 What's shaking? My name's Cam. Welcome back to another video. I hope you're well. Hope the writing's been going good. We're nearly done with the first month of 2022, so I hate to say it, but I think we're past the point of being able to use New Year's as an excuse for procrastination. At least that's where I'm at. Kind of moving back into the grounds of feeling terrible about not doing enough with my time. It's a lot of fun. Anyway, today's video is about questions. It's about the big questions, the questions of life. What is life? What is we? What is we? Who are we? What are we? Where do we fit in in this universe? Will we ever find success? Is there any point to writing? What is art? Is art profitable? Is selling out required? These are just some of the questions that we will not be mentioning at all today. That has nothing to do with today's video. I made a community post on my YouTube page if you want to see future ones like this. By the way, if you want to be kind of included in videos like this one, just subscribe. That's all you need to do. I made a post on my YouTube page asking, Hey guys, it's been a while since I've done this, but how about a Q&A? Ask me anything you like about writing YouTube or the Tube, etc. And I'll answer it in a video. Have you ever gotten recognized IRL? For the not so hip, IRL means in real life. Have I ever gotten recognized in real life? For YouTube? No, not really. I don't think I'm even close to anything that would be considered someone capable of being recognized for their online presence. Plus, a lot of the people that watch me are Americans. The closest thing I've had to getting recognized in real life for the stuff I'm creating is when I wrote my first book years and years ago. It was just a crappy little YA urban fantasy that I self-published, but I grew up in kind of a small town and people writing and publishing their own books was kind of unheard of and I'd moved away by that point. I was living in a big city, but when I went back to the small town to visit family and friends, I went out to the one small nightclub there and a lot of people I didn't know at all were just coming up and like kind of hyping me the hell up. It was amazing. I was actually like just, I had just started seeing this girl at the time and I felt like to her it must have been very bizarre because to her it would have looked like I was a celebrity because we were walking through this like bar, this club and literally every second person was coming up and being like, holy crap, your cam, your cam wolf, you wrote that book blah blah blah and they're acting like I was a New York Times bestseller which was really nice of them in retrospect. It was even close to being like a big deal but it was nice. I felt like a big shot for one night. Hey cam, I'm currently working on some short stories trying to get to know a few characters better that I made up for some project of mine. So how do you work on your characters? What do you do to flesh them out a bit? So I'll leave a card up here for a video where I talked about my outlining process. I remember filming it a really long time ago but I went into very specific detail about how I do pretty much everything associated with writing a book and that process hasn't really changed. When it comes to characters specifically, what I'll usually do is I'll create a character sheet. It's the same thing that a lot of people do in their outlining. I will list pretty much every physical and personality trait to do with that character. Everything from their hair and their eye colors down to their temperament, how they would react to certain situations. If it's a character that is very hotheaded and blows up and gets very defensive anytime that they're challenged, I'll make sure I note that down. That way when I'm writing the actual story, I can refer to those character sheets and I will know exactly how they will react to everything in the story. That in my opinion is the best way to make characters feel real and authentic. Hey cam, I do have a question about anthologies. Since you've hosted several and been a part of them, what does it look like to either create an anthology or be a part of one? Could you possibly do a YouTube video about that? That's a great question Joshua. Thank you. I kind of already have done a video about that. I'll leave another card up here. I'm pretty sure I covered most of it in that video. I can't really remember off the top of my head. But the main thing you need to know about kind of taking the reins on creating an anthology, meaning a book of short stories involving a lot of different authors is, I would say it's extremely accessible for anyone. You don't need to be a big YouTuber. You don't even need to be a YouTuber necessarily. You just need to be able to find a community of other writers and if you ask them, if anyone would be willing to throw in a short story for your anthology, you're always going to find people that are willing. If you're going to turn it into a physical book, there's always going to be people that want to take part in that because they, like myself, love the idea of seeing their writing published and in physical form, you know? It's not easy. I'll say that it's accessible, but it's not easy, especially if you're the one in charge. You got to keep in mind that at the end of the day, you were trying to corral and get, let's say, around 10 different authors to work together on something. That's very difficult. If I was to summarize it as quickly as I can, I would just say it's about finding people that are interested or reaching out to people and asking them. That's the first step. Once you've got all of the people that are going to be involved, that have said, yes, I will take part in this, you're done with step one. Easy. Step two, you write out an email giving very clear instructions about what you need and when you need it by. I want a horror short story that is about vacation or travel and I want it by, I would say give them at least two months to do it at least. It can't be any shorter than 7,000 words. It can't be any longer than 10. That's step two, just letting them know what you need when you need it by. Hopefully step three is you've gotten all of the stories and then it's just down to the more technical aspects and that's formatting, turning it into an actual book. This is both the easiest and the hardest part. If that makes sense, it's because it doesn't make sense. If I could give you a tip, I would say make sure that you tell all of the authors involved to not do their own formatting because I forgot to do that and I ended up having to reformat almost every story, took a long time. That doesn't mean no editing, get them to self edit the story, make sure grammar and spelling all that stuff is good, but no actual formatting, meaning no paragraph in dense, nothing like that. And then the only other thing I would say is working out what you're going to do with the profits from the book because personally, I think any anthology I'm ever taking the reins on, I'm just going to have the profits go to charity because the logistics of having the profits be split between different authors indefinitely is very complicated. Although a lot of other people when they do anthologies will just give the authors involved a single payout regardless of how popular or unpopular that book ends up being. You could say every author involved with this project will get a hundred bucks and that's it, that's all you get from the book forever. And a lot of people will be okay with that, that's a perfectly fine way of doing anthologies. There you go, there is a very long answer to your question. Is it usual for you that you get stuck during the writing process or even get into a writer's crisis? Do you have any methods that usually get you through these hard times? I am in a perpetual state of writer's block, writer's crisis, so yes. If there's anything that gets me out of a bit of a stage of writer's block, it is almost always sudden bursts of inspiration or motivation and you can most definitely kind of give yourself that. The way I do that is through a number of different methods. I will either watch movies, shows, play games within the genre that I'm trying to write in, I know that sounds like procrastination. In a weird way that's actually going to help if all you want to do right now is procrastinate, try to focus your procrastination within the genre that you're trying to create in. If I'm trying to write fantasy I might go watch Lord of the Rings and suddenly I'll be inspired to do some writing. You could listen to music that kind of goes in the genre, you could listen to fantasy soundtracks, that might give you a burst of inspiration. Or something that almost always works for me is going on YouTube and watching videos of people talking about their success stories, people talking about finishing a book or doing a cover reveal, basically seeing people being excited about a book that they're about to publish. That always gets me like in the mood. The main point I'm making here is that you can absolutely give yourself the inspiration. In fact in most cases you're going to need to be the one to do that because if you're just sitting around waiting for inspiration to strike and I know you hear this all the time, you're never going to get anything done. It's just the way it is. I'm trying to read more survival or isolation horror. Any book recommendations besides Welcome Descent which I enjoyed? Well first of all, thank you so much. They were talking about that book down there which is my Psychological Horror Novel that is the only self plug I'll do here, don't worry. If you're looking for stories like that I could definitely give you some recommendations. I'll give you some recommendations for stories that inspired that one actually because if you enjoyed that you'll probably like these. I would recommend High Rise, the short story 1408 by Stephen King was a huge inspiration in me putting out that book. More so the movie actually than the story but the story is still pretty good. If you want a bit of an old school one you could read We Have Always Lived In The Castle by Shirley Jackson. That's a pretty good one. If you don't mind venturing a bit more into sci-fi Dark Matter by Blake Crouch is also one of my all-time favorite kind of horror slash thriller books. It has a very very unusual but entertaining kind of isolation angle where a guy is alone while not being alone he's I can't I can't explain it without spoiling it. You just have to trust me on that one. Actually on the topic of Blake Crouch also Wayward Pines the Wayward Pines series one of my all-time favorite kind of horror series very good very strong isolation vibes. Maybe you've already covered this somewhere but I've just started submitting sci-fi slash horror-ish stories to magazines and am interested in any insight on that or other people's experiences. I know you've done indie publishing and collaborative anthologies just wondering whether you've had any experience and or tips for traditional magazine submission publishing things. I actually haven't um although I it's funny you mentioned this I'll access because in 2022 one of my goals is to have some short stories go out to magazines. It's something I've never really thought a whole lot about before because I would either just put them out myself in my own collection or on Wattpad after free or in these anthologies that are happening a lot more nowadays. So there's this magazine called the darkcornerzine.limitedrun.com that I really want to get a short story into. I can't remember who it was that I saw talking about it. It might have been Mary McWilliams maybe. One of those horror tubers that I've worked with before on these anthologies had a story in one of these magazines and I just love the artwork and the whole atmosphere of the darkcornerzine. I just love it. My only tip would be make sure you are reading the submission guidelines very closely because if there's one thing that will turn them off that will make them just not even bother with your story is if you have done something that they asked you not to do in the submission guidelines. And also make sure that the magazine that you're submitting to is the right fit for the story that you're trying to tell because people underestimate how many different types of horror there is and there is a lot of different types of horror indie presses and magazines and some of them might be more sci-fi focused some of them might be more wacky focused like dinosaurs that kind of stuff. If your story doesn't fit in with their magazine or their press they're not going to bother. Have you ever considered adding a small cameo from one of your previously finished novels inside your current projects? I have indeed. I love the idea of a kind of connected universe. In fact I wasn't going to even mention this I was just going to let people try to find out for themselves to see if anyone did notice but I'll mention it briefly in this one video and we'll see if people remember in the future. In the horror collection that I currently have the first draft finished of that I'll be publishing in a couple of months every story in that short story collection has something to do with one of the other short stories it's very subtle but I'm interested to see if people pick it up and one of those short stories has something to do with that novel. Why are we all if not all most of us are obsessed with the concept of the multiverse? I'm assuming that you're referring to the multiverse now because it's the big thing and in particular movies like we're seeing it and you know Marvel and DC like DC's got like a multiverse thing they're trying to work towards with the flash movie. My theory for why the multiverse is becoming such a popular thing right now is because it's kind of because of Marvel because with Endgame they topped off a 10 year long franchise they did something that's never been done before they quite literally made history they built up towards this cinematic peak and they've reached a point where you can't top that without doing another 10 years of build up so they want to find a way to tap into that same success without having to spend another 10 years making movies and the best way to do that is fan service by giving people old movies coming back in the new movies crossovers don't want to spoil the new spider-man but I'm sure you see where I'm going with this by tapping into nostalgia with fan service they're able to reach those peaks that they did with Endgame just by making people happy reminding them of their you know younger days bringing back actors playing their most iconic roles it's setting off all the neurons it's making people spend money very weird answer to your question but that's why I think the multiverse is so popular right now fan service I make that sound like a problem but I'm actually completely cool with it what do you think of the new hyperventic connection between novels cosme for example does it add to the story or take away from the potential of the story what is going on why that's three in a row about the same thing um anyway I think it absolutely adds to the story as long as it doesn't become the focus of the story let's say Brandon Sanderson's cosme because you used that as an example the reason that is such a cool and fun concept is because it's so subtle you wouldn't even know about the cosme unless someone told you about it or unless you've read the other books in the cosme to see the examples in the easter eggs so it doesn't take away from the potential at all I think um and I do think it adds to it I think I think doing these interconnected worlds kind of this like multiverse thing within stories and having authors different books kind of tied together somehow in very small ways is actually a way to reward the reader for being a fan like with Stephen King all of the Stephen King readers were rewarded with the dark tower series because they were references to all of the other Stephen King books have you ever let your characters take over the direction of your stories absolutely I think the story and the characters always kind of lead the story in their own way like when I outline I will do paragraphs for what I want to happen in each chapter but they always change it always ends up being a whole different thing because when you're actually writing the story the characters and the plot will grow in ways that you didn't expect what's your process for putting a plot together how do you come up with the different beats and put them in the right order do you start with the plot and let that dictate the characters or let the characters dictate the plot I love your videos they're wicked fun to watch thanks josey and um this ties into the outlining video that I've probably already left a card up here for in that outlining video where I broke down my whole process um I specifically mentioned when I outlined the plot again like kind of like what I just said um I outlined it almost paragraph by paragraph and the best benefit of doing that for me the main reason I do that is because it gives me the skeleton of the story that helps me with the pacing I see where the story's meant to rise and fall I know where the major conflicts are and I can build towards them and then I can like have the story kind of mellow out a bit and then rise towards another conflict when you settle on a story how do you keep yourself from jumping to different ideas and stories I don't I mean I wish I had a profound answer for you here but I quite literally have to force myself to not start on different stuff I'll just make like a notepad document giving the idea for the next story I just came up with and I have to forcefully tell myself to not start on something new even though I've done that a bunch of times I'm starting an author tube channel like you to chronicle my journey as an author what do you think is a good video to start for a new channel there is a very easy answer to this mr swam you should always start with the author tube newbie tag you should go on youtube right now and type that in and have a look and you will find plenty of people just starting their own author tube journeys if you could body swap with any author at any point in time and you would also gain their writing skills who would you pick you would expect me to jump to saying like Tolkien or something but Tolkien started with his writing career pretty late in life I think I would want to start a lot earlier and when it comes to classical writers I don't know if I would want to live in that time so I'd probably choose a new writer I guess I might have to say Brandon Sanderson because I really do think he is going to be I think a few generations from now Brandon Sanderson is going to be one of the most iconic fantasy writers of this point in time I genuinely believe that his writing is on a whole whole other level and not only that but he writes so much and of such high quality um he I honestly think he's one of the best writers ever for so many different reasons not just because his writing is good but his attitude the way he interacts with the community he has his own youtube channel where he does like movie reviews and always talks to people he has a beautiful family he just everything about his life at least from the outside uh looks amazing do you think it's possible to write a charismatic first person narrator without them being snarky or sarcastic I think the main trick there is just to make sure that uh the narrator can be kind of condescending or sarcastic at times to the characters within the story but you never want the narrator to seem like a dickhead to the reader in particular who do you think is the biggest mum is boy Jason Voorhees or Norman Bates I mean the answer to that is obviously Norman Bates right there was definitely some weird edible complex going on there what is the best fighting strategy against auto correct let me know if you find out does it really get cold enough to warrant a leather jacket where you live have I ever worn a leather jacket on this channel I don't think I've owned a leather jacket for years um look maybe like twice a year it gets cold enough as a writer do you think it's harder to see your own shortcomings or easier are you hard on yourself or more defensive lately when I noticed bad writing habits forming it's all I think about when you're doing anything creative whether it's writing or singing songwriting painting whatever it can be pretty difficult sometimes to see the flaws in your own stuff because you kind of have to believe in the best of yourself that's the only way to succeed at it noticing the flaws can sometimes be a pretty slippery slope to just feeling like everything you do is garbage when I started I had way too big of an ego when it came to my writing a lot of people in my life a lot of people in my life had told me I was a very talented writer in retrospect I think it was just being nice but it did inflate my head a little bit and it took a long time a lot longer than I would like to admit for me to realize that I had a lot of improving left to do and as far as a single piece of writing advice that I think is total BS pretty much any writing advice that deals in absolutes saying you absolutely have to do this or you absolutely cannot do this it's almost always wrong there is a balance to everything and almost every piece of writing advice should be dealt with nuance I think saying that you absolutely should never use any dialogue tags other than said is dumb I think that's stupid advice but obviously using said should be the primary dialogue tag otherwise it can distract from the story itself there's nuance there's balance have you heard of the newer kindle vela program for serialized stories do you have any thoughts about it would you write anything for it I absolutely have thought about it I would love to start doing like a serialized little story thing within the world of this fantasy series I'm writing I would love to do that for kindle vela unfortunately kindle vela is not available in Australia right now I don't know why as a nausea I'm being discriminated against and I'm not allowed to publish on there apparently which I think sucks how do you find an idea for a story most often it just comes to you it's just a thing you'll think of like you'll see something happen in real life and you'll say to yourself hmm what would happen if this happened instead and then it leads to a whole story do you have a mailing address that one can send you a postcard or something first of all Angelia I hope you are also well I've been thinking about you a lot and secondly no I don't I don't have a postal address but maybe at some point this year I will get myself a PO box I haven't really thought about it a whole lot but yeah I mean I mean it's a possibility have you ever joined a writing contest I did a lot um just after high school or around high school during high school I did a lot of writing contests I think I won two but yeah I think I won two and I'm not flexing because that's two out of like like 50 um but yeah I did enter a lot I haven't done that recently because finding writing contest now is a lot trickier as an adult the logistics a bit are just a bit more difficult and almost everything I'm writing right now I'm writing for the purpose of publishing and when you send a story into a short story competition that's not something you're always allowed to do it kind of feels like author tube is getting a little toxic not you you're quite friendly well do you think that's true as well or it might just be me I have no idea to be honest with you uh because I mean I watch author tube videos but I feel like I miss all of the drama or whatever all the stuff that happens I know I know the woman from the channel heart breathings ended up in a big legal thing recently I heard about and I did kind of look into that and I thought about making a video on it but I decided against it um like I did a lot of the research I started writing up a bit of a script for it but I decided against it because at the end of the day that's a very serious and personal thing that's going on with that lawsuit and it just felt too much like I was sticking my nose in where it didn't belong but I am very willing to say right here and now that I I land firmly on one side and that is with the side of heart breathings I think this whole lawsuit thing against her is fucking absurd for anyone who doesn't know basically here's what happened heart breathings made her own I kind of book or course or advice journal kind of thing for writers to use to purchase and use say what you want about the process of people on author tube selling services like that that's not really the the crux of the issue here they did that and they said that a large inspiration for that was let me get the names up because I should really be using the names I'm talking about this right so the woman from heart breathings her name is Sarah Cannon and the person like putting all this legal shit against her is named Alexandra Sokoloff and I did a lot of looking into this I looked through a lot of the posts on Alexandra Sokoloff's Facebook page about like what the accusations are basically it is that Sarah has taken some of the content or like the writing tips and structures from Alexandra's own like writing course stuff and used it as her own and all it took was like five minutes of looking into it to see that those copyrighted processes that Alexandra is referring to are very very generic and standard like writing advice things that have been sold and put in every self-help book for the last 50 years it's just it's ridiculous the whole situation is absolutely fucking absurd and the big smoking gun that Alexandra has is that Sarah Cannon said in a video at one point that Alexandra's stuff was an inspiration it's just fucking it's it's silly I'm sorry if I'm being completely honest I think all of these like writer's self-help books and courses and stuff are all just the same like generic information being reworded and resold by everyone with a platform I don't think I've never really found a whole lot of value in them but if you're gonna start suing people that like use the same methods that you've taken from other people as well I think you're just kidding yourself you know what is on your 2022 TBR well that's a good question and a question you can have answered by going to my youtube channel where I talk about all of my reading stuff it's called wolf the story nomad and I talk exclusively about fantasy and horror books there if it's not up already I do have a video going up there talking about all of the horror books that I'm excited for in 2022 how much does it cost to self-publish these days by stewart good question stewart and again I'm gonna have to refer you to another video I've done where I went into very specific detail not just about how much I spent but how much I made back self-publishing that is a there is a very long answer to that question I can't really go into that here it's complicated is there anything you would like to change about author tube back in the day I would have said that I would prefer if there wasn't as much drama because back in the day there was a lot more drama with all the christen martin stuff but it feels like nowadays that's the only exciting stuff that ever happens on water tube so maybe we need more of that is there anything I'd like to change about okay here's one I would say I would love to see a lot more collaboration because I think author tube has the most potential out of a lot of communities on YouTube for collaboration and there's just not enough of it for example a lot more people on author tube I think should be doing anthologies we're a huge huge community of writers we could be working together to make tons and tons of anthologies where the prophets all go to charity it could be an amazing and huge thing that's that's what I would change more collaboration but yeah there it is I think that is all of the questions wow this is going to be holy shit this is going to be a long video sorry I appreciate your questions and I appreciate you tuning in to watch me answer them thank you so much especially for watching through this whole big ass thick ass video thank you or in the meantime you can pop in and do some writing with me live over on twitch on my twitch page there it's cam underscore wolf do like three streams a week it's usually two writing streams where we write together and one gaming stream it's a lot of fun it's like a big just club for writers there's a fair few of us over there so if I don't see you there I'll see you in the next video catch ya