 Hello and welcome back to my channel. If you're new here, my name is Jackie. I'm an aspiring writer and this week I am trying a new writing experiment which is I'm going to write from the office and maybe only from the office but let's see how it goes. So today is Sunday. I've just got it back from the gym. I've just had my lunch and now I'm going to head back to work even though it's a weekend. I've relocated to the office. If you don't know, I work for a crypto startup in Estonia and we have a co-working space but we have a private room in the co-working space because we needed a door that could lock for our like financial license requirements. So we've got this private office that has four separate desks. Most of the time when I come in I'm the only one here because we have four colleagues who are supposed to be based in Tallinn at the moment. There's me obviously. There's a girl Elena who she comes in sometimes but I think she might do like one day a week and often that's like a day when I'm not in so we sort of see each other once every couple of weeks but other than that we're both working on our own. We have our treasury manager who he has a very young child like under a year old I believe so it's easier for him to work from home at the moment and then we have like our compliance manager who is supposed to be here for six months out of the year because of the licensing requirements and he went back to Switzerland in I'm going to say November and then the Covid situation got really bad and he hasn't been able to get back so during the week I often have this space to myself. So why am I coming into the office on a weekend to write? Well there are two main reasons. One is that even though I've been thinking a lot about my work in progress fantasy hot mess for the past few weeks I haven't done a lot of writing and that's because I've just been feeling really lazy at home so I thought getting out into a different environment one where I usually work would be good for just switching off relax mode and switching on work mode. The other reason is because on the week of Christmas I tried to write this in a week and failed but I ended up with 29 30 000 words and then over the new year weekend I started again and ended up with 10 000 words that I later added some more to and after all of my thinking I've decided like a hybrid between those two beginnings would work and that means I need to be able to see three different documents at once I need to be able to see the document from Christmas I need to be able to see for the words which is where the second version was and I need a new document where I can combine them or rewrite and I can do two documents on a laptop screen but three is just too much so I thought I'd come in here where I have multiple screens and work that way I also stole one of my colleagues screens the one who's in Switzerland because he doesn't need it he can have it when he gets back so if we look at my spreadsheet for the year we can see that on the first three days of the year was doing pretty well I ended up with 12 472 words and then there's really nothing so I have a week of nothing I attempted to write on the weekend and it wasn't working and then I have from the 10th until yesterday which was the 23rd nothing so another basically two words of no writing and yes I was thinking but I haven't been getting a lot of words out so yesterday was the first day I went into the office I've got 7952 words there but that's not actually writing like that's combining the two documents which is mostly what I want to do again today it's been about an hour and 20 minutes since I started writing and I can tell from the viewfinder it's noticeably darker in here so you've got to love Estonia in winter anyway it's been an hour and 20 minutes and I'm making progress but one of the things that keeps coming up which I think is a challenge of having had something in your head for so long is that I keep thinking of all of these things I need to introduce at some point and I'm not sure when to get it done because now I have a new scene that I'm working on before Perry decides to go and steal them and often which is good because it gives us a chance to see Perry's relationship with her best friend Madeira which I didn't really have a lot of time to develop that in the last version but that then makes me realise oh we've also got this character and this character who are part of Perry's life and we should really meet them at some point and I don't know how to get all of these people in there before the plot starts happening so if you have any advice for this please let me know. One of the things that's a little bit frustrating though is that this is taking longer than I'd hoped and I don't know every like fiction in general takes longer than I expected but I was hoping because yesterday I made quite a bit of progress I was hoping that today I could finish combining the two like initial drafts I had which should get me up to the turning point moment for Perry's point of view and you know it's been an hour and 20 minutes and I don't think that's going to happen because now I've got this new scene but once I get through this scene I think the rest of it I'm probably going to be able to keep the stuff that I did in Christmas week so yeah I think I'll just focus on getting this new scene done for now and then see how long it takes but I might need to continue with combining the two books tomorrow and for the next couple of days. It is 4.30 and I'm done I didn't finish the scene and chapter I wanted to finish today but I'm at the point where I'm trying to write and it's just not working so again sometimes things take longer than expected but at least I've got something concrete to continue working with tomorrow so for today I did three hours of writing time and of that I had about 160 productive minutes and 3,180 words so not great words per minute but it was also I had a lot of thinking time today like it was quite slow going so in any case I'm glad I'm making more progress especially after the last few weeks. One of the things you might be wondering now is well working from the office on a weekend sure that makes sense but how does that work during the week and my plan is to hopefully get to work a bit early on each of the days I go into the office so that's Monday Wednesday and Friday and on the days when I don't have anything after work so that's Monday and Friday usually I can stay a bit longer and maybe do like a half hour to an hour of writing after work so this is my first week doing it and let's see how it goes. It is 9 a.m on Monday morning and I just did 20 minutes of writing I got into the office only 20 minutes earlier than expected I was hoping to do like 45 minutes to an hour earlier but I was just really tired this morning when I woke up and part of it is just that I have doms from the gym so I think you know it's natural to feel tired when your body feels tired but also you know I did a few hours this weekend and I think it's going to be interesting to see like how sustainable this is. I think I might take the days I work from home off from writing unless I'm really inspired to write so I still get some sort of a break or weekend but I'm curious to see how I feel by the end of the week. This session did not go well I mostly just went through what I did yesterday and I decided to have like a scene I wanted to have somewhere where the main characters visit another one of the secondary characters like homes he lives in his mother has a shop in the town and he and the family live in an apartment and I knew I wanted to have a moment with them just so we could see more of this other character's life but now that I'm there I don't really know what to do with the scene so and I know from when I worked on powerless generally the scenes that I was struggling to write are ones that you know readers weren't really engaged with it maybe I could have just done without so I'm also considering just cutting this bit which I could but then I don't know when to introduce this character so I think this is one of the things I mentioned yesterday like when do I introduce everyone and do all of this foundational work that needs to happen before the plot gets started because once the plot gets started things move very quickly and you don't have a lot of that establishing time anymore so yeah not a great morning I did 172 words in 20 minutes which is nothing like that's eight words per minute that's very low having said that I can't really do much more now because I need to get to work so I have my work day ahead and I'll see if I can do some more writing at the very end of the day it is now the end of the day so I'm going to attempt to do some more writing honestly I'm exhausted I don't know why I yeah I don't know if it's because of the work I did on the weekend I mean I also had a lot of meetings today and I do find meetings very draining basically from 9 30 a.m till 3 p.m today I was in meetings with the exception of about an hour because I had a half hour break in the morning and a half hour break in the afternoon in between all of those and that's a lot so since then I've been mostly focused on admin and organization and so on because when you're a manager you have a lot of admin and organization to do but professionally I haven't been doing very much creative work today so I'm not sure how I'm going to go now that I'm going to jump back into writing but what I think is I'm just going to get through this scene and move on to the next one I think the big challenge is that I'm writing something and I can see it's not working I start to put on my editing hat and then I can't continue writing and today I don't really have the energy to do good editing like I look at things and know they don't work and I can't make them better so it would be better just to push through and have something and then tomorrow or Wednesday or whenever I'm a bit fresher I can go back and improve it the problem is the new scene I'm on at the moment I need to get through there's not that much left and then the next scene is one of the ones from the week of Christmas that I'd already done that I need to like rework to make fit this version of the book so I actually need to do editing work unless I want to skip that which I don't really want to do it's a mess and I'm tired but I'm going to give myself 45 minutes to an hour and see how well I go I made it so I did write for an hour and I got 1253 words done in that time so that's much better than my results earlier today I didn't get as far as I wanted and I think I don't know I need to readjust my expectations for how long things take because I always feel like I can get to the end of a scene in a session and I don't know how often that happens to me completely honest I got here to the end of the new scene I was working on I then started the next one which was it was an iteration of that from the version of the book that I tried writing over Christmas and I thought I could get through that and I didn't I did maybe 300 words of that scene and that's because there's like some new stuff that's happening at the beginning so I'm probably taking the second two-thirds from what was already there and replacing the first third and um yeah it just fiction takes a lot longer than I expected I I feel like my experience writing non-fiction so blogs books so on emails it's given me a different perception of time and I know that it takes me this long to do a blog post if it's a really long blog post like 5000 words plus I know I can probably do that within a day and I equate that to like I equate a blog post to a scene and I think oh yeah I can do a scene in this amount of time but I feel like I forget how much thinking goes into this work especially when I'm a bit tired so I'm calling it a day it's time to go home tomorrow I will be working from home and I'm not sure whether I'll do some writing or whether I'll purely write from the office this week so maybe I'll see you tomorrow who knows it's always an adventure happy Wednesday it is 901 a.m and I'm about to start work I did not film yesterday because I didn't do any writing yesterday so it was a work from home day but we had a like annual virtual annual meeting at 8 p.m my time so I was working from 9 a.m until 9 30 p.m so it was a long day and um I didn't get any writing done I did have an idea though which if I pursued it would mean I'd need to throw out a chunk of the beginning of the book again and um on one hand I like the idea on the other hand I am so sick of trying to rework the first part of this book I just I don't know why I can't crack the beginning of this book so at the moment in the first part of the book Perry steals the MacGuffin which I still need to name and then it gets stolen from her and when it gets stolen from her that's like the turning point that sets the plot in motion because it gets stolen from her and delivered to the antagonist and one of the things I've struggled with is how she got it in the first place so in the draft I wrote in 2019 like a random cloak troll woman just gave it to her which didn't work but I just needed to get it to her somehow so in this version one of the things I needed to solve was how she got it and I had a couple of different things that I was playing with in the draft her wrote over Christmas I had her stealing it in the next version of the draft I thought maybe the antagonist team actually gets it before the start of the book and she just finds out about it a bit later which sets the plot in motion and then I had an idea which was what if the head master slash governor person whose title I still need to decide gives it to her because the lead-up of events to this is she is presenting at the international exhibition she wants to be the showcase exhibit for the opening gala and he says no I'm presenting the macguffin instead so you can't have this spot so she was going so I was going to go okay let's make her steal the macguffin instead so she gets her spot back then I have this idea which is what if he like sort of goes oh but you can hold on to it in the meantime you can guard it in the meantime is sort of like a penacea is that how you say it and I like this idea for two reasons one is because it's not what she wants and I so viscerally feel the reaction of this isn't what I wanted this isn't what I asked for so I quite like that I quite like it for their dynamic between them I think it's good for her age so she's supposed to be like 19 so sort of YA new adult but still um you know you're still at that stage where you're coming into adult would be you can still have these like tantrum-y reactions and entitlement sometimes so um I quite like that dynamic the other thing that could work about this is I've really been struggling with the stealing the orb scene so and the orb is the macguffin it's like a spherical stone thing um and in the book I'm just calling it the orb at the moment but it will need a name at some point but where it's positioned is on the top of like the main governing building in the city so it's a big domed building and it's like on the top and the building's on a hill so everyone can see it so the fact that it's positioned like this means that in order to get it it should be almost set up as some grand caper but it's too early in the book to be pulling off a grand caper because this is actually before the plot gets started so if I get bogged down into going okay here are all of the obstacles here's the plan we carrying out the plan the plan goes wrong like that turns into a new book maybe I need to have a book before this one so at the moment I sort of have this scene that I wrote over the week of Christmas where they go and get it and it's difficult but it's not really there are no stakes or anything and that means that it's not even though theoretically this is an interesting thing like they're climbing on top of the building to try and steal this magical item it just doesn't read that interesting so I need to find some way to increase the stakes here without turning this into the book and I'm not sure how to do that and if I don't it just feels like logistics it's really not interesting so at the moment I have her going to steal it and then she gets the orb the macguffin and then it gets stolen from her and chaos into use if I switch to rain giving it to her I need to like cut out a couple of scenes and figure out how that would work because he's not going to be carrying it with him when they have the conversation where she pitches him to be the one to present because he doesn't know that's going to be the conversation so yeah that needs a little bit of tweaking once again I'm thinking maybe I do two versions because I booked in a developmental edit with a friend of mine former colleague of mine who's an amazing editor and that's not until November unfortunately just because she is so good and so popular and has all of these regular clients that she books out six to twelve months in advance and one of the things I said when I booked her in was you know I haven't been able to figure out this book yet this could be the time when I figure it out so would you be okay with me cancelling with six months notice if that happens and now I'm thinking you know this keeps happening maybe it would be worth me just waiting until November like writing the book but maybe it's okay to put it on hold until November just so I can get feedback from someone on the outside and if I'm doing that then maybe it would be helpful to have the two different versions because ultimately this doesn't change the macro story because the whole purpose is for her to get the MacGuffin so it can then get stolen from her how she gets it doesn't really matter in the grand scheme of things I've just got to make it interesting so people keep reading this is turning into a bit of a ramble I don't know what point I was trying to make but yeah I suppose it's interesting knowing logically that this doesn't really affect the macro story but still being stuck on it and I could skip it and come back to it but the thing is I need to figure it out sometime so I might as well figure it out now and I'm just not sure how to do it so yeah once again I'm thinking about doing two versions of this little section from because the opening scenes I think are okay and then we've got to do this little hop between the opening scenes to her getting the orb to it getting stolen from her and maybe that little hop I need to do in two different ways to see what works best anyway this morning I was sticking with the stealing the orb scene and I've introduced another one of the characters a bit early and thought it was a good opportunity to have a bit of world building because this is a world where they've basically tried to destroy magic and mages they tried to do this in a war which ended 20 years ago so around the time that the main cast were born slightly before we haven't really had a chance to explain that at all and this is actually a good opportunity to because there's one character who the stakes are higher for him like if he gets caught whereas Madeira and Perry the sort of two best friends who are going on these hijinks Perry is like the adoptive daughter basically of rain who rules this city so whatever she does she's sort of going to be okay he'll have her back we assume so not so many stakes and Madeira she is basically a princess of the country she comes from so very wealthy very powerful they can't really do anything to her without causing major diplomatic issues between this city-state and that country so they sort of have diplomatic immunity they have a free pass to go and do bad things and that means um there aren't as many stakes to the scene whereas this third character he's just a normal boy he's a friend of theirs he goes to school he's a mage he's a magic student and he knows he needs to sort of always be on his best behavior because if he isn't like he could be lynched he could be stolen in the middle of the night and taken away to a work camp the consequences for him are real so because of that it gives us an opportunity to have this discussion where he's like look whatever you want that i can't help you with this so that's what i was working on this morning i'm really struggling to capture his voice though which is quite unusual for me but i had this idea that i wanted him to have this really you know distinctive voice one of those people who sort of has so much information going on that he starts a sentence and goes off into tangent and i was about to say um i'm a very clear and straightforward communicator so i'm not used to talking like that but look at the last you know 10 minutes or however long it's been i think we've established i can go off on tangents so i had this idea and i had this paragraph that i did in um the 2019 draft that i really liked and anytime i brought up this character i've like copied that paragraph across just to try and get a sense of the rhythm of his um of his dialogue and i'm really struggling so this morning what i did was sort of like just a script so i had you know midirah dialogue parry dialogue trevor dialogue and just sort of had the conversational back and forth and i'll go back and try to polish it a little bit um but yeah so this morning i was working on that bit before when he backs out before they go to steal the mcguffin i did 558 words in 30 minutes so that was 18.6 words a minute that's pretty low to be honest but there was a lot of time thinking they're like trying to get his words right and also um i wanted to introduce the fact that daromon is patrolled by guards and i don't know i want to have like a nice little paragraph that talks about you know the utopia that daromon is seen to be um and then sneak in and oh by the way there are armed guards who patrol the streets so i'm not sure i'm okay with the armed guards patrolling the streets but i'm struggling with the utopic depiction so if you know any books that have cities that are presented as you know utopias paradises perfect worlds please let me know because i'd really like to see how the authors tackle this anyway it is now quarter past nine so i've really got to get to work after work today i do have a singing lesson which means i won't be doing another writing session in the office after i finish however i might take a lunch break in the office and see if i can do some writing then it looks like i'm going to be on my own again today so it shouldn't be too hard to focus as long as i close email and slack so i didn't have lunch today in fact it's five thirty four and i haven't done any more writing but things have come down a bit now so i'm going to see if i can squeeze in half an hour of writing before i finish for the day and then head to my singing lesson it is Friday and i'm back in the office so yesterday i worked from home i didn't end up doing any writing so i didn't record anything but um it was kind of crazy day for the company i work for so i work for a crypto company and the way crypto projects tend to get funding is through an i ceo rather than ipo so an ipo is when a company goes public and issues shares for the first time and you know the public can buy them um an i ceo is when a crypto project creates their coins and people can buy them as part of the initial coin offering so our um company has its own crypto token so its own version of bitcoin if you like and um when i started last year in july it had just hit like an all-time high of 17 cents and it sort of dropped down and fluctuated between about 8 cents and 12 cents for the rest of the year until we get to mid december we launched a new feature and then it shot up to 18 cents and then went up to 33 by christmas so like everyone was over the moon and for the past month it's sort of been steady up there which is really good and then suddenly this week it's like all-time high week so on tuesday when we had that virtual event i mentioned like it was just going up and up and up and hit i think 42 cents and then yesterday it just started spiking again when we released a new product or a new feature so um it went all the way up to 62 cents i think and it's just it's so cool to be i know to have this vested interest in something doing well and just watching in real time as the price goes up and everyone on slack was going mental and everyone on twitter's going mental so um yeah it was a lot of fun and even though i could have done some writing i was i know so so caught up in that that i didn't want to and honestly um i'm not too worried because i think it's nice to have you know for the purposes of this experiment to have a week when i only write from the office to see how i do so today is actually a quiet day i don't have any meetings um and my boss also said i could take the afternoon off if i wanted because i was working until like 30 p.m on tuesday so i think i'll leave slack open but i might just move on to my writing after lunch and if anything happens at work i can check it but i'll have a good few hours and the writing goal for today is to one get through this stealing the macguffin scene and two i'd like to get started on the aftermath scene so after everything that happens and perry suddenly realizes oh my god what have i done and i had some ideas for that last night so i might start with that one and then go back to the stealing scene because i don't know if this will work but i have a feeling that if i do the aftermath first then it might be easier to make the stakes feel higher when i'm back in the stealing scene so we'll see how it goes now three p.m and i started writing at one p.m and something that was really nice was just to like have this whole afternoon available for writing it was nice to sit down and not have to rush or not for it like for it not to be the end of the day and feeling like i had nothing left and i was really pushing having said that now it's three p.m i stopped about 15 minutes ago to have a bit of a break and i was just looking over what i'd written and i'm not really sure where to go i think i'm at that point where i just need a bit of a mental break from this session because one of the things i've noticed i tend to do is if i get into like a new scene and i haven't really planned it that well or i only know how it's going to start i have these circular dialogues i get started between characters where they sort of have this conversation that goes in a spiral until we finally get to the point that's in the middle and that's not an ideal way of doing things even though it might be realistic so i think it's time to have a bit of a break so i'm going to go home in fact i might go to the shops and pick up some groceries and then go home and depending on how i'm feeling i might do some more writing from home so on one hand i'm really glad that you know my boss said i could have some time this afternoon and i have still been online responding to things but um like it's been nice to have this time where i can legitimately work on my own stuff as opposed to you know sort of sneakily working on my own stuff which to be fair i don't really do in this job but i have in the past um yeah so that was really nice but on the other hand i sort of feel like oh normally i have like another three hours in the office i wouldn't be leaving until six so technically i should have another three hours of writing today so on one hand it's a bit disappointing not to have had that extra time but on the other i see my writing that there's no point in pushing when i'm at the point in this discussion where the like urgency from the scene is getting a bit lost and then there's no point in having it if there's no urgency so i'm going to have a break now and i will check in later if i start writing again as you can see i'm back in the office so last night i tried to do some more work on the book and i'm still stuck on this scene where perry steals the orb so i started googling what you can do when you're stuck on a scene as opposed to just having general writer's block and i came across an article that said reverse what happens in the scene and there were two ways the author approached this one was literally reversing every single action that happens so you end up with like sort of the multiverse of this scene and then um the other one was simply reversing what happens at the end so most scenes are built around a character either achieving or not achieving their goal so in this case perry wants to steal the orb from a guffin she steals it so what would happen if she didn't steal it and i thought because it is like balanced on top of the building on top of a statue maybe she could like reach for it and just knock it off rather than getting it and in the macro story that could work if somehow the antagonist was going for a midnight walk and happened to see it and pick it up the problem is if i do that then i basically lose two of the major characters from this book or i need to find some other way to bring them in because they were originally part of the sequence where it gets stolen and falls into evil hands so um yeah that threw me through a bit of a loop and i was incredibly frustrated because i just don't know why i can't figure out the beginning of this book and it's easy to go oh well just skip this scene and come back to it but the thing is i sort of already skipped the scene or i've already gotten the benefits of skipping the scene because i do have a full draft i already have the stuff that comes after this so i need to figure it out sometime i might as well push through and do it now so um i think yeah i think i'm just gonna try and get through this scene for the next week and if it doesn't work then maybe i'll move ahead in any case it is the end of the week i have done my week long experiment of writing in the office so i'm going to bring this video to the close all in all i really really like going to the office to work i like having a set workspace i like getting out of the house so um i think i'm going to continue doing it the only real downside was that on Monday morning when i went back to the office for work i did feel like i hadn't had a weekend however by the end things seemed to have evened out and part of that might have been because i finished early on friday but i think also because i work home on tuesdays and thursdays like it didn't feel like i was just always there even though i was working on those days i sort of still got the weekend break of being in the same place if that makes sense so by the end of the week i felt like i do at the end of the normal week it wasn't like oh my god i've been working for so long so i'm going to continue going to the office on a weekend like today um and yeah keep doing this for as long as it works um in terms of word count this was my best week since the uh new year long weekend so i did um 14,524 words take that with a grain of salt because the first day in particular was just merging a couple of documents and i had 490 minutes of productive time so eight hours eight hours of the bit if that's wrong i'll put a number on the screen so in terms of writing time it was better than just like trying to get it done at home in terms of word count it was better than trying to get it done at home so i'm going to continue coming into the office to write so i hope you enjoyed this vlog if you did please give me a big thumbs up um leave a comment below telling me like which environment you work best in and i will see you next time bye