Adara VS Winter 25 ~ Writing, Desk Upgrade & Spam
This month I’m looking back at my author activities in Winter 25-26.
Video Image 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. In chibi mode she has white feathers covering the ears, a black collar with a heart emblem, and a dark green/blue jacket with white t-shirt. Intermittent backgrounds of graphic libraries. 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.
Transcript
Adara, where have you been? Well, I'm glad you asked. Welcome to my winter author roundup.
Rewind to December, and my poor laptop was on its knees. It was overheating, the hinge was broken, and then eventually the screen was coming apart, and it kept crashing from OBS. So, I upgraded to a proper PC and was able to update my streaming layouts and this avatar. Managed to lose some of the progress on my audio book in the process despite thinking I'd backed everything up. Something about updated software not being compatible with prior backup formats and not being forewarned. Note, AI is not your friend with this. Often, its information is out of date. I repeat, if you need help to migrate everything from one computer to another, AI is not your friend. I now dread the term update. I think I've been traumatized. It took about an entire week to transfer everything over. The less said the better.
Moving on, in terms of writing, my three projects, the Drawing Red audiobook is still in production, and I have six chapters complete, having been redone, so that the audio quality is better now on my present current PC. Drawing Red's sequel is still in revisions and Project Angel is still being drafted.
I'm not actively marketing Drawing Red as I want to do one last proofread check before updating it. I found during the audiobook production that even after hiring an editor and having four alpha and beta readers, it wasn't enough to catch every mistake. And to put a price on that, I spent over £1,000 on that. And what's annoying is there are mistakes that I remember correcting that are still there. And now I'm questioning my software. So I'm taking my time to go through, update, triple check every typo that I'm changing as I go. A perk of being indie and using the new free upgrades feature from Ingram Spark is it will now no longer cost me, but I would like to do it all at once. So, as I produce this audiobook, I will be changing these as I go and then finally upload them all when the audiobook is released.
Now, Project Angel is a paranormal romantic comedy which is now venturing into new adult territory, and the comedy aspect is thankfully spilling over to Drawing Red's sequel, which is giving it a much needed lift and making working on it a lot easier. The first draft itself was pretty dark, so it took me about 2 years to write, but it seems to be coming along fine now.
After that, I went on and I have added a contacts page to my website. So, all my social media is there, a form to fill out if you want an arc or a review copy for free. I am open to doing that if anyone wants that. And also to promote my live streams, I realized I kind of had nothing on there other than just kind of these transcripts of these roundups.
I held my weekly Monday live stream now without cancelling for 5 weeks running. I am proud of that. I've done 23 live write-ins on YouTube to date. Before that, I would host things on Twitch, but since moving to YouTube, it's been a lot more straightforward. Monday the 9th will be my 24th writing sprints. If you want to stop by to get some work done, feel free. I'm streaming every Monday at 1:00 UK time, which works out at 8:00 Eastern time at the current time of recording. I say that because time zones will change in the UK towards the end of the month. But I'm now attempting to schedule all of those live streams in advance and have a month's worth up on my channel all at the same time. So if you click on that, you should in theory see what it will look like in your own time zone. I know the idea is you should write every day, but I often don't have the energy or mental space.
In terms of my own work, I am attempting a bit of a suggested weekly schedule to myself to try and cope with my limited energy, but I found that often changes due to energy levels, health appointments, etc. I might need to rework it to a 3 or 4 day working week or try to be flexible to swap some of those around. It's kind of difficult to do with a mixture of lack of spoons and autism. But we'll see. So on those days where I am just pfff... I can't cope with sitting at a desk. On those days I tend to be reading or attempting to work on author branding. Canva has an app and I love it. Even on my phone I found I'm able to do a fair bit. And I also admit to lurking in authortube during those times. Quite often I will not say hi. I am only there as a mysterious thumbs up; you don't know where it's from em, or a number.
In terms of desk layout, yes, I have a new ultra wide monitor to replace my three monitor setup. I have a PC and the big update is I have added a cat bed clip on to my desk because my cats have been causing absolute chaos walking all over the keyboard in front of my cameras, brushing up against microphones. It's been a lot and the cats have taken to it fantastically well. The problem is I have two cats. I have one of these. I do not have space for two. if I did, problem solved. I have seen both cats on it at one point, but yeah, my life is a lot better.
In terms of author branding, which I mentioned. I'm starting to blend this VTuber personality more now with my author brand online. The idea of the traditional author head-shot still exists on my larger social media platforms where people know me more for that. But I'm really hoping to promote my writing streams more and my avatar is one of my biggest selling points for that. Plus, if there's any trickle over to Adara Unwinds, my gaming platform or vice versa, then that's a bonus. A lot of this is about moving away from the traditional brand only social media to become, well, more social. I'm mainly housebound and streaming is giving me a way to interact with other people.
Originally, I only joined social media strictly as the Adara Spence pen name brand, but I think leaning into my VTuber side more can really help to combat my isolation. With that in mind, for the second year running, I took part in the Under 1,000 Subscribers Authortube and Booktube marathon. More creators this time around. I think it went up from about 30 to 50.
I experimented with using a webcam on that stream to show me typing as a bit of a bridge for people who were expecting to see an actual human, but instead they would just see this very full-on VTuber form who might not be used to that. It was kind of a, hey, there is still a person here behind this avatar. Come in. But after that, I'm in this full VTuber setup, including in my little writing area. And I also have found this thing, which you can see when I move my mouse. That's fun. And you can see when I type in real time, which I think is pretty cool. I also have another background on the go which is this because people are going to miss all the kind of the crashes behind the scenes that you can't see. So I wanted black cat representation on screen which is nice.
Another aspect of my writing over winter was to write a poem for the closure of a charity which has been going for 18 years and that was Skimstone Arts. I've been associated with that charity since it was 4 years old. The day I wrote, recorded and edited that poem, I'd been running on about 5 hours sleep and I'd spent the bulk of the day sitting in a hospital. But I think the fact that the deadline was that night, plus my lack of energy may have been helpful because I couldn't use my inner editor to constantly critique my words as harshly as I could so I could just get it out there and meet the deadline.
Off the clock, I've been playing a lot of Animal Crossing, listening to fanfictions, and now I'm attempting a Pokémon Fire Red Nuzlocke challenge over on my AdaraUnwinds channel on Twitch. VODs are available on YouTube if you're interested.
Now, you're allowed to combine chats from different platforms on Twitch so, I've been considering multistreaming, but my internet isn't powerful enough to do that myself just from OBS. But, at the same time, if I choose something like for free from Restream, I'd end up with a watermark, and that's something I'd likely have to avoid. You can also only have two channels there, like two platforms to pick from. So, I would have to choose between my Adara Writes streams to multistream or my Adara Unwinds. And I'm torn.
I attempted to record a reaction video of a music video and try to tackle the lyrics from kind of a storyesque storyteller format, but I didn't feel good about it and I pulled it down. I love watching other people react to the same media I like and I try to give it that author slant, but I felt really icky doing it. Don't know what that is.
Overall, from December to February, I started on a hiatus with a lot of health issues, a lot of caring responsibilities, and a great deal of tech issues. By mid January, I'd upgraded my desk and my setup and then got stopped by ill health again before finally picking things up in February.
I also started falling asleep listening to audiobooks and then I get frustrated when I wake up and I find I've missed part of the story. Please say I'm not the only one.
And lastly, the amount of spam I am getting in my author inbox is off the charts. I thought I'd seen the worst. I'd created an autoresponder to filter a lot of those. I'd created a separate email that people would have to use to go through to reach me as well to see if they would go through that extra hoop. Those kind of marketing service emails have now morphed into fake book club advertisement emails. They mostly have the exact same format going on, the exact same sign off at the bottom. Some of them are very convincing and but then I look at the email and have maybe one letter missing out of the person's name or something like the word official in the account name which yeah, red flag. Long story short, if it looks too good to be true, it probably is. A real marketer would always have clients seeking them out and not need to resort to that. And you, of course, can always market for free.
That's it for this roundup. If you have any expertise on any of these things listed, any inputs, any stories, or even just if you're proud of something that you have done during winter, let me know.
I've been attempting to join Discord channels. If you have a Discord kind of group going, let me know and I'd be happy to join. Thanks. Bye.
Credits
Live 2D Model: Customisable Male Model from IAmKyoki on X
Ending theme and piano – Adara Spence and Mr 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
Music from various artists from chillhop.com
