 Hello, it's Jackie here. My husband and I are moving from Estonia to Switzerland on the 2nd of August, so what I want to do this weekend is do like a trial pack to see how much fits in our suitcases and how much we're going to have to ship over and of course like what we can either sell or donate. So I thought I'd have a casual chat with you while I'm doing all of that. One problem is is that my camera is running out of battery so I'm not sure how well this is going to go but we'll see how we do. So I never considered myself to be a person who had that many clothes but this looks like a lot especially when you include things like my wonderful chicken onesie which takes up quite a bit of space as well as all my pajamas which are under the things hanging up here. So this is going to be interesting. So I have a few broad categories of clothes here. There are things that I currently wear and would obviously want to take with me in the suitcase just because I'm wearing them now and I will likely continue to wear them. There are things that I wear in the winter which obviously I'm not going to wear now but I will need them in future so those are things that I'm going to post over. Then there are sort of like aspirational clothes so things that fit me at one stage that don't fit me anymore that I still have hope that they might one day fit me again. So I have gotten rid of a lot of these. A lot of these things are in the bag for donation but there are still a handful of things where it's like oh it's like it's only one or two sizes too small so it might happen one day. So I have a bit of a problem. I put everything on my bed and now I have nowhere to organize the different categories of things so I might need to rethink this approach. There is really not enough space here for me here with the suitcases. So since we're here I thought I might give you an update on what's happening with me writing wise. So it is July. I didn't realize until today which is I think the third that that means it is time for Camp Nanorimo. So given that it's the third and I am not prepared I don't think I'll be doing camp. I do want to start on a new writing project but um yeah I don't even know what goals are set at this stage. So my new project is something that I think will have more of a fairy tale feel than powerless. The codename I'm working with at the moment is the glass witch. If you also watch Lindsay Puckett I am aware that that is the name of her book that's on submission so I'll come up with something new for it but that's what I'm calling it for the time being. So the idea is about an apprentice glass blower in Renaissance Venice who wants to be the most famous and respected glass blower there is. She wants people to travel from all corners of Europe to buy her art and I think I'm going to adjust the camera angle because I'm too high. Ah movie magic. So she wants everyone to travel to Venice to buy and appreciate her art. Anyway the book starts maybe a month before the carnival in Venice and she and one of her friends the name I'm playing with at the moment is Roberto they go to look at all of the other exhibits waiting for carnival and she sees this statue of a girl and it looks like it's one solid piece of completely transparent glass which back then I believe would have been very hard to do. In Venice they were very famous for glass blowing but sculpting from a bit of solid glass is a bit of a different art form and when you're looking at a life-size statue of a girl around the same age as Chiara that's pretty impressive and she becomes obsessed with this statue like I think three days in a row she goes I'm worried this pile of clothes is gonna fall um actually I don't need that can be delivered oh I think I'm gonna need a second pile for the stuff to pack What was I saying? No we all knew that was gonna happen Anyway back on track so she becomes obsessed with this statue and she goes back night after night to see it and she wants to like decipher the puzzle of who had the skills to create this piece of art because she like she knows all of the artisan she's part of the world she knows all of the masters she knows all of the apprentices and she doesn't think any of them have the ability to create something like this so she is determined to find out who made it and I'm not sure how she finds out I'm thinking maybe on the third day she visits there'll be some sort of clue indicating who um who the maker is just because I want this to feel a little bit like a fairy tale and fairy tales have clues if you prove yourself worthy so on the third day she finds some clue which gives her a starting point to go on this journey and she and her friend Roberto go on a journey to find the person who created this statue and it turns out the person who created the statue is actually a witch a glass witch someone who can turn anything she touches into glass and she used to be like Kiarra she used to be an artisan in Venice and she was banished and forbidden from going back and I'm still figuring out the details around this but she um has been trying to lure someone out to her for years and I'm not sure if it's because she wants to pass on the gift because it's like a curse as well as a gift or if it's to get revenge I'm thinking it'll be to get revenge just because it's a little bit juicier so she has been trying to call someone out to her and Kiarra's the one who takes the bait so she goes out and finds this witch not knowing that it's a witch who's trying to um get back to Venice somehow and starts working with her she apprentices herself to the witch to the witch instead and wants to learn how she built this incredible statue and there's going to be a climactic scene at the carnival in Venice but something's going to happen between the witch and Kiarra where Kiarra unwittingly invites her back to Venice and then she is free to go there and turn the city into glass so that's what I've got so far and I'm a little bit worried because it is nothing like powerless and if powerless gets interest then an agent or publisher will probably want something similar but powerless is probably going to be a trilogy so that's okay so that's the idea so far I have a separate video where I've actually started trying to outline this so I've used basically my favorite methods from when I outlined powerless so that was the take off your pants story core the save the cat beat sheet the story engineering outline I want to use the save the cat storyboard as well but I'm still on the story engineering outline um it has been maybe two weeks since I first started looking at that because what I found was I did the save the cat beat sheet and then when I went on to do the story engineering outline I found I wasn't getting many new ideas and that could either be because you're supposed to follow the method in its entirety which is my bad for just doing cherry picking the bits I like it could also be just because I was doing them all in a row like it was all in the space of maybe two hours I was doing everything whereas last time when I used these methods it was sort of one every one to two weeks each weekend I was trying a different method which gives you more time to think and for the thoughts to marinate between you know just between each session you look at it so now that it's been a couple of weeks I think I'm we'll see how this packing experiment goes first but I think I would like to revisit and see if I can flesh it out a little bit more I also have started a little bit of writing just um the scene where she first sees the statue because that was really fresh in my mind so I might also play with that a little bit like just writing the things that are really inspiring me at the moment rather than trying to get everything outlined perfectly but that is the new project right now so this is what I'm left with these two piles on the end they're the ones that I would actually pack now these four are all like either winter things or things where um I don't have an occasion to wear them yet probably about a third of this mass in these two piles is pajamas which take up a surprising amount of space I mean from like these are a couple of jumpers I wear to sleep so this all the way to here and then this chunk here that's all just pajamas so they take up a lot of room this is my selection of things that are just big so my snuggy my onesie my shawl and then over there we've got um winter jackets so obviously don't need them and then these are the two contentious piles ignore all of the coat hangers so this first one this is the pile of stuff that doesn't fit but I would like it to which isn't actually that big but given how big like these two that need to be sent off maybe I should get rid of some of this or maybe I should just get rid of some pajamas this one is my corporate style clothes so the reason corporate clothes are interesting is because I don't wear them anymore and even when I worked in corporate I didn't really wear them that much anymore because like in Australia and in Estonia you don't really get that dressed up anymore I mean a lot of people wear jeans and nice tops to work every day so I'm a bit torn about what to do with them because I feel like it's good to have some suits and that sort of stuff just in case you have an occasion where you need them but like if it's just in case I have an occasion where I need them I should get rid of everything except for one suit so probably should make some decisions about getting rid of some of that stuff um a bit warm now um so I just did some fashion parades with my husband to take a look at that corporate pile and um he liked everything which is lovely when your husband thinks you look good in everything but it doesn't really help us practically with the current situation so we rationalized one jacket but keeping the rest though he said we could get rid of the chicken onesie which I left up to him because it was a gift I got for him because like he calls me his little chickens I got a chicken onesie for one of his birthdays as a joke so um we'll see if anyone wants to adopt our onesie um but yeah I have a lot of stuff to ship and it's a little bit different from previous times when I've moved like internationally because this is the fifth time actually so I moved from Australia to London then London to Australia then Australia to Paris then Paris to Australia in Australia to Estonia and now this is the sixth time so Estonia to Switzerland and um this is probably the most challenging time because both London and Paris I didn't have that much like I could just take it home with me on the plane and even if I did like I could have shipped stuff home to my parents easily enough whereas now we don't have a home address to ship anything to because this is our home address and we don't have a new place in Switzerland yet because we want to be there to look at places so we've sort of got this limbo I think I might send like some books back to Australia because I'm probably not going to reread them in the next let's say two years we're in Switzerland but other than that like everything's coming with us so I guess we'll just have to send it to the Airbnb and hope that they deliver it when we're at home and we don't need to go to the post office and show proof of address because we won't have proof of address but we'll see so something I've been struggling with when it comes to getting into this new project is I mean I guess it is self-doubt I was going to say it's not self-doubt because it doesn't feel that strong but that is the only accurate way to describe it in that I tried these plotting exercises and I didn't feel like I was getting very far beyond the initial idea and yeah there were some new things that popped up but I feel like when I did powerless I was a lot further along at the end and that may or may not be true because I remember writing powerless when like I got to scenes where it's like oh yes I had this in my outline and all I had was the brotherhood interrupts the family on a mission it's like oh well that doesn't really tell me what's happening here so maybe I am at the same stage I was with powerless when I was at the outlining but part of me doubts my ability to write another book I worry that maybe powerless was all I had in me or maybe I can write another book but it's going to be another 10 15 years because that's what happened with my fantasy hot mess I wrote it when I was 19 and then I didn't finish anything else until 2019 so that's 13 14 years later and now it's like well maybe I've done my project for the decade and I'm going to have to wait another 10 years which does not fill me with hope because that is not how working writers work at least not in YA like you're generally releasing a book every year maybe a book every two years so waiting a decade for inspiration to strike again isn't really realistic so part of me wonders like is it just not a strong enough idea in which case I should go back to the drawing board and find something that is a bit easier to flesh out or maybe it has nothing to do with the strength of the idea and instead it's my ability and I just had the one book in me or the one book in me for now and then there's probably the most likely culprit which just self-doubt so I am able to do it but I haven't built up the habit of writing new books yet and finishing new books yet so when it's time to do another one I doubt my ability because I don't have any evidence in the past showing how that could happen in fact because it's the middle of the year we had our like semester reviews we call them at work so half yearly reviews and one of my team members is an intern so he's not he's not like really really young he's not like at university or anything but is in his 20s and doesn't have that much work experience and one of the things he mentioned he needed to work on was confidence so one of the things we were talking about was how um you know there's a lot of stuff you can do in terms of personal development to improve your confidence like you can do affirmations visualizations all of that sort of stuff but the thing I've found to be this like this stuff is taking up more room in the suitcase than I expected I thought it was going to be half empty so you can do personal development things to help with your self-esteem but what I find to be the most helpful is taking actions so taking small chances because the reason why I have so much confidence at work is and honestly in my current role I probably don't have that much confidence but as like a content person and a copywriter and a content marketer which is what I was doing before this job I was very confident because I had you know over 10 years of experience behind me showing that every time I'd been thrown into a situation I had managed to figure it out and I yes of course I learned and improved as I went but I survived everything even if I made mistakes and having that track record behind you naturally gives you confidence because like okay I did it once I can do it again and I had all of these things that happened in the past and I didn't know how I'd deal with them and I did I survived I'm still here so therefore any other new things that come up there's a good chance I can probably handle them because I've done it in the past so professionally I have this track record which has built this confidence with writing I don't and I don't know if there are any shortcuts to building that confidence or if it's just you need to write more and the more you write the more your confidence will grow and it turns into this virtuous cycle so yeah that's my rambly way of saying I'm lacking in confidence starting a new project is uncomfortable but I probably do need to get started in order to get through this uncomfortable stage so here's what we're dealing with first we've got the big box that is overflowing as you can see this backpack will also use to send stuff this is the bag of things to donate I'm probably going to need another bag because it's also overflowing then we get to the suitcase that I'll be taking with me and that's a bit under three quarters full which isn't too bad until you consider that there's no tech stuff in there no shoes and we still need to do the washing this week so there's more clothes then we have shoes I should probably get rid of some of these because I only really wear like I wear the boots in winter and only really wear these two at the moment but the shiny ones are nice for special occasions when they happen then that suitcase you can ignore because Drew will use that one and then I started gathering non-tech stuff so we have general stationery and some craft books here oh in fact yeah and then we've got more craft books under here as well as French books and these are a couple of books I just want to take with me because they're good and I'll probably want to reread them the rest of the books I'm going to be sending back to Australia and then we have the box for my Mac for work because work had to send me a Mac from Switzerland rather than letting me get one here then over here we've got chicken onesie which we'll see if anyone wants and jackets which need to be dry cleaned or tailored before we go so those jackets over there they need to go in this packing district as well and then this doesn't include my laptops because I have my personal laptop and my work laptop it doesn't include the tripods which you can see set up here it doesn't include the light it doesn't include handbags which I just saw in the cupboard and I don't have like I have like three handbags and that's not many but still they'd take up space I don't know how it's all gonna work I'm just so tired and so sick of packing especially because we're not even doing it for real now we're not leaving for another 30 days so I need to unpack again after this or at least I need to unpack the suitcase of stuff that I still use now and it's how I don't know how we have so much stuff and I feel like I don't buy a lot of stuff but somehow it just accumulates and I really can't be bothered to move yes I think I'm gonna take a break from here and see how Drew's going because he's like doing the same exercise in the other rooms and then um yeah well I guess we'll figure out how much we need to ship over but ugh I hate I don't want to move like I know I'll be happy when I get there but I just can't be bothered I just want to be a lazy blob is that too much to ask thank you for watching if you like this please like subscribe hit the notification bell leave a comment let me know if you have any tips or thoughts on moving as well as the other writing related stuff so new ideas and self doubt and I will see you next time bye