Adara vs Juggling 3 Writing Projects ~ July 25
Video Description: Shows a desk, with a laptop and monitor on a stand. There is an anime avatar representing Adara. Adara has purple hair and light blue bangs. Sometimes she has white wings, wears a grey hoodie or a blue jacket. Intermittent generic backgrounds of libraries and cosy work spaces. The ending screen shows a banner advertising Drawing Red, with a link to www.adaraspence.com/books. The paperback and ebook cover of Drawing Red shows a teenage girl drawing in a notebook with a large protective red and white wolf standing protectively behind her. It's set in a moonlit forest. The hardback cover is black with a grey outline of a tree on it.
Video Transcript
The most well-known VTuber agency in the West imploded. Internet privacy is disappearing, and I was knocked out from writing related activity for a good chunk of the month by being ill. With all the bad stuff out the way, let's move on to the good stuff that happened in July because yes, it actually exists.
I celebrated my AuthorTube 4-year anniversary of this channel.
I completed a sensitivity read project for another author.
I removed over 100 book promoters and author elevators from my social media. I'm hoping by doing this I can alter who the social media sites recommend me to that way.
I also completed plotting my standalone paranormal romantic comedy and I have written the first chapter. I am a plotter. I appreciate a good spreadsheet. This tends to become a bit of a cut and stick exercise where I printed out 12 pages of the spreadsheet, cut them all up, stuck them together as appropriate, and I ended up with the equivalent of a 90 cm long scroll. This is now a tradition that I do for every one of my novels, and I am really, really pleased with the outcome.
By the end of the month, I had also received a printed and spiral-bound copy of my first draft of Drawing Red's sequel, which I still need to come up with a title for, or even just kind of a code name for for short.
In terms of audio-book production for Drawing Red, I spent days editing half a chapter because the learning curve is that steep. I have now resigned myself to the fact that this is going to take me longer than the 6 weeks holidays. However, if there are any narrators who would like to approach me to do a royalty share for this, I would be listening. That sort of 'you coming to me' would show that you have interest in my work beyond blanket auditions on ACX. Note on that, Drawing Red does have a female protagonist and it is based in Britain, loosely based in Britain. Otherwise, I'm happy to march on with this by myself.
My VTuber model, as you may have noticed, has had an upgrade by adding these feather ears to finish off my look. I also slightly adjusted some of the settings for how it moves so it's not so quick and harsh. I have also introduced to my setup the free Elgato Stream Deck app on my phone, which lets me control it better during live streams when I'm hopping into different scenes and I can toggle different effects in and out.
This month, I also explored websites like Book Sirens and Book Sprout and launched a campaign to help find reviewers for Drawing Red because by the time my novel debuted, I'd reached burnout from doing all the promotion and social media handling myself. I was sitting a couple of days after its release, I think it was 3 days after it had launched if I remember rightly, in a hospital fighting with an online troll. And at that point, I decided I'm not going to let this troll take its toll. And I pulled back from social media for months. But now I have a target to actively increase my novel's reviews without falling into the dreaded mindset of comparisonitis. If you want a free copy of Drawing Red in exchange for a review, a new campaign will be launching on Bookspout in the next few weeks. So stay tuned. If you think you'd like a YA paranormal romance and sci-fi novel with a bit of disability rep, then you should give it a go.
Ultimately, I haven't streamed as much as I'd like thanks to a mix of heat and a bout of food poisoning, but I'm getting back to it. And I'm also getting back into the habit now after the food poisoning of starting to plan what I think my workflow will look like across the week. I'm having to take it on a week-by-week basis, so my streams will still be pop up, unfortunately. And after some serious issues with my setup overheating while streaming because I have a very very intense setup of a laptop about nine pieces of software running at once connected to two phones, two external screens, a microphone. My laptop has been overheating. The phones have been overheating and I have created a new setup to give my workspace more airflow. One of the biggest things I've done is although I had my laptop on a raised stand anyway, the stand was partially obstructing some of the fans on the bottom of the laptop. So, I have kind of propped it up. I've moved it so that the front of the laptop is over the foot edge of the stand and I have propped it up at the back with a few um plastic clips and now it's boosted off the stand. There is a lot more airflow and I have placed a fan underneath that directly on those vents. It has helped dramatically. I have also got one desk fan pointing at the phone that I kind of use as a bit of a webcam to get this model moving.
I also did something I thought I would never do and launched the Adara Spence Author Facebook page. Thank you to people who have shouted out the page. I appreciate it. Combined with everything else, that has been a lot of learning curves this month. A lot of tweaking and streamlining my methods of working, especially to re-evaluate my energy levels after the food poisoning and through recovery. A lot of streamlining how my setup works, how to make it easier, and a lot of streamlining my own workflow of how can I balance these projects while also being realistic. I try to keep my social media as focused as possible on writing and author related activities. And now that I have increased that again, you will see more regular updates from me.
I've also been trying to use the community tabs to post things on YouTube as well because I make little graphics for Instagram and now they also go on Facebook and now they also go up on YouTube. So, they're a bit more kind of to do. It's a lot of it is copying and pasting what I'm putting into tweets. A point on YouTube though that I'm finding with the community notes section like for posts, there is no way of adding alternate text to those images. So every time it comes up, I'm typing either what is on the post with an image description as the update itself and then also having the image that gives all the information anyway. I find in this kind of day and age that lack of accessibility feature annoying. I remember when threads started, there was a giant push to have that made accessible and for people to add alternate text. That doesn't seem to have happened with YouTube and I don't know why. And the annoying thing is YouTube is really hard to get into contact with to ask for that feature. It's baffling. It's genuinely baffling.
On a more personal note and kind of closer to home, a charity I've been involved with for 14 years will be closing later this year. This charity is Skimstone Arts. I joined Skimstone Arts as a young person in autumn of 2011 where I'd go straight after work to do film, photography, music, and other multidisciplinary media work. They specialize in helping people at risk of social isolation through art to make pieces and tell stories that are important to them, often about the world around them. I have been on their board of trustees for a few years now as a volunteer. I would like to personally thank them for all the hard work they have done as an arts charity over the years. I got a lot of the courage I needed to be working as an indie author from their multidisciplinary approach. I had the honor of speaking to the artistic director this month to reflect on my experiences there.
What struck me was the way different people, agencies, and organizations compose themselves and act. The VTuber agency VShojo imploded within days of a whistle-blower and is now facing accusation after scandal after accusation with more and more things coming out almost every day as people fight with NDAs and all that jazz. Skimstone Arts, however, is winding down operations with dignity and continuing to fulfill their mission and create a lasting legacy.
No matter what work you achieve or book you write, the ending matters as much as the beginning or middle and often is what will stick with the person afterwards. It will color the light that people see you and your work in. So, it got me thinking and I'll put this question to you. As a writer, what will your legacy be?
Credits - Art
Vtube model: @hayukiiii on X
Images: Adara Spence or canva.com
Credits - Music
Ending theme – Adara Spence
Beloved - Sakura Girl https://soundcloud.com/sakuragirl_official
Creative Commons — Attribution 3.0 Unported — CC BY 3.0
Free Download / Stream: https://bit.ly/3ji1zZc
Music promoted by Audio Library https://youtu.be/omTgn4GQcKA
Soon We'll Fly by Ghostrifter Official https://bit.ly/ghostrifter-sc
Creative Commons — Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported — CC BY-SA 3.0
Free Download / Stream: https://bit.ly/35reep7
Music promoted by Audio Library https://youtu.be/q2vomZqSJuE
