 Hello, my name's Jackie and welcome back to my channel. If you're new here, I'm an aspiring fiction author who is still getting over a cold. So if I sound a little bit raspy, that's why. If you are not new here, you might have noticed that this is a new location. I am actually inside a shipping container. So before we get into the main topic of the video, my husband works for a company called Guest Joy, which is an Estonian startup that basically helps hotels with customer communication and the user experience and upselling and so on with their app. Now, this hotel is one of their clients. It's brand new. I think it's opening. So today is the 2nd of February. I think the hotel officially opens on the 3rd or the 4th, so fairly soon. And they offered everyone at his company, which sounds like a lot, but there are only 12 people. So they offered the people at Guest Joy the opportunity to stay here for a night before it opened in order to test that everything's working. So, yeah, I, as his wife, I got to go as well. So and we each got our own shipping container for the evening. So this is my shipping container. He is next door in number 15. I'm not sure how well the GoPro is going to do with coverage for the hotel, given that there isn't that much light. But if there is a lot of light, I will show it now. So basically they took an old industrial building in Teleskivi, which is the cool hipster district in Tallinn. And they put a whole lot of shipping containers inside it. And each of these shipping containers has been styled as a double bedroom. So there's a bed, a desk, a bathroom. And then outside of the rooms, there are a whole lot of communal areas. So there's a kitchen if you want to cook while you're traveling. There are a bunch of just areas to hang out. There's a co-working space. There's even like a yoga and meditation room where I spent about an hour this morning. So it's really cool. Now, onto the topic of today's video, which is could author tube be detrimental to your writing as an author? Now, I am a fairly new author tuber. I've been doing videos for maybe four months now. And this is also the start of my fiction writing journey. So I have been a professional writer and editor and content marketer for about 12 years now, I think. So I do write every day and I do get paid to write every day. But I hadn't really written any fiction since I left university and I just started again around mid last year. So from that perspective, author tube has been a really good way to keep myself accountable. Watching other author tube videos has been really helpful for motivation when I'm feeling a bit low. But 2020 hasn't gotten off to the best start for me. In fact, so it's the second of February now. And the last month, I feel like I haven't achieved very much, especially considering that I've finished my nanorimodraft at the end of December. And there are a couple of reasons why I haven't achieved a lot, I think. One of them is that I did have a nasty cold a couple of weeks ago, which I'm still trying to shake the cough. In the last two weeks, I've actually been away from my apartment three times, including this little mini trip. I was in Tarku last week for two days for startup week. And the week before, I went to this actually really cool manner about an hour and a half outside of Tallinn for the management annual conference at my company, which was a bit emotionally draining, because basically everyone in the company hates marketing and I'm in marketing, but oh well, we're dealing with it. So because like I have these three separate trips, I have been out of my regular routine. I was sick as well, which was really draining. So my last video a couple of weeks ago was on the post-project writing slump, which I think is true. I think I had a slump after my most recent project, which was making it hard to get started on something new. But it was also the day before I came down with a really nasty cold, which didn't help. However, when it comes to life stuff, I don't really like to blame it so much, because professional authors have lives as well, and they somehow manage to write, so if they can do it, why can't I? Beyond the life stuff though, something I've been thinking about for the past couple of weeks is whether my commitment to doing author tube has actually been detrimental to getting started on a new project. And the reason I say that was because in January and now February, my goal was to map out a couple of new ideas using three different plotting methods. So I did the same thing last year before NaNoWriMo. I used Story Engineering, Save the Cat, and Take Off Your Pants to map out three different ideas, and one of those ideas became my NaNoWriMo project. For my next project, I wanted to try three different plotting methods, because I think there's a lot you can learn from the ways different people write, and ultimately I'd like to mush all of the things I find useful together into my own ultimate plotting and outlining method. But I'm really not doing well with the plotting methods I've tried. So the plan was to start with one, plan out three ideas using that method, and then once I've done that method, move to the next one, and then move to the third. The first one I tried was the Snowflake method, and that video might be out before this one. So if you've seen that video, you'll know that I struggled with that simply because at its most basic, the method is simply expanding what you have each time. So you have a one sentence summary, then you have a one paragraph summary, then you have a one page summary of your book, and so on. And in order to summarize your book, you need to know what you're writing about already. So on its own, I don't know how helpful that method is for discovering what you want to write about. So since I was struggling with that one, I thought let's put it to the side and start with my next plotting method, which is StoryGrid. And I thought if I started with something that maybe was a bit more concrete and gave a bit more guidance, then I would have more to work with when it came to the Snowflake method. StoryGrid I also struggled with, mainly because the book is not structured very well. Again, if that video is out by the time this one's out and you've seen it, I share my thoughts in depth on the book. But in general, one, I think it's more designed as an editing method than now, rather than an outlining method. Two, the book is structured very, very poorly. The author introduces exercises, then goes off onto tangents, and then covers exercises that don't seem to be part of the main method. He introduces theories, but then only covers them for one genre, rather than all of the genres he discusses. So it's a bit of a mess. I also went to his blog for some more information, and saw that some of the content was word for word from his blog, so I get the impression that he just published a bunch of blog posts, which is fine. But as I think I discussed in that video, the purpose of a book is you bring all of this information together in the easiest way for your reader to digest, so that they don't need to go to the blog and find every article and organize it themselves. If you're just putting blog posts together, you're not really providing the service that a book should. And as someone who has written and edited a lot of nonfiction, it frustrates me because I don't think he did his job as an author. Anyway, that's a roundabout way of saying I also struggled with the story grid method. So I had these two plotting methods, both of them I was struggling with. I tried going back and forth between them, which is not the original method I set out, but I just wanted to get it done. And at the time of recording this video, I'm still struggling. And the reason I'm struggling is because I wanted to cover three new plotting methods for AuthorTube, whereas if I was doing this like unobserved, I guess I might just go back to some of the methods I tried last year or try some different ones. But I feel like I've made this commitment and I need to get the videos up. And that's why I had the point of publishing this. It's been at least two weeks since my last video. So I'm not sure where that leaves us because on one hand, AuthorTube has been a great opportunity for me to try new things and keep myself accountable and get videos up. On the other hand, I haven't published anything in the last couple of weeks. I've been feeling bad for not publishing anything. And but the reason I'm not publishing anything is because I'm struggling with these plotting methods. At the same time, I'm also not writing anything for the same reason. So it's sort of this vicious cycle where I'm trying to get the videos done and because I'm struggling with stuff, I'm not getting them done and because I'm focused on getting the videos done, I'm not getting writing done and I'm not sure how helpful that is. So learnings. I think one is and these are learnings for me as well as for anyone else considering AuthorTube. The first one is know what your priorities are. So is your priority building an AuthorTube channel or writing? And the priority should come first. So in my case, learning how to write is the priority. So maybe it's okay to go for a couple of weeks without doing a video if it's helping me get my words done. Two is that different methods work for different people. And just because I said that I wanted to try a couple of methods, doesn't mean I should keep pursuing them if they don't work. And that's actually really hard to say because I have probably filmed a good 20 minutes, half an hour of footage for each of those videos so far and I'm not even done with the process yet. So I have put work into them and I don't want to give up yet. But I think if I don't get any further in the next week or so, then I might consider switching to a different method, which is really annoying because the story grid book retails for 33 euros. So learning three is that maybe it would be nice to have a project that isn't being observed. Now, I've personally avoided doing more than one project at a time simply because I work full time. And I do have limited time for writing, so I want to move through each project as efficiently as I can. But in the last few days, maybe even the last week, I've been thinking it'd be really nice to just try and write something and not worry if it's good and not try to follow a plotting method and maybe not even vlog about it and just see what happens. And as of yesterday, I have actually started doing that and I think I will do a video about it. But if I do do a video about it, I think I'll just film as I go and have no real agenda for anything I need to accomplish. And if there's a publisher wall video at the end, then great. And if there isn't, then oh well. But what's interesting is that for the last two or three weeks, I've been struggling with these two plotting methods. I really haven't made any progress on my books, like even planning wise. Beyond the initial ideas, which is sort of a setup for each one, I don't actually have many plot points or characters figured out or motivations. So that shows how much I've been struggling with these things. And admittedly, I haven't been working on them constantly for the last few weeks. But the fact that it's been a few weeks and even having it mulling over in the back of my brain and still not making any progress, I think it shows that these methods aren't helping me. Whereas this other project that I thought, oh, why don't I just try writing a little bit and see how it goes. So it's a Beauty and the Beast retelling and I'll probably do it under a different name because there are enough Beauty and the Beast retellings in the world. So I don't think it's going to be my most original work. But since yesterday, I've written 3,000 words of that because I didn't tell anyone I was doing it until now. So I think having something that people aren't aware of can be helpful too. And four, I guess, is keeping things in perspective. So yes, I made a commitment to myself to do author tube. However, I do have a very small channel. I've got 50 or so subscribers. And, you know, I love that you guys are watching my videos. I love the comments and the interactions I get. But it is a small channel. It's not like this is... it's not like this channel is my full-time job. So maybe it isn't necessary to keep up the pace of two videos a week that I was hitting last year. So that's today's writing ramble. If you enjoyed this, please remember to like and subscribe because that makes the gods of YouTube happy. And let me know in the comments below, are you an author tuber or have you considered becoming an author tuber? And have you found it helpful or detrimental to your writing? Until next time, bye.