 Hello. It's been a while. It has been three months since I uploaded here on this channel. Welcome back to my writing channel. But look, I know it's been a while and I will talk about why I haven't been around on this channel for so long and in just a bit. But I wanted to make this video primarily so I could come back and just say, hey, I haven't forgotten about you guys. I hope your writing is going well. I haven't quit this YouTube channel or anything like that. I still plan on making videos here a lot more frequently than three months at a time. So I want to tell you about some life changes I've had recently that don't specifically have anything to do with writing. But I've always kind of treated this channel as a bit of a like personal vlog in addition to talking about writing as well. So screw it. And then I do want to tell you about where I'm at with my writing, what I've planned coming up, that kind of thing as well. And then my next video after this one should be just back to formula fun kind of writing themed videos. This one's just a catch up. So the last couple of months have been pretty super busy for me. I also haven't been streaming over on Twitch for quite a long while. I was in a really good rhythm of streaming on Twitch, doing writing streams where we would like just write together, which was really fun to do. And I was in a good rhythm of doing that like a couple of times a week for a long time, in fact. And then I just kind of hit this wall where I needed to take some time off. And I never quite went back to it despite the fact that I actually really liked streaming. And I will be going back to doing writing streams. It's just it's going to be a lot more tricky than it used to be. And I'll explain why. So the first of like my major life changes in the last couple of months has been that the role that I have at my place of work has changed pretty dramatically recently. Unfortunately, not in like the best of ways. I wasn't demoted or promoted or anything like that. It's just without going into the specifics, my team of people at work would work a late shift. So usually like 4pm to midnight or later, that kind of thing. The reason this worked so well with streaming is because the very heavy majority of my audience that tuned in for streaming were in the U.S. And that was the best time for them to watch the stream. If I had like a nine to five job and I streamed after work, then pretty much the majority of my audience would be asleep. And that role that I had at work also came with a pretty good pay. I got penalty rates because I was working so late, that kind of thing. Long story short, that team got dissolved and they've moved us back to more basic kind of nine to five sort of role. So not because of the quality of the work of anyone in our team, but in my personal opinion, probably just because the higher ups realized that they could be pocketing more of the money they were spending on our penalty rates. The thing is, I was in that team with those hours for like six or seven years. It's been over half a decade of my life has been working from late afternoon to midnight. And suddenly I have to work during pretty regular hours again. So it's been a huge life adjustment for me. I'm not saying it's the worst thing in the world. I still have my job. I'm lucky enough in that aspect. It's just different is what I'm saying. The good thing is that despite not being paid as much as I used to, at least I have my weekends back now so I can kind of get a social life again, hopefully. But I do want to stream again. It'll probably just have to be maybe like once or twice a week tops now. So that was my first kind of big life change recently. Basically, it's almost like going to a completely new job, really. And the second one was that almost exactly around the time that we found out our work team was being dissolved, I found out that my landlord of the place that I was renting decided that they wanted to live in that house. So we were told that we had to move out in a couple of months. We lived in that house for a couple of years. We were really not planning on moving out any time soon. So it was it was a pretty uncomfortable shakeup for us, which was made so much worse by the fact that where I'm living right now in Queensland, Australia, we're going through like a rental crisis. It's genuinely awful. It's really, really, really hard to find a place to live at the moment, not because of money whatsoever. Me and my two housemates, we're absolutely fine on money. We have an impeccable rental history. But there are so, so many other people looking for places that it's just so much harder than it ever was. We ended up finding a place, luckily, as you've probably noticed by the new backdrop, but we were cutting it really, really close. There was a moment there that I genuinely was thinking to myself like, I'm going to be homeless. That's what I was thinking to myself like, I thought I was fucked. Luckily, we got a place at the last minute. A lot of other people haven't been so lucky. And I mean, families with two parents with full-time jobs and a set of kids, they are ending up homeless where I live right now because there's just too many people looking for homes. I'm not going to go into the specifics of why, but you know, there was a lot of migration here from other states during all of the COVID lockdowns, etc. It's just, it's a whole thing. But the point is basically being faced with the prospect of potential homelessness, alongside having the job that I'd been doing for six years just be wiped away. It took a pretty big toll on me. The last couple of months have been pretty rough. Again, I know there are people in much worse situations than myself. I'm still extremely lucky. But it did, it did wear on me quite a bit. My writing suffered, my creativity suffered, my ability to come on here and do these videos on this writing channel where I get more personal suffered. Luckily, the worst of it is over now. And I am readjusting to this new kind of lifestyle or whatever. Things are definitely back up on the up and up. And I am feeling, you know, somewhat blessed to be in the situation that I'm in. All the negative stuff aside, as far as other life updates go, my older sister just had a beautiful baby girl. So I'm uncle to another niece. I would show you a photo, but it's not my place to show you photos of other people's babies on the internet publicly. I don't think she would be okay with that. So I'm not going to. You're just going to have to take my word for it that she's one of the cutest babies in the world. With my new sleeping schedule and other kind of blessing in disguise has been that I can take up more daylight hobbies again, which means I've kind of died back into something I haven't done for like seven years. Since I was like, in my very early 20s, something I did all through high school as well. I was a skateboarder. It was one of my biggest passions. I have this tattoo here. It says glory days with a skateboard because that's how I met all of the best friends I still have today is through the hobby of skateboarding. It was a huge part of my life. And unfortunately, when I got into my 20s and I had to start getting a proper job and, you know, all that kind of stuff, all the adult stuff, I just didn't have time for it anymore. And recently I've been making time for it. And it's been both incredibly satisfying to get back on a skateboard and feel active again. And also insanely demoralizing to realize how bad I've gotten. The layer of rust around my skill on a skateboard is so thick, it should be twerking in a Doja Cat music video. But I'm getting there. I feel like I'm progressing very slowly towards where I used to be. I would like to be at least as good as I used to be, but I don't know. Maybe I'm just, maybe I'm getting too old. These knees are getting more brittle by the day, so I have to use the time I have left. Speaking of which, I turned 29 in August, which means I've got roughly about a year left of being in my 20s, which is horrifying. I understand that 30s is meant to be the peak of a man's life, but I just, it's, it's scary man. Getting older is scary. News flash. That's really all I have to share as far as life updates go for now. But let's move on to my writing update. So I do have a short story being published coming out pretty soon in Regina's Next Horror Anthology, Regina from Regina's Haunted Library. I, I've had a short story in Local Haunts. I've had a short story in Served Cold, and the next one is called Lurking in the Dark. The theme is monsters. The promise with this one is to be a lot more gory and violent, so that's fun. I wrote a story for this one called Severance Pay. It's about a young guy who's on his way to his corporate job, and while he's in the elevator he gets stuck. The elevator stops, and while he's in there he starts hearing some terrifying sounds from outside the elevator. He starts hearing screaming and other sounds. And when he finally makes his way out of the elevator he'll start praying that he could just go back to his monotonous, boring day in the office. That's the next thing I have coming out. I also have my own collection of horror short stories that I want to publish that I've been talking about for, I know, I know. I know it's been a long time. Here's the problem. Here's where I'm at. It's basically finished. Yeah, it's basically finished. The problem is that it's at about 40,000 words and I was really hoping to get it over the 50k word mark before I publish it. That way it's not just like a pamphlet because I feel like 40,000 words would be like, would be like this, you know what I mean? I just kind of wanted to be a bit thicker than that. So before I put it out I'm really hoping I can come up with one or two more short stories to throw in there. I think I can. I'm super proud of the stories that are already in there. Some of them I think are, if I can be so bold, some of the best writing I've done, particularly when it comes to horror. But yeah, that'll probably be the next thing that comes out after this next horror anthology from Regina. And then after that is probably the biggest writing project I've set for myself in years, like a really long time. I'm working on the foundations for a fantasy series that I'm hoping can be very long running. The idea is that they're going to be shorter, more episodic books, maybe books that are around the 50,000 word mark with a monster of the weak style. The idea of this fantasy is that it's set in a fictional fantasy world and it's about these two guys who are like, you know, best friends and they basically carry out jobs for people. Jobs that don't really operate inside of the lore. So they'll be doing things like, you know, and anything from slaying monsters to heists and all that kind of fun stuff. Basically imagine the Witcher crossed with supernatural. I've written quite a lot of the first book in that one already and I honestly don't think it's going to take me that long to finish it. But my plan is to write the first three books before I publish any of them. That way I can give myself a bit of a head start and basically just publish them kind of one after the other pretty quickly, maybe a couple of months apart. And with these books being more episodic, my hope is that I can keep writing them pretty much indefinitely with no end date in sight. And then when I feel like the series has run its course, I can just end it. It's kind of my dream to have a series that I can write like that. So that's what I'm trying to establish. And another great thing about writing an episodic fantasy series like that is that after I've written a couple, I can also take breaks in between writing some of them to write maybe another horror novel, another collection of short stories, that kind of thing. I can basically work in other stuff while I'm writing that one. And I'm really excited for that. I'm thinking with this new work schedule that I'm on, it's going to be a lot easier to get more writing done ironically. As much as I complained about, you know, my hours changing from late to earlier, I think it's entirely possible that I'm going to find myself with a lot more spare time as well. Probably. We'll see. Anyway, that's all I really have to share for now. If you've watched this far in the video, if you've watched this video just to see what I'm up to, I really appreciate it. Thank you. And I should thank you as well for sticking around for this long for staying subscribed despite the fact I haven't uploaded in months. Again, I am going to be uploading more going forward from here. I hope your writing is going really well. Please do let me know what you're working on down in the comments below. Oh, by the way, pretty recently, I actually, I was on a stream with author DL Tillery where I read out in full one of the short stories from that horror collection of short stories that I mentioned before. So if you want kind of a sneak preview of that collection, then I'll leave a link to that stream in the description below. It was a really great chat. We chatted about a lot of horror theme stuff. It was really fun. Anyway, if you haven't already, go follow me on Twitch as well so you can see when I do my next comeback stream. Otherwise, happy writing and I'll see you in the next one. Catch ya.