part of the whole Twitch thing and if you want to see a video giving you like all the details on the actual anthology itself what it is a lot more detailed information on who is involved and how it's going to happen I'll leave a card up here as well for you but without further ado here is the cover reveal. So the theme of the anthology is being away from home so it can be like vacations or travel anything like that. So keep that in mind when you see this alright I guess here we go three, two, one. Soak it up. That is the official cover for we're not home a horror anthology. I think it looks great. It's like a 3D rendered cover. It was done by a really great artist. I think it looks cool. It's it's meant to look like a family photo obviously like a dad on vacation with his kids with the horror spin. So that's the vibe. That's pretty much all I have for you today guys. I know it was a very self-indulgent video. Forgive me. If it's also your birthday as well or if it's been your birthday recently or will be your birthday soon happy birthday to you too. Here's to many more years not just on this planet but on this platform. I cannot wait to show you all of the great stuff I have planned in regards to my writing and my projects I have in collaboration with other authors and YouTubers. Things are only going to keep getting better from here. I'm absolutely sure of it. And it means a lot to me that you're sticking around for the ride. So thank you. Maybe in another five years I will look back on this video and get to do a reaction to this one and laugh about how I had no idea about all of the success that was ahead of me. Hopefully. I'm going to go try and rest off this hangover but you should probably get back to writing. Thanks for watching. Catch ya.