 Hello and happy Thursday! It is now week four of Camp Nanarimo and July ends next Friday, so I have eight days to revise 25,000 words, which works out to 3,125 words a day. Is that doable? I mean, if I just skip the difficult parts maybe, but then that defeats the purpose of revising and now I've gotten to a challenging couple of scenes again where I'm not sure what to do with them and I took a brief look at them yesterday and today and I'm really not getting anywhere. So I mentioned at the end of my last video that we're at a stage in my book which has a bit of a lull, so until now we've had this setup where we get to know the world and the plot gets kicked in motion and then from the event where the plot really starts, which is when Hannah gets kicked out of home, the next part of the book is supposed to be the response so everything's in reaction to that and the last, let's say 10,000 words of the book, 12, that I think works really well because it's like a series of dominoes getting knocked over so one thing happens and then the next thing and then the next thing and we've gotten to like the end of that section but it's too early in the book for the midpoint when things shift and she starts to move on the offensive and go after the antagonist. So I do have content here because this is a revision, in fact if you're new here, my name's Jackie, I'm revising my Nano 2019 project for this year's camp, Nanarimo, which is a book called Powerless where superheroes meet the Russian mafia. So I'm at this stage of the book where we've got a lull after all of the action that happened earlier and we need something here and what I have is okay but it's not great and I'm not sure how to make it better which leaves me wondering do I cut this and put something completely new there because I know where we need to be for the midpoint so it's really just from now to the midpoint which is how long is it? Let's say another five to ten thousand words. It's just that stretch of scenes that could be better. Maybe I should look at redoing it because what I was thinking a couple of days ago when I last filmed and first started looking at these scenes was maybe I could just tie them back into the heart of the story with a flashback scene which is a convention I've introduced in the revisions where every few chapters there's a flashback between Hannah and Maria who's her sister and the reason I decided to include this is because these two their relationship is supposed to be like the emotional heart of the story and that wasn't really the case in the first draft and part of that is because maybe 20% of the way into the draft Hannah gets kicked out of home so they're not actually together for most of the book and other than a few passing references of how much Maria means to her we don't really get anything so I think the flashbacks have been really helpful for addressing that. I also found a second use in an earlier scene which is after Hannah escapes from the siblings and originally I had her like running through the old town and looking for a hiding place and it was very meh it was very bland after the really going head to head with her siblings and what I realized is oh why don't I just cut this section and I'll pop a flashback in there about how there's this secret place where Maria and Hannah were always going to meet and then we can go back to the present and she's already in the place and we don't get the very it was almost procedural or routine as she turns left and then right and then down this street and then she sees a coffee shop and yeah it wasn't great so I was hoping I might be able to use a flashback to save the current scene that I'm in and cut it back but I've run into a couple of issues one is that I started the flashback thinking it could be something about wouldn't it be nice to have friends and Hannah gets upset and just like but I'm your sister you know aren't I enough and then we can go to the future where Lisa the granddaughter of the mafia boss is basically treating Hannah like a sorry good sister now but then when I started writing it like I was writing as Maria thinking about like all the things they're missing out on by being trapped in their father's home and she started talking about like school and travel and doing these school trips to Helsinki and St. Petersburg and maybe doing an exchange in Paris or Tokyo and that doesn't really align with the sister's message I was originally thinking but it could align with more of a focus on well we can't do that because we're supers and we're tracked by this register and our rights are limited so what it made me realize is basically that other than taking up space the purpose of these scenes isn't clear and that means it's hard to find an appropriate flashback that would explore whatever the themes are so I think I need to take a step back and do a little bit of brainstorming type of work on this small section of the book so from now until my midpoint and see basically if there's another way I can fill the space but it is now 9 a.m so I need to start work for the day and in case you're curious about what I'm going to be working on today my main priority is to start putting together some potential customer personas for the company now the reason I say potential is because I'm waiting for the data team to put together some information about who our customers actually are I'm also hoping to speak with the support team lead to learn about the you know type of people who generally choose to use our app and I also want to speak to someone who it's a bit hard to explain what his role is without explaining what the company is and what they do but basically there's a community of people who love this company who do work for us for free essentially or for various rewards so to me these sound like the ultimate people we want to find like we want these people who are really passionate about the company and what we do so I want to get a better understanding for who they are because once we know who they are then we can target them more effectively so today is just really some brainstorming and then anything else that comes up I also have a meeting so I sit in the marketing team which is part of the growth department at this company and there's a meeting today which is a weekly growth team backlog where we go through what's in everyone's backlog now the challenge is that my boss is away this weekend next week and I can talk about marketing but I don't really know what else is happening in the wider team so I might have to run this meeting but I don't know how so this will be interesting so I'm going out for dinner in half an hour but I thought I'd take a quick look at the book between when I finish work and when I'm going to the dinner and rather than getting straight into the edits I thought why don't I just read through these couple of scenes and see how they really are and what's interesting is I was going through them so it's two two and a half questionable scenes and I was going through them and sort of skimming going and writing bullet points of what I cover and thinking you know it's not I don't think it's not great but it's not that bad either maybe I can just tweak this and polish it to improve it a bit and then I got to the club scene and particularly the middle of the club scene when Hannah gets into let's just say a storage area where she's not supposed to be and she discovers the mafia's secret drug that they've developed and then even though I was skimming that's when I started getting interested again I'm like oh the tension and she's almost caught so I have confirmed that those two scenes do need work they probably do need a complete rewrite but it was really good to go through this exercise because even though I was skimming I got to see the difference it makes when something is working versus when something isn't working it didn't matter that I was skimming because the good bits were still good enough to draw me in so that's the good news the bad news is that I do have two scenes which are probably like three to four thousand words that need to be redone and I'm not sure if I should like just skip them and come back to them on the weekend because that was my plan or if I should try looking at them now I'm tempted to skip them and just come back to them on the weekend because I'm pretty sure the next scene or two will just be me reading through the scene or two and they won't need any work and that'll be good for my word count but I don't want to get into the habit of leaving everything to later so okay what I'm going to do is I will go through the next couple of scenes because I don't have that much time today and then I will start just mulling over the couple that need significant reworking and do some brainstorming and outlining and then hopefully tomorrow or on the weekend when I sit down to do the work I'll be prepared and I'll have some idea of how to approach it since I mentioned how I was going to be highlighting going back to areas I thought I'd give you a quick look at what my book actually looks like in terms of what's been addressed and what hasn't so anything that's highlighted in yellow is something I need to go back to this area here is the first scene that I was struggling with that I just went no we're going to leave it I think that was nine hundred and sixty four words then we get into the section today so these are the two chapters that was five thousand two hundred and eight words I believe and then all of the little sections you see anything that's just a line or two is most probably something about the science that doesn't work or where I've tried to rewrite it but I don't know if it sounds realistic and later in the book so especially when we get to this last bit I looked at today I've actually just taken to highlighting the old text I had where I refer to it as a gene mutation because I'm not a hundred percent sure of what the final scientific explanation will be so I'm thinking I'll just highlight the areas where I mention science stuff and then have that highlighted for when I send it to Chris and then once we decide what'll work I can go through and update each of those sections and hopefully get her to send to check it so when it comes to my word count the document is three thousand seven hundred six hundred twenty seven words and I need to take off six thousand one hundred seventy two which is for the sections that are highlighted the sections that I haven't done yet thirty one thousand four hundred and fifty five words so let's update the nano rhino website and of course I've forgotten how much that was three one four five five and today I'm feeling good because once again I skipped forward to the easy bit so if we look at my stats we can see that it's not too far off now so I should be at almost thirty eight thousand words and I'm at thirty one and a half so that's six and a half thousand words behind which is not too bad considering that for the last three days I haven't really done anything in fact if we go down to my last two days so yesterday I think I did yeah 159 words in the day before I actually took off so feeling pretty good about things hello and happy Friday so after I went through those scenes yesterday I realized the next scene or yeah next scene I guess is actually the midpoint of the book so it's where Hannah gets some information that makes her turn against her father and I don't feel like I can continue with that without having fixed the first half of the book so I actually want to go back and try to address these scenes that I've been getting stuck on so what I did this morning was I basically did the snowflake method so I just started doing a summary of the book so far so where we start and what happens with the mission that goes wrong she gets kicked out of home she runs into the mafia and so on and the reason I did that was because I wanted to see like how it flowed from a higher level perspective because when you're like nitpicking at scenes it can be very easy to get lost in the detail and it was a helpful exercise I don't think it illuminated anything I didn't know but it has made me realize that I do need to build up the brotherhood earlier in the book which I already knew but it's made me realize that I should probably try to do it in this read through rather than just leaving it for next time because some of the things that aren't working now with the two scenes that I decided to skip yesterday I think they will be helped if we've already established the brotherhood earlier in the book so given that it is Friday it's a work day I'm not sure how much of that I'll get done today but it is going to be my priority for the weekend getting these highlighted yellow sections fixed it is Saturday and I think I figured out how to fix the scene from earlier in my book it's been two and a half hours and I feel like that's a really long session for how little I accomplished though having said that what do I have now I actually I wrote two and a half thousand words and pretty much all of them are new so that's not too bad when you think about it that way but I feel like my other revision sessions that have been this long it's generally been this long because it's been going well because I've been looking at chapters I like and they tend to be sort of three four or five thousand words but for this one so if you've been watching these vlogs you'll know from a couple of weeks ago that I had planned to put a new chapter towards the beginning of the book where Hannah the main character goes to a morgue to see the bodies of the culprits at the previous mission because basically they have superpowers but they don't have the genetic quirk that they're supposed to at least they think they don't because there was a hair left on one of her sibling suits that she analyzed so she decides she needs to get more samples and ends up going to the morgue to get these and when I tried to write it last time it just felt very you know they got into the car and then they got to the building and walked through the reception and then she was going to be doing this stuff with the bodies and they didn't really seem to be any point in having this seen so I've been thinking about it basically since then I've skipped ahead and now I've gone back and what I thought was maybe we could use this scene to introduce the brotherhood which is the Russian mafia and the reason I thought this might work is because we haven't done it yet and we need to introduce them before she actually meets them later in the book so I thought why don't we just skip all of the procedural stuff she can decide she's going and then we can go 30 minutes later they were there and get to the point with the bodies and while she's looking at the bodies she can like we can mention the brotherhood and so that was the approach I was going to take that was the approach I did take actually it was the approach I was going to take it seemed better in my head as most things do until I started writing and I went well I don't really know how to make this group seem bad or scary like I don't know maybe it's because in real life I don't really like get that attached to organizations or governments or ideas I suppose like I don't I know a lot of people do and they get this sense for who or what something is and become really aligned with that or against that whereas I don't really seem to get attached to abstract things and at this point the mafia is an abstract thing it's a concept that the main characters had no direct interaction with so when we get to the direct interaction and things happen like yes then I can make scary things happen but in terms of creating a sense of this organization that leaves foreboding in the character and the reader I'm not sure how to achieve that so what we have now is they go to the morgue she gets her samples from the bodies they happen to discuss the brotherhood and we have a little flashback in there where I share that her mother who's dead might have been associated with them somehow which is new in this draft of the book but I think it makes sense and I think if there ends up being a sequel it'll be something that can be explored in more detail then so I think the scene is at the point where it's worth being there but there is still room for improvement and what's funny about my word count though is that originally for my camp natto word count I was basically using the documents total word count but I made a note of the two sections that I hadn't done and needed to revisit so one of them was nine hundred and sixty four words and then the one from like just a few days ago was two thousand no five thousand two hundred and eight words so if I was updating my word count it would be the total word count minus those because they hadn't been looked at yet and I looked at the scene I have my two thousand four hundred and whatever words and there's like the next piece of the scene because the original chapter where this was it's sort of been split in half and the first half has been replaced by this and the second half is still there and still needs to be looked at and I just checked the word count for the second part and it was seven hundred and thirty eight words so of my nine hundred and sixty four words that needs to be taken off like I've added two and a half thousand but that's basically new because only two hundred has come off the word count that I need to subtract from the total does that make sense it makes sense in my head basically of the words I'm adding today most of them are new they're not revised words so I guess that's something to celebrate so I'm going to quickly update the NaNoWriMo website with my word count so the document was thirty eight thousand nine hundred and thirty one words minus seven thirty eight minus two five zero eight equals thirty five thousand six hundred and eighty five words so let's add that now let's look at the stats page so the stats page isn't too bad actually like I haven't gained any ground since what Thursday but you know I'm about the same amount behind I'm a bit over five thousand words behind so that's not too bad I think the biggest challenge at the moment is that I do want to address the difficult parts of the book this weekend I do want to get the first half of the book pretty solid before I move on to the second half so if I managed to get that done this afternoon and tomorrow then that'll be great because it means during the week I should be able to move fairly quickly because I think most of what happens after this midpoint is going to remain pretty similar so I could potentially still hit my fifty thousand words but if I don't get those couple of scenes right this weekend then I'm probably going to miss it but that's okay because as I've been saying for the last couple of weeks the goal of this process is to make this the best book it can be fifty thousand words is just like it's nice if I get it but it's not the whole purpose of this exercise good morning it's Monday and I'm pretty sure I'm not going to hit my fifty thousand words by the end of the month but that's okay and there are a few reasons for that one is that I started a new job at the beginning of the month and that has caused a fair amount of anxiety and as well as fatigue I'm trying to think of how much detail to go into about this because this is supposed to be a writing vlog rather than a work vlog but I think I'll just do a bit of stream of consciousness and we'll see if it makes it into the edit so the anxiety at this new role beyond just having a new role and new team and starting remotely so being a little bit out of or feeling a little bit out of a loop I think um the other reason I've been feeling really anxious is because I feel a little bit like a fraud in this role and the reason for that is because like I'm a writer I happen to get work in marketing when I left university as a copywriter and gradually moved into content marketing as my niche which I quite enjoy the role I applied for was called senior content managers so a content marketing role and the week before I started HR reached out to go do you mind if we change your title to senior digital marketing manager rather than senior content manager because we think this is it's not going to change the job description but we think this is a better title for what you'll be doing and I was like oh I don't really want to lose content but fine it's it's just a title I can put whatever I want on my LinkedIn when like in the future if I'm ever looking for a new job so that was fine then I started and I started having calls with the different people in marketing and a couple of them said to me oh we're so we're so glad to finally have a head of marketing we're so glad to have someone who can create more of a marketing strategy who can get us organized and I was like wait what now because I didn't apply for a head of marketing role as far as I knew I was like in a content digital type of role and when I spoke to my boss about it he's like oh yeah we'll look at something in sort of three to four months regarding title and so on but it appears that yes this is an active head of marketing role so which I would not have applied for if that's how it had been advertised because I've never considered myself to be a marketer I'm a writer who happens to work in marketing if I'm any type of marketer it's a content marketer so looking at overall branding and marketing strategy that's um a bit intimidating and the team like through no fault of their own but occasionally they'll make comments like oh and we want you to run this process because you've got more experience than we do and I'm sort of like I really don't though so that has been a bit in anxiety inducing on top of that for the first like until last week really I was just exhausted by this job like I would finish in the evening and I wouldn't have enough energy to take a bath like that's how tired I was so that made it hard to work on the book and I also wasn't doing a lot of socializing in that period because I was tired um until last week when I started to feel better so one of my old colleagues reached out to me and said why don't we do a group catch up on the weekend we'll bring a bunch of old content people so we did that yesterday um and we met for lunch and hung out for maybe four five hours and by the time I got back I was just so drained so drained that I don't want to say I couldn't work on the book because I could have pushed myself to work on the book but I didn't think it was in my best interest to work on the book given that there's this new job and so now I'm in the position where I'm like I could push to get through my last 10 11,000 words this week which is doable there's five days that's manageable but I'm also in this position where I'm still quite new to this job next week I'm going over to Switzerland to do like an in-person branding workshop and I really need to prepare for that and there are only so many things I can focus on at the same time and I think I'll do a separate video on this and prioritization but ultimately the thing with priorities is you can't have that many of them like you need to rank things and you can only prioritize a couple of things at a time and sometimes only one thing at a time depending on how much time it's taking and at the moment I feel like I need to prioritize this job and getting on my feet and taking care of my health and anxiety over my writing and that makes me feel a little bit guilty because this is an author tube channel and I say I'm trying to be a writer and that should be the top priority but for now I don't think it can be it's coming up to 7 p.m. I'm home I'm ready to start doing some work on my book in fact I've just been staring at the page that I'm up to in my book for maybe 10 minutes and not getting anywhere and it's because I'm still in the difficult scene that I worked on on the weekend and I think I'm just going to try and write anything so I have something to improve but yeah every time I try to write something new in this section I really question whether or not I needed to add this or whether I could just cut it out and even after what I added on the weekend which does have extra context that wasn't in the beginning of the book I'm still still not feeling it. Work was okay I did slides for the branding workshop next week which look really good the thing is most of them aren't mine because they're already like these really detailed brand guidelines that have been done so I just about half of the slides I've got are existing ones so I can't even really take credit I'm not entirely sure what they want us to do with this workshop given that everything's already defined but we'll see um what else I lost a little creepy thing on the end of my microphone um like I got really sore and I rubbed it when I got home so I can't tell if I've got mascara spread everywhere it's not my day I think I'm ready it's Monday evening and I'm ready to call it a week I'm ready for the next weekend but if it's the next weekend that means it's August and there's no more hope for Camp Nanarimo so I will persevere. It is the end of week four of Camp Nanarimo and this morning I tried to do some work before work like some work on the book before work and I was just exhausted and didn't get anywhere so like last week or the week before I don't even remember I decided it was a better use of my time just to skip the difficult chapter that I was stuck in yesterday and leave it for the weekend when I have a bit more time in space so I just went through the next three chapters in my book which was how many words was it eight thousand words that can't be right that feels like too many words I'm not entirely sure what's happening with my word count on this project but according to Microsoft Word I just looked through eight thousand words and I don't know if I'm being lazy but I didn't really change anything like there are a couple of words here and there but generally when I'm going through the book even if I have a good chapter or a good scene there are still you know paragraphs here and there that need to be redone it and I didn't find that today so I'm not sure if it's because this part of the book was good or if it's because I'm just tired but I don't know I feel like if I was just tired I'd still know that it was bad because that's what's been the struggle with the chapters I couldn't get through so here's hoping that I feel the same way once I've gotten through the whole book and I read through it again so that brings my total word count up to 41,061 words and I should be at 45,164 words so I'm 4,100 words behind in terms of my target so there are three days left in July after this Wednesday Thursday Friday and I have 9,000 words to get through in that time I'm thinking that if I just go ahead with the good chapters that is actually doable and given how much I have on at work at the moment I can't really see any reason to like try and push myself to look at the difficult parts during the week but just to highlight them make a note of them move on to the next thing and make sure I don't count that in my word count if we look at the book as a whole it is about 68,000 words so I'm definitely not going to get to the end this month which I expected going into this month I'm not sure how quickly I'll get through the rest of it though because next week I'm going to Switzerland for work so I'm imagining I won't have as much time there and again new job full on week I'm going to be running a rounding workshop next week so I yeah don't know how well I'm going to go with the difficult bits because I have a feeling by the time I get to next week I'm only going to have the difficult bits left but we'll see anyway that's all from me for this week I hope that your camp is going well please let me know how you're going in the comments below and as always please give me a thumbs up, a subscribe, hit the notification bell and keep the gods of YouTube happy. I will see you next week. Bye