 Hello and welcome back to my channel. If you are new here my name is Jackie and I'm an aspiring writer who in six days has to turn over 50 pages of her manuscript to her editor who also appears to enjoy talking about herself in the third person. If you are new here this book is my 2019 NaNoWriMo Project Powerless which is a book where superheroes meet the Russian mafia. I scheduled the 50 page manuscript critique just because I've been looking at revisions since the beginning of July. In fact before that if you include my camp NaNoWriMo Prep work and I'm at the point where I feel like the book still needs a lot of work. It doesn't read like a book that I'd buy in a store. It doesn't read like a book that has gone through many revisions and editors and so on. But I'm also at the stage where I'm not sure how to fundamentally fix it so I think it's going to be helpful to get the feedback. Having said that, sending up a feedback at this stage where I know it's not ready to be seen by anyone else is rather scary especially since I also enlisted three different people to beta read the book in September. So I'm going to have some very interesting emails coming my way in September once they've all read it. So when it comes to what there is left to address in the next six days the Monday deadline is for the first 50 pages of the book so I want to make sure they're as polished as possible. However I've told my beta readers I'll get the book to them in early September so that's about an extra week for them so I'm just looking at everything in one go. Over the last few days I've looked at a couple of scenes that really needed work. They were either added during the revisions or they needed to be replaced. I've looked at adding more of a sense of place so just more description because there are a number of scenes where I can see what's happening in my head but I don't think a reader would be able to recreate that with the lack of detail I gave them. Is that all I did? I've got to watch my last video to find out what I've already done because I feel like given the amount of time I've spent working on it over the past four or so days I've done more than that but I can't think of what else I did. So what else is there still to do? Well one of the difficult scenes I was updating I've sort of done the first half of it and I need to do the next half of it now. I want to include some more flashbacks later in the book because during revisions I added flashbacks as like a convention to help build the relationship between the protagonist and her sister as well as to give little hints about her character in the world and her father and so on. So I've included maybe five, six, even seven of those in the first half of the book but in the second half of the book I don't have any. I've got a couple of placeholders where they can go but I haven't put them in yet so I want to add maybe two or three. I'm okay with there being fewer in the second half of the book because everything's been established by then but I think if it's a convention I introduce at the beginning of the book it should at least appear later on as well. Then I need to name things so I have a city with no name, a country with no name, a family with no surname, a couple of minor characters who are just name and capital letters and highlighted in yellow so all of those need to be filled in. And then I'd like to give it another read through before sending it to anyone so this weekend reading through the first 50 pages, pre-editing and reading through the entire book, pre-sending to everyone else. To give you a sense for length in Microsoft Word I think it's about 166 pages at the moment and it's sitting around 72,000 words. I actually chopped off almost 2,000 words in the last few days so yeah the more work I do the shorter it seems to be getting but that's a good thing. I admit needless words. So the plan for today is to see if I can do the second half of the scene I added yesterday and I think that will be enough for one evening. Hello and happy Thursday. I ended up taking yesterday off because I'm just feeling a bit worn out to be honest. It's been a busy couple of weeks I've had a couple of trips. I'm still quite new into this job that I started at the beginning of July and I feel like I'm getting to the point with the book where I'm making changes but they're not making it better or I'm making changes but they're not like they're feeling like a very rough first draft again especially because the last thing I did was writing a new scene. So that's a little bit frustrating because I'm not at the end of this revision. I do have the deadline coming up. The good news is that I have actually gone through the first 50 pages though so I thought what I'd do today is send the document to my Kindle and just read through what I'm going to be sending the editor and make any notes on how I can refine that and then maybe this weekend I'll get back to looking at the second half of the book which is going to the beta readers. I can feel myself getting very red and warm so let's put this up for a little bit. One of the interesting things about this experience has been figuring out like how much capacity I have to work on this stuff because I used Microsoft Word's compare feature the other day just to compare the current version of the draft to the end of nano-rimo version of the draft. If you're not familiar with the compare feature it's basically combining two versions of the document and highlighting any changes using track changes and what's interesting is the first half of the document had a lot of red a lot of changes had been made but as you get into the second half there's not that much like it's words or sentences here and there but you don't have like sections where pages have been deleted or added and that's very reflective of my experience working on this book in July where the second half of the book I was sort of like I don't think there's that much to change and I'm going through it very quickly and I'm still I'm still not inclined to say that means the second half of the book was just better. I mean it might be but I still think there's an element of me just hitting a wall and I wasn't getting productive work done in that time and I feel like I'm at the same stage now where I've been working on it for the past week now but that's not long at all but I've been working on it for the past week and now I'm at the stage where it's like feeling like a chore it's feeling like a slog it's hard work to get stuff done and I am being less effective in the work I'm getting done and I'm not sure what to do about that I think in the future I might experiment with doing like revisions in one or two weeks sprints so doing a couple of weeks having a couple of weeks off then doing a couple of weeks on the next part of the book the moment I don't have a luxury because I lined up editor and beta readers but I think that could be interesting for the future one of the things that worries me a little bit is that if this is how long it takes like how do people finish books I mean I wrote this in November and December so in fact if we include plotting time I started work at the beginning of October last year so we're coming up to almost a year on this book and it's nowhere near ready for submission in fact I'm at the stage where I'm ready to put it aside for another couple of months before coming back to it so I could see it being almost another year before it's in a stage where it's submission ready if it ever gets there and that seems like an unreasonably long time and it's not that I'm procrastinating I'm not twiddling my thumbs I'm not putting off working on it I'm not making it take a long time because it needs to take a long time it's just genuinely taking a long time and maybe it's because I work full time and 2020 has been what it is but I look at authors who release you know one book a year as part of a series of authors who release multiple books a year and I wonder how they do it and I do know there is ramp up time at the beginning that by the time they've got books coming out there is a good chance they've been working on them for a couple of years at that stage but like the fact that the first one comes out and then a year later the next one comes out that means even if the initial ramp up took a while the ongoing pace is sort of a book a year and I don't even see how that's possible at the moment and again there are somewhat extenuating circumstances 2020 has been a mess started a new job last night in fact I didn't mention last night I was at the police and border guard getting my DV's are organized because at the moment I'm in like immigration limbo where my old residence permit was tied to my old job so that was cancelled at the beginning of August and now as an Australian I can stay in Europe for 90 days without a visa but if I want to stay for longer than 90 days I need either a visa or a residence permit so I've applied for the new visa now that'll give me an extra year and hopefully that's enough time for immigration in Switzerland to open up again so we can relocate so that was last night and that was another one of the reasons why I took the evening off because even though nothing went wrong and I wasn't expecting anything to go wrong it's still a little bit I know it's just the idea that you could be kicked out of a country it's still a little bit stressful and emotionally taxing and I think especially in the moment because borders are less open than they were last year because of coronavirus you're almost in the position where you don't want to do anything wrong like part of me was like oh maybe I should take out my camera and do a little vlogging but I don't want to get told off by some Russian immigration official who doesn't speak English well and so yeah anyway so now I have no passport because it's with the police and border guard and I have no ID because on the way home from my trip from Switzerland they confiscated my Estonian ID card because it was technically expired which is really annoying because it's only expired if you try to do anything with it like if you try to use it for a digital signature or scanner in some way but if I'm just using it as like photo name address identification it's fine the date on the card is until 2023 so now I have no ID at all which is completely unrelated anyway now I'm going to send power list to my Kindle and try to read through the first 50 pages and see what still needs to be polished by Monday I just opened the document on my Kindle and I actually got a little thrill seeing the words because it's like oh my god it feels like a real book now that I'm reading it in a format that isn't a word document or a printed out word document and what's funny is that there's still placeholder text that I need to fill in or little things like I added a subheading every time there was a flashback just so I could see in the document outline how frequent they were through the book so there are things there that need to be deleted to make it clear this is not the final book but it's still it's um yeah cool little milestone and there are so many typos this is embarrassing I've now read the first 13 chapters of my book which is approximately the first 50 pages and this was a really good exercise I mean one because I sort of got the thrill of reading my book on the Kindle but two I think it was good for me to sort of have this as more of a recharge day rather than an active working day but the other thing that was good was that I didn't see that many changes like I wrote five pages of notes they were all copy editing type of changes so typos I noticed or repetition or you know awkward words or there was one paragraph that I'd moved but I'd moved it to the wrong spot so things like that so no major changes and when it comes to the work I did in July I'm really happy with the changes I made I think the flashbacks I've added to this part of the book add a lot more soul I think having the new first scene at the beginning works really well so I'm feeling fairly comfortable about sending this off the feedback admittedly it's not perfect so when I got to around chapter six that was when I started feeling a little bit tired and I don't know if it's just because I'd been reading without a break or if it's because there's something in the book that makes that part tiring so it's going to be interesting to see what other readers think I also I don't remember exactly when but I also got to a point where I'm like okay now it just feels like a whole lot of stuff's happening and like it isn't actually plot now in the last chapter in this selection that's when Hannah the main character meets the boss of the mafia then it feels sort of like we're getting back into plot but I think maybe the two chapters before that just felt like stuff happening and that is the way they're designed because this part of the book is reactionary it's her response to what's kicked off the plot which is her getting kicked out of home so it's not supposed to be too organized but just because it's like that intentionally doesn't mean it works so again that's going to be really helpful to get external feedback so from here I'm just going to update the document with the things I noticed it is 2 46 p.m and at 5 p.m I actually have a french conversation exchange which will be probably the first time I've tried to have an actual in-depth conversation in France since 2011 when I was living there because since then like I've been to France since then but it's all been transactional stuff so when you're at the supermarket or the bakery I haven't tried to explore ideas or anything so this should be interesting but it means I've got a bit over two hours so I'm hoping I can get these changes typed up fairly quickly and then I have a little bit of downtime before I need to head out hello and happy Saturday so I didn't do any work yesterday because work work was a bit it was a good day but it was a long day like I didn't finish until seven which might not seem late to some people but it is fairly late for me so I was a bit wiped out by the time I got home and decided it was best to take the evening off and then have a really you know really focused weekend so the good news is that since I read through at the first 50 pages on Thursday and I've addressed a little bits and pieces I found I don't actually have anything else I need to do before Monday when the first 50 pages are due to the editor aside from naming the things that need to be named but I can put placeholders that's not too big a concern there were a few things I noticed like there's I added in a letter that Hannah picked up before she was forced out of the home which I never put in again later in the book so she never reads it so that's something was like I do need to either delete that sentence or add it in at some point but because the editor's only getting the first 50 pages less of a concern so the agenda for this weekend is one I want to write the couple of flashback scenes I'd like to add to the later part of the book two I want to go back and revisit the difficult scene that I was struggling with earlier in the week just because I am feeling fresher now I do think I can do more work with it I do think it could be better so I'd like to see what'll happen so again not in the first 50 pages so it's not a big deal if I don't get to it this weekend yeah other than that it's just naming the things I do also need to go through the entire book and look at character consistency but I think I might leave that to next weekend I'm actually thinking I'll take the whole week off the whole working week so I'll work this weekend and the next weekend and given that there isn't that much left to do I think I will have done everything I need to before sending it to my beta readers the following week so that's something and that's not to say it doesn't still need work it's just to say that I'm not sure how else to work on it without feedback the other thing I wanted to ask about was how do we like this location so because I don't really want to invest in a lot of lighting because Drew and I are moving to Switzerland at some point and because I also want to be lazy with makeup I was thinking if I just position myself so I was facing the living room window which means I'm literally sitting on top of the coffee table right now all of that natural light might turn me into a supermodel now clearly that hasn't happened I do like the light I do like not having to worry about makeup so much even though as I said natural lighting doesn't make you a supermodel but I acknowledge that the background of the kitchen is a little bit weird so if you have any major objections to this let me know but I think we'll be doing a lot more coffee table sitting in videos to come so one of the flashbacks I want to add is a fight scene between Hannah and Maria like a sparring scene that their father and sister they do as part of their training and there's a moment where Artem says to Maria now use your powers which is not good because she can basically cloak her body in fire and I've run into a problem where Google is not helping me and the reason this is a problem is because I've probably been searching for a good 90 minutes now and I'm not finding anything useful and it's stopping me from writing so if you know someone who's a fireman or I don't know you're a fire dancer or you know something about fire please let me know how long is it possible to touch fire before you get burnt because Google is useless I think I'm done for the day so I've added the two new flashback scenes one of which is split in two so it's sort of like three little flashbacks what's interesting though is that I remember starting another scene and it's nowhere in the book so I don't know what I've done with it maybe I've got a separate outtakes document actually so maybe I'll check if I put it there yeah so I need to look into that anyway I've added the new flashback scenes I went through a couple of sections that I'd highlighted in yellow to sort of refine and I think I'm at that point in the day when I'm not making progress anymore because when I went back to look at those areas I didn't really change them at all so I'll probably look at them again tomorrow so that means the main thing I have left to do this weekend is to name things and then I'll leave the like reading through until next weekend so almost done it is definitely the home stretch so today has been a fairly quiet day I think I mentioned yesterday that after reading through everything a couple of days ago I think the first 50 pages are largely okay or they're as okay as they're going to be before I send them to the editor so what I've been looking at today is naming the things which has involved a lot of looking at Estonian and Finnish and Russian maps to find place names that don't exist or and using Google translate to find different ways to use Estonian words and naming a couple of very very minor characters so that involve going to a list of common Russian names and putting them in so now that I've done that I'm going through trying to find some of the words and phrases I use quite often to see if I can find different ways of using them something that probably won't surprise you if you've been watching this for a while is that I use the words so 187 times in this book which is probably a bit much so I'm going through and trying to take some of them out at the moment however what concerns me more than individual words is phrases so I think there are five or six separate times someone's heart is pounding similarly there are a few different times when someone's mind is spinning or racing there are times when someone's breath gets caught in their throat I use the phrase waved a dismissive hand for separate times so I need to go through and find different ways to say those things because that's a problem having said that there are also like character quirks so I'm not sure if it's a problem to talk about one person who has this mannerism where she waves a dismissive hand because there is one person who does that I don't know if it's a problem to use that phrase more than once in the context of that character or if because this isn't a particularly long book the draft is now around 75 000 words if I should find different phrases to describe that action if it comes up more than once so let me know your thoughts on that is it okay to repeat certain phrases to a certain extent but now I'm actually having a break because I'm having a call with fellow author Tuba and a call Wilbur who is probably going to be one of my beta readers next month so little scary check out that blue orange contrast which way is the best way to do this okay I think that works so I have in through the book I have tried to vary up the words I use and the phrases I use and the first 50 pages are as good as they're going to get this weekend so it is time to send the file to my editor so it's done and I'm not sure how I feel about this actually I am sure how I feel about this I feel very relieved that it's over I'm very much looking forward to putting powerless aside for a few months I'm not ready to do that yet because I still need to read through the I don't know last 80 pages of the book no 120 pages of the book if the first 50 pages are what I already looked at there are 170 pages 120 to do so I'll be doing that next weekend and all in all I feel like this is a pretty good milestone I do feel like I don't know if all of the changes I've made to the book have made it better but I do feel like some of the changes I've made to the book have made it better so that's good so I'm going to end this vlog here I hope you're having a great day whenever it is wherever you are and I will see you next time bye