 Hello and welcome back. This is part two of my week of trying to be a full-time writer. So let's go back to where I was on Friday where I had gotten up to 38,000 words in the book so that was a triumph but I was a little bit worried about how much they worked. So we're going to get into some of my concerns and then proceed with the rest of the week. So on one hand I was like quite happy that I'd actually done so much and I hadn't realized how much I already had in this book. On the other hand when I was going through this stuff like I thought I would go through it and I remember really liking it and I thought I would continue to like it and I already see a couple of issues. One is that I think we definitely need some more time with Aubrey before this happens because at this point we don't really know who he is and what he wants and it sort of it feels a bit like so what. So I think I do need to add a couple of chapters on for him towards the beginning. I'm also worried that at this point it's starting to change characters too frequently and I don't know if we're still feeling forward momentum, if we still feel connected to the characters or I don't know if maybe it's just because I wrote it in this way where I did Perry at once and then I looked at the others and now I'm putting it together and I've sort of forgotten where we were with Perry so it's going to be interesting to see how I feel about it when I read through it. The third problem is that when I initially wrote this book I had very short chapters. There were sort of like mini chapters grouped into larger chapters so we'd have like the first one was called The International Exhibition and then there was like one, two, three under that and they were like these mini chaplets if you like so they were sort of a thousand, maybe fifteen thousand, fifteen thousand, one thousand to fifteen hundred words each and that was the way the book worked to sort of keep things moving very quickly and in this rewrite the chapters towards the beginning of the book because I've been fleshing them out they've averaged around three thousand words each and then we get into this selection of chapters and suddenly they're short again so we have one with Ince which is sort of just him watching Perry which is maybe five hundred words and then we've got a few which are sort of a thousand words each and in theory I don't mind having shorter chapters at certain parts of the book because I think it's helpful for building momentum and you know just building the pace especially when you're switching between different points of view for the same series of events. However I do feel like the transition might be a bit sudden because we've gone straight from having these three thousand word chapters to having a really small one to a bunch of really small ones. Having said all of that I don't have the distance to look at this as an editor at the moment I don't think it's a valuable use of my time and energy to fix it. The other thing is like I'm where I was back on the 30th of December or whenever it was when I finished my week of trying to write this book in a week so it's been almost two months and I haven't really made yes I've made progress I do have an extra 10,000 words I've written and rewritten like parts of this beginning many times but in terms of progression through the story I haven't gotten any further in the last two months so I think it's time to move forward. So now that I've got in this first chunk of the book done what I want to do today is basically start mapping out the next part of the book and in the original draft it was like the first half of the book that was causing me problems. The first 25 percent so the setup I didn't feel like there was enough for us to really get to know and become invested in the characters before the plot started and then the second 25 percent which is where I am now I was struggling with having sort of two parallel storylines and I felt like I was jumping back and forth between characters too often had scenes that felt episodic rather than making progress and carrying forward momentum so I already have like quite a few things that I know I want to happen in this section so today I want to do some brainstorming some outlining to try and figure out how to make it work and then maybe this afternoon I'll do some more writing so I'm also very behind on YouTube at the time of recording this. I usually upload on a Saturday morning my time and I've missed the last two Saturdays so since this is my last like weekday off I might try doing some videos this afternoon as well because I have like some different rambly things I want to discuss that a bit in my head for a while but I just haven't made the time to sit down and record them. So this should be interesting to give you some context for what's happening in this title book so the orb has just gone missing, Perry stole it or rebumped into her, it fell out of her bag, someone stole it from her and now it's made its way into the hands of the antagonist. He originally wanted it sort of as like revenge on Rain who's you know ruler of the town whose title I need to confirm um and also because something happened to the woman that he loved back in the war and he thinks that having the McGuffin will fix it and um in the process of him getting the McGuffin he sort of forms an alliance, it's so hard trying to keep this vague but he forms an alliance with another character who sort of pushes him to have a much bigger plan so rather than just focusing on himself and trying to fix what went wrong in his own life the other character basically pushes him going look you've got this power now let's fix, let's restore the world what it once was and bring power back to mages once more. So he gets the orb and then his um objective increases from fix what's wrong with my life to fix the world and he wants to stage a revolution. So one of the plot threads is him preparing for the revolution so he's recruiting mages maybe some training I because we could only have limited stuff from his point of view so it's mainly going to be around the recruitment, the plan, planning the uprising up to the midpoint which is when they stage a two. The other plot that's happening is the search for the McGuffin because Aubrey and Perry both need to find this object that they lost so we've got sort of revolution and search for the McGuffin and about halfway through this section so let's say 37.5% that is when Aubrey and Perry discover that the revolution's taking place and they sort of go oh we've got to stop this as well so there are like these two parallel things that get a little bit tangled and I need to figure out how to do them so this should be fun. So I've been looking at this for about 20 minutes and I um I don't know if I'm going to pull this book off to be completely honest it's so much more complicated trying to do a multiple point of view book than is doing a single point of view like a single point of view is simple you have one character and you're just following them through the story and naturally like as long as that character's making progress the story's making progress things are moving forward they in theory should be evolving as you watch them whereas when you've got like five different point of view characters which I have um then yeah it's hard it's like on one hand I've got lists I've got arcs for all of them and figuring out how to incorporate them but then there's also like the events that are happening and I'm struggling to focus on both so what I was just doing was looking through the list of scenes I already had and it looks pretty good I do think hang on where's my tab have too many tabs we have um yeah the orb goes missing all re and perry start searching for it yeah basically they start searching for it they split up and they happen to bump into each other in the same place which coincidentally where jaren's having his revolutionary meeting and then after that they've sort of got these parallel actually no see this is the good thing about talking it through you realize what doesn't work so I was going to say and then after they've got these parallel searching for the orb and trying to stop the revolution plots at the same time then that doesn't really work because or three yeah okay so up to the point of the revolutionary speech I think we're okay but then from the revelant that from the revolutionary speech to the coup I think um it's a little bit difficult you see I am very I can't do more than one thing at once I focus on one thing I'm doing that and now trying to get my characters like I don't know how they can be both focused on how do we bring down a revolution and how do we keep searching for the orb anyway I can I've got a few scenes before that so I can think about that later but anyway the reason I turn the camera back on is because I um basically have a list of things I want to show for each of the different arcs and this was really like easy between villain because there aren't many chapters from their point of view so or re-imperial the main point of view characters they are the ones who are like experiencing most of the story whereas the villains or antagonists we sort of just check in with them at any moment so Madeira for instance she has like five chapters from her point of view there were like two from the last version of the draft I rewrote the earlier chapter from her point of view and I think it would make sense for there to be a point of view chapter for her around the coup and also around the final battle because her arc is all about you know her anger at knowing that she is powerful but it's not recognized and how can she like basically how can she impose her power on the world so we've got the angst at the beginning we've got the dream of being powerful by being swept up in the revolution at the coup um there is a moment when like she and Perry have a disagreement and Madeira sort of flips on her because before then Perry wasn't involved in the coup at all and Madeira sort of thought oh I can make you one of us so you can join our cause and Perry doesn't want to so this causes a rift between them and because this is a significant moment Madeira I think would be good to have a chapter from her point of view and then the battle at the end makes sense to have a chapter from her point of view so we've only got these five moments but those five moments are enough to illustrate her arc same thing with ince his setup his pickpocket gets recruited by Jared and steals the orb and delivers it to the antagonist and then he's sort of recruited to be Jared and sidekick for the revolution and in the revolution like his initial thoughts that you know mages are in such a weakened state I'm doing a good thing I'm returning them to their rightful status to having second thoughts when he sees the cost to like switching sides in the battle so again we can get this complete arc with only a couple of chapters so for those characters like all I need to do is think of one chapter for each of those beats or one scene for each of those beats where we can see them experience those beats and because there are these core events in the story which involve everyone so the orb going missing the coup and the final battle I know where those things fall in the scope of those big events so slotting those in should be fairly easy when I come back to Kerry and Aubrey though because they're carrying the rest of the story their stuff starts to feel much more logistical in comparison like they're just getting everyone from A to B so we can experience these big moments so I was also thinking about their arcs which are predominantly Perry and Aubrey's relationship which goes from annoyance frustration dislike to being close Perry's which is going from you know believing in Daruman in science and thinking magic is useless to sort of seeing the value of magic to seeing the cost of magic to wishing there was a better way that both of the worlds could exist in harmony and then there's Aubrey's arc which is which needs work because originally I'd planned he was going to go from like being really suspicious of everyone else to being able to trust Perry but it doesn't seem to fit with everything but anyway so in my planning when I was just going through the list of scenes it all seemed to work it's felt like yeah these are the key events this is what needs to happen I don't think there needs to be anything else in there and then I looked at this and I'm not sure when these little bits of character development happen and like it's really exhausting my brain is so tired just trying to puzzle this out so I don't know if this is um something I can do now or if this is something where I just try writing the book and then when I'm going through and revising it that's when I stick each of these things in so if we take Perry and Aubrey's relationship for instance the beginning there's supposed to be this instant dislike she thinks he is annoying and entitled he thinks she's arrogant and a no at all then there are moments of respect when they begin to bond so she respects her magic abilities he there's a moment when she covers for him and she sort of gets caught spying and lets him get away then there are moments of betrayal so he thinks she's been hiding something from him the entire time she accidentally unlocks all the these hidden memories he didn't know he had and the this builds to the final moment where they bond in the battle now obviously bonding in the battle isn't going to be as significant unless all of this stuff happens first so I need to make sure all of this stuff happens first and the question now is do I try and work it in now or do I just write it and then in revising go back and go okay how can I pump up the dislike here how can I make this you know moment of respect or camaraderie more impactful I'm not sure about the best way to approach this I'd be really curious about how you approach this sort of stuff whether you try to like whether it's a matter of planning it really well and knowing how everything slots together or whether it's you know sort of starting with this skeleton draft and then you build on it with all of these layers and things you wanted to incorporate I have a feeling my approach is going to be the second one I don't know I just I don't know if it's going to work because in theory that's what I should be doing with the last draft I should be taking the 2019 draft and like layering all of this stuff onto it and the reason I'm not is because I don't think the 2019 draft worked I think it needed to be rewritten I think when we get to the end of my 2021 draft and do like a comparison it'll be at least 50% of it will be completely new but then what happens in or at the end of 2021 when I look at it again and go oh I don't think I can fix this by layering on what's there I think it needs to be thrown out again yeah it's a good challenge I like the puzzle that it's a little frustrating being in this position where I just don't know if I'm going to solve it and yeah I don't know what the solution is so because I don't know what the solution is it's time to go to the gym so I was at the gym and I had an epiphany and I'm not sure how I feel about it I think I might need to cut or breathe from this book so here's my second point of view character and the reason for this is I was just thinking how much easier would the book be if there was just one protagonist and then I had other points of view like sort of as garnish a seasoning which was how I always planned for the villain squad to be represented in the book and it would be so much easier like I'd have one character who's driving the story forward all of the chapters would be from her point of view there wouldn't be any of this jumping from one to the other and having parallel things going and losing momentum and forgetting who people are and losing your connection with them and to be honest like a lot of Aubrey's stuff could be cut without being detrimental to the story I mean he comes to Dharomon from outside Dharomon um and sort of brings another character along with him who is his handler who gives him his mission but like neither of them really have any bearing on the orb going missing getting stolen the magical uprising the final battle um you know they're both there like Aubrey bumps into Perry and that's how she loses the orb because it gets knocked out of her bag but it doesn't need to be him someone else could do it the only um potential difficult thing is in the battle scene there's like a moment where he pulls her to safety and just because of the architecture of the scene and I mean the literal architecture like the way the dungeon's structured and what's happens it's basically on fire and starts falling apart by the end of it um like someone does need to be there to fulfill that role and I don't know who else it would be but that's the only moment when he's necessary which is really bad like bad job Jackie that's a very poorly designed character so removing Aubrey might solve my problems I don't want to do it because like I don't want to do it because I feel like he can be saved I feel like the reason he is easy to take out now is just because I haven't done my job well enough and if I do my job better then he will be more integral to the story and by my job I mean my job is the author so I feel like he can be selfish I just need to get to work but like critically I do think if I removed him it would solve a lot of my problems I'm not going to do it today I'm not yeah I'm not that committed I'm not committed at all to this course of action to be completely honest I think I'm just gonna like start working through the next section and keep it in the back of my mind maybe when I'm done I'll do a second version of the book without him which is seems to be the way this book is going like I have multiple versions of everything it's ridiculous but maybe that's the process this book needs to get done like I don't want to get like angry at my brain like why did you have this idea why are you making things more difficult for me because like my brain's doing its job like that's what it's meant to do it's meant to marinate things and spit out ideas but can't we just find a way to fix what I already have as opposed to having to pull it all apart again so from here I think I'm gonna work on the next section in fact I might just chill for a bit this is a big revelation yeah I think I might watch some youtube and then get into the next part of the book the nice thing about this next part of the book is even though like a lot of the stuff is new I already know a lot of snippets that I can take from the last draft so like for instance there are sort of two scenes with Aubrey and Artemis who's his handler and um I think I can like the second one's going to be completely removed but I think I can incorporate some description and some of the dynamic from that one to the one we're keeping so which will make it much better similarly there was this um like two scenes with Perry and Aubrey where they were like strategizing for how to get the orb back and how to find it and they're really slow things down they're not necessary but we've got another scene where they're going to start like following page boys because the person who stole it was a boy in a page boy uniform and I think we can have a lot of that deduction there so I think the next couple of chapters at least are going to be not writing from scratch with a lot of rewriting and cobbling together paragraphs and bits of dialogue from different places so that should be fun it's um it's always a little bit easier when you've got something to start with especially when you've had a revelation that might mean you have to throw out this book you've had in your head for 15 years but I'm not bitter there's um um but I can't see there we go so um this has been a very dark year like literally I think we've had maybe five or six days with actual sunlight since the new year started and um yesterday was one of them like yesterday afternoon the sun came out for a bit so I'm really excited to have woken up and the sky's blue and the sun's shining and Drew and I are actually going on a day trip to Malta today which is a city on the border with Russia and we haven't been there before um Drew's boss actually said since we're probably not going to be here for that much longer we should go and see it and bought us train tickets which was really nice so um taking a day off writing today but I'll be getting some footage when I'm out there again and now I'm in real time so it's the afternoon of Sunday the 28th of February which means it's the end of my week of attempting to be a full-time writer I didn't end up doing any writing yesterday obviously we were on our day trip to Narva and on the train I was focusing on YouTube and video editing rather than writing because I'm a bit behind my altitude duties but I was mulling over the book in the back of my head and what's interesting as I was editing this video you're watching and I was watching my struggle on Friday and my realisation that I might need to cut all of this in the book I realised it was probably the right decision and I didn't really want to but I thought the book would work better for it and if I look for a comparison book the best one is probably The Darker Shade of Magic by V.E. Schwab blots not similar at all but sort of tone and style like these books would be closest to those and in the first book the two main point of view characters are Kel and Lila but if you look at it objectively the story is Kel's story he's the one who brings the mysterious object that causes all of the problems into his world it's his responsibility to get rid of it he bumps into Lila and chaos ensues but she's sort of just tagging along for the right she doesn't actually have any personal stakes in this story other than like when she finds herself in battle she needs to survive but she doesn't have any vested interest in saving Kel's world or you know returning the magical stone back to where it needs to be she's along for the ride really and with that in mind you could probably rewrite that book without Lila because it's not her story she's along for the ride so earlier today I was trying to map out my book again just with Perry's point of view and I still think it could work but I'm not sure how because what happened when I removed Aubrey is and this is the same thing that would happen with the darker shade of magic you could remove Lila but Kel would be on his own for most of the plot there would be no sounding board for him no one for him to interact with it would be him and his thoughts and a lot of running and fighting when he ran into other people and that's sort of what's happening with my book now if Perry's on her own so I need to rejig the bit where the odd gets stolen from her which is fine I can find another way for it to happen without Aubrey bumping into her so she drops it but then from it being stolen to her discovering the revolution it's sort of just a lot of thinking like there's no one for it would be like Sherlock Holmes without Watson so you've got Sherlock Holmes his sort of trying to unravel a mystery trying to find a criminal or a clue and it's all happening in his head it would be very quiet without Watson to explain his thought processes to and Aubrey has a similar role here and I think in the dark shade of magic Lila has a similar role they are able to expose it through dialogue and through getting to know each other and through seeing how their backgrounds are different so now that I've actually attempted trying to do the outline without Aubrey I'm genuinely not sure what the best solution is so I don't think I'll do any more writing today which is why I thought I'd do the outro now rather than waiting until the very end of the day but I am going to continue thinking about it because yeah I'm not sure what the best option is I think it could work without Aubrey but Perry would be on her own a lot so I've got to find a way to make that more dynamic and interesting or if I keep Aubrey I just like I said on Friday I need to do a better job as an author in making his role essential so that's where I am in terms of the week in general it was really nice to have a week off work I think I said this over Christmas when I attempted to write this book in a week that generally when I take time off work it's because I'm traveling somewhere I'm going on holiday and that isn't an option at the moment in Europe because they're crowded and generally in the past I would have just like stopped part of my leave until I could go away again but the company I work for has a policy where your leave from the previous year will expire by the end of Q1 so you're sort of forced to take time off which I think is actually a good way of doing it because it's good for like your mental health to have some breaks from work and this year has definitely been a little bit stressful and taxing so I did need the mental break so it was nice to have a week off and not go anywhere and just focus on the writing when it comes to how much I did I'm going to go through my results in my spreadsheet as of this moment if I do do anything else this afternoon I will add like some text on the screen explaining what the official end of the week numbers are so in the past week on six of the days I spent time on my book the activities I did were outlining rewriting rereading and thinking time reviewing existing content and actual writing when I measure my time I have like the time of the session and then my productive time so that's time that was actually spent on the activity as opposed to if I got distracted by youtube or took a break so productive time was 525 minutes which is 8.75 hours and that's actually a lot lower than I was expecting it would be just because I did have the entire week off and I thought like I said at the beginning of the week I wasn't planning to do 40 hours of writing and working on my book but I thought I would spend more than like the equivalent of one work day on my book and one of the interesting things I discovered this week is that I do have a limited capacity for creativity each day the longest day I did had 160 minutes of productive time so that's two hours and 40 minutes the shortest day was actually Friday where I had my 20 minutes of outlining then I had my revelation that I might need to cut all three and then I was depressed for the rest of the day and didn't actively work on the book in the week even though I didn't spend that long working on the book I did get through 26,212 words now obviously those weren't all freshly written words in fact on Thursday I went through like the 7,900 words that I basically just copied from the last version of the book and pasted into this one and reviewed but I did reread all of that I was making notes on some of the problems that will need to be addressed my best words per minute was 141.5 words though that's not writing time that was when I was reviewing that 7,900 words my only pure writing session was only 19.6 words a minute so you can see it was much slower going when I was writing from scratch when it comes to the total time I've spent on this book this year so this is two months now it is 1,707 minutes which is 28.45 hours so that's also not a lot though I can't say I'm surprised because I haven't been that disciplined with like pushing through with this book this year with the exception of when I did that week of working in the office a month ago most weeks I will only do like sessions on the weekend so it's not surprising that that isn't that much time and that's just been because work has been challenging the number of words written is 50,793 now obviously that is higher than the total word count in the book at the moment which is 38,000 words the reason for that is because there are a number of parts of this book that I have rewritten multiple times so on Monday the scene I was working on it was the fourth time I'd written it so because I'm counting words in individual sessions that scene has been counted multiple times and I think it's interesting to count words this way so you can see how much work you're putting in even though the number of words in your document might not be changing like if I was comparing this book to what I wrote over the Christmas week you know that was 29,000 words down up to 38,000 words so that would mean I'd only done 9,000 words in the last two months which is not true I have put in much more work than that all in all I think this was a good week it was a more productive week than most of the weeks I've had this year because of the aforementioned only looking at the book on the weekends it was a little surprising and disappointing to see how diminished my creative capacity is especially when I compare like myself to my younger self when I was working in non-fiction ghostwriting and editing and how much I used to get through in a week or two because I was doing that full time if I compare to when I was working on powerless and writing from scratch I do feel like that moved forward a lot more efficiently however I do feel like this is a more complex book I do think that this like 2021 has been a difficult year for me and not because anything's happened so much it's more like the hangover of 2020 and just like homesickness has been really starting to hit me works also been challenging because the company's been growing so fast which is good but the support team hasn't grown fast enough to deal with all the new clients so we've all been having to deal with like a lot of complaints and bad feedback and I'm like getting lots of messages from my personal LinkedIn and trying to chase down people's payments and stuff so that's been a bit draining especially when this is a time when once you want to celebrate because the company is doing so well but everyone it seems like everyone's mad at you so I was emotionally drained going into this week and I think that's definitely reflected in how much I got done so even though this was a good experiment I don't think it's indicative of how much I would write if I was a full-time writer I think if I was a full-time writer one there would have been time to transition from like corporate startup work to working for myself again so I wouldn't be like taking time to recover a lot of this week was you know going to the gym and spending a really long time just having good work out and going to the sauna getting a massage having long bars watching YouTube just taking the time to relax a little bit because I do have to go back to work tomorrow so there wouldn't be that like almost work-related jet lag when I was going into a regular week as a full-time writer because there wouldn't be anything to recover from ideally it would just be my regular routine anyway I hope you enjoyed this video if you did please the new league thumbs up subscribe hit the notification bell and I would love it if you let me know in the comments whether you like these deep dives into my thought processes as I'm trying to unpick a book and would you be interested in me doing a video with whether or not I decide to keep this character Aubrey in my book and how I got at that conclusion because like I could document the process but only if you want me to do so please let me know other than that I hope um yeah you're having a great day great week and I will see you next time bye