 So it has been a while. I think it's been like six weeks since my last video went up. So my name's Jackie. You might have forgotten that I wouldn't blame you. I used to make all the two videos once a week and I have taken a couple of smaller breaks since I started in 2019, but this is definitely the longest. So I thought I'd do this casual chatty video as a way of just checking in and letting you know what I've been up to and why I took the break. So the last time I filmed it was during Camp Nanarimo, so let's start there. In camp I had a couple of different goals. The first one was to prepare my YA Superheroes meets the Russian Mafia book powerless for working with a book coach because I had a friend who was doing a book coaching certification and she needed to do a manuscript critique. Then I also wanted to query powerless. I tried to go back to my fantasy hot mess and I also had like the background goal of maybe I'll start something else if my fantasy hot mess isn't going so well. Because I did have a number of different goals I ended up doing a time goal rather than like a word count goal and I actually achieved that I think on the 14th of April. So the first couple of weeks were really, I won't even say productive, but I just spent a lot of time on these things because researching agents and drafting query letters and looking for other authors query letters takes a lot of time and I wasn't expecting that. So I hit my goal quite early on but for the second half of April I did try to stay on track and it was only really in the last week that so I did hit my goal quite early on. I exceeded my goal just with the powerless work alone and then I went back to my fantasy hot mess which is a project I had been working on since Christmas 2020. It has a long and not sorted history, but a long history. I originally wrote it when I was 19 at university then picked it up again. I'm going to say in 2017 and sort of looked at it on and off until 2019 was when I went okay I'm going to be a writer, I'm going to be committed and that was when I finished the second draft of that and I still knew it didn't work but at least I had a draft and then yeah this year was going to be the year when I fix it and made it work and made this story and these characters that I love in my head come to life and that didn't go so well. So I even filmed some videos about the process but yeah I don't know if I should publish them or not just because like that feels like a long time ago now that I've moved on from the project but basically it didn't go so well. I went back to working with the anatomy of the story and tried to use the plot chapter to get a better outline which didn't work. I ended up removing one of my point of view characters and still felt like I had too much to organize in a coherent way without it feeling like a lot of plot and no story as one of my friends says and yeah I got to the end of April and I had this realization which was no part of working on fantasy hot mess has actually been enjoyable and that isn't to say that every part of working on a fiction project should be enjoyable because ideally if you sell your books it is a job, it is a discipline, it's something you should work at but at least some of it should be enjoyable and when I reflected and like even if I looked at the old vlogs I'm sure I'd see that I was just sort of trying to push through and get it done and I was like I didn't mind thinking about it so much and trying to reorganize the puzzle but when I compare it to powerless like powerless yes it was a challenge to write as well but there were parts in the writing process when I'm like yes this is working so well it's good and every time I've reread it even with the areas that can be improved every time I've reread it I've loved the story I've loved the characters I've had so much fun and even rereading my fantasy hot mess like it just felt like a chore so I got to the end of April and thought okay I think I need to give up on this project and yes I might pick it up again in a couple of years but for now I just don't know how to fix it and yeah it's not enjoyable and maybe I'd have better luck if I was working on something that I did enjoy so that's where I was when I stopped filming I had tried doing a little bit about getting back into fantasy hot mess and it didn't go so well and then life happened and good things happened but there was just a lot happening at once so my work takes a lot of mental energy I'm head of marketing in a crypto company and I never intended to be a head of marketing so I'm not really like I do the work I think I'm mostly what I bring to the table is organization and in a company that isn't very organized a lot of the time so I think I do it well but it's not really my natural space so it does take a lot of mental energy but yeah work takes a lot of mental energy and then I had a bunch of things happening they got added on top of the work and I was just feeling exhausted and I've had issues with fatigue in the past and I feel like for the last you know for 2020 and 2021 it's been getting worse and what I would usually do to address that is take like a month or two off and go traveling and recharge and that's not really an option when the world is still closed so I realized I was feeling exhausted pretty much every day and didn't really have any energy to do anything beyond what I absolutely had to get done so I decided I was going to take the month of May off from writing and I didn't intend to take it off from author tube like I was still planning to do videos but clearly that didn't happen and the reason for that is just there was a lot of other stuff happening so I've mentioned my job which is full-time but even the job has extended to be more than full time sometimes like every second Wednesday I've got a call that's at 7 30 and it goes to between 8 30 and 9 so that evening is gone but aside from the job I got approved for my Swiss residence permit which is really exciting if you're new here I am an Australian I live in Estonia and my husband and I are planning to move to Switzerland because the company I work for is Swiss and I started there almost a year ago now so the residence permit finally got approved which is really exciting but then that started the logistics of applying for visas and this is so stupid like I know there's at least one Swiss person who watches these videos so I'd be curious to hear what you think about this process in the comments but basically I have an approved residence permit in Switzerland that I need to go and collect I need to apply for a visa in order to enter the country to collect my residence permit but if I was just visiting Switzerland as a tourist I could stay there for 90 days without a visa so I don't know why I can't just go there and get the permit as long as it's within that 90 days but I need to apply for a visa now there is no Swiss embassy in Estonia the closest one is in Stockholm Sweden which manages all of like the Nordic and Baltic states so that's okay it means I need to send off my documents my passport to Sweden in order to get this back the problem is in May I had to go to Dubai for a week for a work conference and this was and all of this was confirmed like at the very end of April so I was like oh I could send my passport off now but what if it doesn't get back in time for the conference so there was sort of this month of things being on hold for my own visa application but now like I got back from Dubai a week ago so now I have no passport it's in another country but that's happening so thing one is the job thing two is I had this visa application thing three is my husband's visa application so I'm getting a residence permit for employment he is getting a visa as my spouse so he's basically piggybacking on my residence permit and unlike Estonia where you can just show up on your tourist visa and apply for everything here again we need to do it in advance now my visa when I sent it to Stockholm supposedly will take four days before coming back postage is obviously longer that's why I didn't want to do it before Dubai because Estonia's postage is quite slow but four days at the embassy and then it'll come back my husband's visa will take eight to 12 weeks so first in fact even before the time frame he has a whole lot of documents he needs far more than I do like he needs his own ID documents multiple copies of each he needs my ID documents as part of his application and multiple copies of each he needs our marriage certificate the original and copies and he needs to be enrolled in a French course because and he needs to either pass an A1 French exam or he needs to be enrolled in a French course now my husband doesn't have an A1 level of French he speaks what he calls ancient high French which is like saying the cheese to Swiss which is obviously not French he's not going to pass this exam so I needed to enroll him in a class and that was like a process of a good week and a half because one all of the classes recommended by the official site none of them got back to me when I emailed them I reach out to my colleagues to see what they recommended they sent me a language school which I contacted and over the summer they only do intensives which are like three weeks and two hours every night of the week for three weeks and Drew was like well I don't really want to do an intensive like that in summer because summer short and it would be nice to go out in the evenings which is understandable but at the time I was a bit annoyed and just like you know suck it up we've just got to enroll you in this course so then um this is really bad actually I've had kind of marketing intern who started working with me because work was so busy and in his first week I'm like can you research French courses for me which is not part of his job but he had the time so he sent me a list of French courses I contacted all of them we found one enrolled him printed out the confirmation and that went into his application so we did all of his documents which took maybe two weeks because there was a lot of back and forth with the French classes and there was one he even spoke to sent off his stuff and then it's eight to twelve weeks from then so which was like mid-may so let's say the 15th of May plus add two weeks postage because Estonia is slow so that's 10 to 14 weeks now my residence permit actually has an expiry if I don't collect it so it's going to disappear on the 13th of July if I don't go and collect it so obviously we can't move to Switzerland then because my husband isn't going to have his visa yet like he's going to get it by the end of July probably or beginning of August so then I started looking into well can I go to Switzerland just to collect the residence permit and go back and the short answer is yes now but when I was originally looking at it it looked like no that wouldn't be the case because even with a negative PCR test I would still need to do 10 days of quarantine in Switzerland and it's like well I can do 10 days of quarantine but that's quite expensive like can work cover it and work said they'll cover the flights for me to go there and back but not the accommodation for that 10 days so I was like look that's going to be a bit expensive so they've basically negotiated with the local government to write me like a permission letter so I can go there and go back in the same day so hopefully nothing goes wrong with that but um the reason I'm going into all of this detail about stuff that's not relating to writing or author tube at all is that there was a lot on and it's not like anything went wrong with this visa stuff it was just a lot of logistics and a lot of moving bits where you're going okay this comes in at this date and then we've got to do this here and and you're trying to plan out your life basically like we're moving countries and you can't really plan that much because you don't know when anything's going to happen like at the moment the big variable is Drew's visa because we can't move until we get that so when do we give notice on our apartment for example when do we book our flights and accommodation for when we first arrived in Switzerland so having the job plus this trip to Dubai for work plus the visa stuff plus positive thing was that Estonia came out of lockdown in mid-may so we'd had our second lockdown of the year um everything had been closed for about two months so we came out of lockdown which meant I could see friends again and go to the gym again all of which is positive but just more things getting added to the schedule at once so we're all of that happening and I was already feeling like worn out and creatively drained I just went okay I think the safest thing to do now is to take a little bit of time off riding because I don't even want to say even if I pushed through because the thing was I felt like I was already pushing through at that stage like everything I was doing for fantasy hot mess was just um I was just a slog like I was really really working hard to get through it and I didn't really have any way to recharge from that and I thought you know I can keep doing this but I'm not getting anywhere like I think it would have been different if I felt like I was making meaningful progress but all I was doing was spending hours and not really writing anything new or finding new like new inspirational solutions and I also thought about switching over to something new but with all of that on the thought of like trying to do something new and even to be honest the thought of like trying to document it in this way like taking videos as I went was just like more than I was mentally able to process at the time and I just thought okay I'm giving myself permission to take the month of May off we'll see how I feel at the end of the month and then hopefully come back to it so the end of May has passed it is now like a week into June I think today is the sixth and um I'm not sure where to go from here I definitely don't want to go back to fantasy hot mess I do think letting that go was the right decision part of me thinks that maybe I will never write that book and Victoria Schwab who I'm a big fan of despite my Adi LaRue video one of the things she's talked about in her early career is that her first book was good enough to get her an agent but it wasn't good enough to get published and people sometimes ask her about it now and she's said she's never going to publish that book because it just wasn't good enough but she's taken elements of that book and used them in other places and part of me thinks like maybe I'll take some of these characters in use them somewhere else or some elements of this world and use it somewhere else and I haven't been completely persuaded to take that approach yet because part of me thinks oh maybe in a couple years I will be able to fix it and if I've you know taken Perry out of that world and put her somewhere else then I've got a big hole in this world so at the moment I'm not doing anything with it but I'm also aware that it's highly likely this book is not fixable yeah this book is not fixable I don't think I don't think there's any way to do everything I was trying to do in a single book and have it make sense and be coherent well that that's a bit of a double up isn't it make sense and be compelling and that's disappointing because I loved this world and these stories and I love the you know themes and the existential conflict but it wasn't working so now I'm like maybe that book will never get published it was a great experiment when I was 19 and now as more of a grown-up writer maybe I'll be able to repurpose some parts of that so that's where I am with fantasy hot mess and it means I'm not sure where to go next because I have a couple of options I have a project that I started last year in camp in Araymo and ended up stopping when I had the interview process for this job so you can see this job has been great for my writing and if anyone from work happens to see this don't worry I'm not going anywhere but yeah it was easier to write before I had this job so I have this reciprocal stalking project that I could pick up but I don't think that makes sense from a career perspective because if I get a deal with powerless then I should have something else in the YA sci-fi fantasy space so I think that one will continue to be on hold and I was also thinking about doing like retelling Final Fantasy 10 sort of if you look at my I think it was my last video I talked about something from the story grid podcast called the master work experiment where basically you deconstruct something that you think is a master work and then find all of the same beats and themes and you use them to create something that should be a completely original story but it will work because it takes everything that works from the other thing so I was thinking of Final Fantasy 10 so maybe that and then the other one is I had a dream recently which didn't have any story so much but there's some really clear imagery for the world so I'm thinking about playing with that as well but yeah I'm not sure like even doing this video is tiring and I have a feeling my camera is going to overheat very soon so I should probably wrap up yeah aside from everything I've had on for the last month like professionally and personally with the visas and the jobs and the trip like all I've really been doing in my free time is reading and playing PlayStation and this is why I don't play PlayStation because it's addictive so from here I'm actually not sure where to go part of me thinks I should start something brand new just so it doesn't come with any baggage of anything I've thought about or worked on in the past yeah I just don't know if I have it in me and honestly that scares me because like I was supposed to be committing to being a writer and yet I haven't written anything new like I haven't finished a new project since 2019 and that's not how writers work especially YA writers because like YA authors need to publish quite frequently because their audiences are going to age out of their work quite soon so yeah I don't know what to do and I don't really have any way to go from here to be completely honest like I yeah sat down to talk to a camera thinking oh this is going to be an interesting discussion about creative burnout and writing and it just ended up being me babbling to the camera for 20 minutes about visas then anyway this is where I've been for the last six weeks thank you for watching thank you for sticking around if you have any suggestions for how to get out of a writing rut or get out of creative burnout please leave them in the comments below if you have any questions or ideas or things you'd like to see a video on also let me know because maybe that'll be a good starting point for whatever the next project is other than that give me a like subscribe hit the notification bell and I will see you next time bye