 It's gonna be an interesting video. I see you Calum. Calum? Calum? I don't know. We'll find out. Hello everybody. E here. Welcome back to From the Desk. Today I am going straight off the top of my head again. I have a topic but we're gonna go all over the place. I know we are because I've been kind of manic lately. I have written five short stories in the past week, all long hand. I'm in the middle of one now but it's gone past 20 pages and I'm kind of feeling it's going to be either a novelette or novella. But it's just just steadily been coming out of me. I know that doesn't sound right but it is kind of like either vomit or diarrhea. It's just all just pouring out. I don't really have any control over it. But it's all started back last Monday. Actually it might have been the Monday before that. My memory is so bad. When I did the live writing, in fact I'm right here on my YouTube thing. I'm gonna go ahead and check which one it is. But it's the one where I did the live writing over on Google Docs and a lot of you showed up. A lot of you guys showed up. So I guess last week was writing offensive content. So it was the week before that. Yeah the live writing was on the 8th. So we're well past that. So it's been two weeks and I've written five stories starting with Popsicle which I just cleaned up and I sent to Sarah, my editor and she's taking care of it now. But I have written four other ones beside that and I think I'm halfway through. Actually I might be two thirds of the way through. I don't know. I think I'm right at the beginning of the end. So I'm gonna go ahead and say two thirds or three fourths or whatever. You math folks have figured that out. You don't even know how far I am. So anyways. But when I wrote Popsicle it was a skateboarding themed short story. And I let my buddy Gregor Zane, fantastic author by the way you need to check him out. I highly suggest the hand over the block or if you want something for Halloween, the Riggle Twins is probably the best Halloween short story I've ever read other than the Halloween Tree by Ray Bradbury which is more of a novella. But that's beside the point. Told you this was gonna be rambling. So back to what I was saying. Popsicle was skateboard themed and I talked to Gregor and one of the things he had to say about it was it didn't feel like I had researched a bunch of stuff off of a Wikipedia page. And to an extent that's true. There's two things my knowledge came from for that story. One of the things is when I was younger until I got too fat to do it, I was literally breaking skateboards. So my mom just said no more. I think there was around 13 or 14. I had broken three skateboards like in a week's time. No joke. We even took one back because we thought it was defective but it was just me being too fat. But I skateboarded a lot when I was a kid. I was never one of the guys who do tricks. I used my skateboard to do cruising. Right now I'm even looking into. I've emailed the company Lean skateboards to ask them. I'll leave a if you're interested at all. I just give a shout out to a company that I'm looking into. I've emailed them to ask them if my weight would be too much for their board because their boards look amazing. Where I got the information for their boards is Braille skateboarding. I'll even leave a link to that down in the description. But I watched those guys religiously. They're on YouTube. They're great. Carlos Lastra, Fetty Potter, Aaron Cairo and the list goes on. Daniel Uzi Walker. There's a load of guys. Nigel Jones. They're all great guys. At least they seem that way. They're really cool to the kids at the skate parks they go to. So that's what I'm basing that off of. Where I'm going with all of this is like what does any of this have to do with riding? Well to an extent I was riding what I knew. The story did not. I did not start watching Braille skateboarding because I was doing research for the short story. But I did get the idea, the image in my head for Popsicle. I got that from watching Braille skateboarding. I'd been bingeing their content on YouTube. I just happened to have a dream one night of this horrible skateboarding accident. And that's what became Popsicle. If any of you guys out there skateboard or know the skateboarding at all, you know what Popsicle is. So it's kind of a spoilery title if you're familiar with skateboarding. But at the same time I tried to add enough of a twist in there so you don't know how or when or who or those are the important things. I like doing that sometimes where right off the bat you know exactly how it's going to end. But you still the journey getting there is still fun. And I think that's what that story became. And I also nailed the content first run. Live on Twitter, started it, finished it from beginning to end, and it all made sense. It was all exactly how I wanted it. I just had to go back and clean it up. So that was awesome. Coffee break. Dude, it is 12, 1, 2, 3, 4. It is 12.34 right now as I'm filming this and I'm still not awake. Coffee. Anywho. So back to writing what you know. To a certain extent, if anybody tells you you should only write what you know, that's silly, that's foolish. Write what you, your rough draft should always be uninhibited. And if your story has to change later on because of factual details that you didn't look up, then yeah, certainly it's just going to have to change if you want to be factual, if you don't care about being factual. And that's not always a bad thing because Colson Whitehead, when he wrote The Man, Underground Railroad, that book is not historically accurate, but it does cover all the terrible stuff that has happened to black people, you know, ever since we brought them, we say we, but yeah, white people, brought them over from Africa. The enslavement, the syphilis, syphilis testing, all of that stuff. It covers all that, but it all takes place during the slave times. So and of course that, that isn't accurate, but the book isn't supposed to be historically accurate. It's supposed to be an alternative history kind of deal. Not even really magical realism, which I thought it was, but I'm off on a tangent again. Okay, rewind. Writing what you know, the rough draft should always be you sitting down and you, like I said earlier, you know, it's just word vomit. You're trying to get that you're trying to tell yourself the story. If the story doesn't make any sense, that's fine. It cannot make sense. But those are the seeds from which you grow your treat. When writing, don't let anything get in the way of you getting done with that rough draft. Don't send it to anybody and ask them, Hey, will you take a look at the first five pages of my story? If they're any kind of friend, they're going to tell you no. And that goes for my own friends. If you guys hit me up and say, Hey, will you check this out? I'll check it out. But I'm going to tell you right off the bat. You know, if I do check it out, you're probably not going to finish it. And that's just, that's just the honest truth of the matter because nothing, the first five pages, the first 10 pages, nothing is ever good in rough draft form. There might be seedlings there that you can build off of. But very, very rarely is it going to be any good. I've been the only reason why my story was was even halfway decent is because I've been doing this for over 20 years. This is my job. In fact, I had one person say, I don't know exactly what they said, but they were surprised that I wrote 4,000 words in a single setting, sitting. And I'm like, dude, this is my job. This is all I do. It'd be like being shocked. And I'm not putting anybody down, but he'd be being shocked to go to a McDonald's and being surprised the guy in the back made you a cheeseburger. It's my job. It's what I do. So there shouldn't be any surprise there. That's just what, and if you can't do that, if you can't put that much out, it doesn't mean that you're any less of a writer. It doesn't mean that you're any less of a person. All that means is, you know, you either need to build up to it or you're just not that type of writer. And that's okay. But writing what you know, never let anybody tell you to only write what you know. Because some of you guys don't know anything. I mean, that's the absolute truth. Some of you guys have absolutely no writing experience whatsoever. Some of you are young, and you have no writing experience, or sorry, you have no life experience other than maybe school or whatever. And do you really want to write stories only about school? No, you don't. You want to branch out. And if you were only to write what you know, then fantasy wouldn't be a thing. Most sci fi wouldn't be a thing. So the point of the whole point behind writing what you know is not so that you're writing something you're comfortable with. It's writing, it's telling stories that you're that are emotionally familiar to you. So if you there's a love story, you want to pull off of your own love story, your own heartache. If there's action, maybe you want to pull off the one time that you did something really cool, whatever it might be, like I did with Popsicle, I pulled off of both the stuff that I knew, just the very limited stuff I knew from back when I did skateboard to today when I've been watching the Braille skateboarding stuff. But there have been certain stories that I've written that I have absolutely no knowledge whatsoever of the person's job, or the person's at any time I write a cop, I always have to get you know, outside party that's in law enforcement to read it to make sure I got something right. Sometimes that impedes on my story. So I take artistic liberties. And that's all right every now and again, but you do have to realize that's one thing that I talked about with writing and offensive comment content. You do have to realize that if you go that route, you are going to have people going to desert and factually accurate. And as long as you're okay with that, as long as you're okay with people saying that, then there's no reason not to do it. And it is fiction. Some people take fiction way too seriously. But and that's not a bad thing. That's just how they read. Like I said with the with writers, you know, if you only write 30, 30 words a day, 300 words a day, whatever, if you write 12,000 words a day, you're not better or worse than anybody. That just means that it's your output. I will say if you write less, the less you write, usually the better the content is, as far as, you know, rough draft content, because my rough drafts look terrible. They look awful. That's the absolute truth. But nobody ever sees the rough drafts except for me. Well, there was one time the very first, the very first manuscript I ever submitted ever and that's where I get most of my, my information for you guys is from my own mentor. The very first I'm talking the very first manuscript I ever submitted. First I submitted to Donald Mays Maas, whatever, M-A-A-S, I submitted to him. And he's just like, no, no, no, just go away. And then I submitted again to another, another agent. And they said, okay, let me point you in the direction of somebody who may help you because we like your story. We just don't think it's, we just don't think you're a very good writer. And that person that I spoke with and talked to really helped me move along. And it was mainly because my content was like his content. And that's basically all it was. And from that point, I never submitted another rough draft. It never occurred to me when I was younger that I could go back and change things. I'm talking young, young, I'm talking 15, 16 years old. Okay. It never occurred to me that I could go back and rewrite something. It always stuck in my brain that the very first thing that I wrote had to be right. And it had to be perfect. Or else, you know, what's the point. But once again, back to writing what you know, there is no hard rule to any of this. And anybody who tells you this is the way to do something is absolutely wrong. The only way that you are going to create new original, you know, content, or even attempt to put your own spin on things is to stop listening to everybody else. You have to stop listening. And yes, to do this. And I'm trying, I'm also trying to tell you, stop listening to even your editors when they say your content to an extent now, even your editors when they said, when they tell you this, I don't like this, there is a big difference between I don't like this, and it being wrong. If something is objectively wrong, I say fix it, you know, unless of course you're, you know, Colson Whitehead writing alternate history kind of deal. I would say go ahead and change it because if not, you're going to get people complaining. But at the same time, if somebody says, you know, for instance, with the sound of broken ribs, a lot of people don't like the ending and then a whole other group of people love the ending. But my editor told me that I should change the whole end of it. In fact, she gave me pointers on how I could go about it easily at the end of the document. And I'm sorry, Sarah, but, you know, I just completely ignored all of her stuff because it was my book. And I knew some people, I was perfectly all right with some people getting to the end of that book and going, this isn't what I signed up for. Because I knew other people would go, hell, yeah, that's what I signed up for. And there were, it's pretty much split right now in the middle, man. If you go and check out the reviews that half the people say it's a great ending, half the people say they could have done without it. And that's fine. That's just the way it goes. But like I said, writing what you know really all comes down to the emotional, it's taking your emotional experience and putting that into a book. Feeding off your own, like this is my speaker turning off, feeding off your own personal experiences to bolster, to enhance a fictional character. Now one thing I want to do before I log off, there was a comment, a question from Callum, I'm loading it right now, my apologies, but Callum thinks he hit me up just before, literally like a minute before I was about to start recording. And he had this question, hello, I am 19 years old and becoming a writer has honestly been a lifelong dream of mine. I do write consistently and I am enjoying the hell out of it. That's awesome. Keep doing what you're doing. However, I have been so stressed out lately in that I am scared of failure and constantly think of pursuing a safe route in life. Do you have any advice in terms of what made you get past self doubt? Thank you very much. Callum, this is this is a hard question and easy question to answer. The easy side of that is I don't really care too much what people think about me. I don't really have self doubt in that way because I grew up, I was bullied all throughout school and I mean you, I still get bullied now on YouTube or just even in reviews. But it's too, you have to, you have to stop worrying about what other people think about you because I promise you they don't think about you half as much as you think they might think about you. The harder answer here is that's easier said than done, right? You know, it's really easy to say that. So, so what the harder answer is, you're going to fail. You have to accept the fact that you are going to fail. I mean, there's really no other way to put it. You are going to fail. You are going to succeed. But the only way you ever truly really fail is if you give up. Now, as far as life advice I have for you, always have a backup because I don't know you, Caleb. I'm sorry if I'm getting your name wrong. I don't know you personally. You could be a terrible writer and I could be giving you terrible advice to tell you to chase your dream because it may not be for you. You could also be a fantastic writer and usually the really good ones are the ones who doubt themselves the most and that doubt is going to linger with you but that's what's going to make you good. That's what's going to make you awesome is because you're always going to worry that you're not putting forth your best effort and that's going to make you edit constantly. That's going to make you work on something constantly until you feel it's perfect. You also have to know when to let go. You also have to know that it's not ever going to be perfect. But it's a nice thing to strive for. I hope I answered your question. If not, leave another question on this video or whatever. If anybody out here has any questions, anything else they want to talk about, if you want me to talk about it on the from the desk, instead of answering you in the comments, let me know that too. Please tell me where you want me to answer you. I'll do it next Monday. Actually, next Monday is my live speaking one. So yeah, it's a surprise. I'll be in Hoover, Alabama talking to folks about this writing gig this Saturday. This Saturday. I'm nervous. Anyways, but until next time, I have an E, you have an U, just another rambly from the desk. I'll talk to you guys later. Bye-bye.