Personal + Channel + Writing Update! (Oct. 2021) (Patreon)

This one goes out to the people doing nothing who believe they will always do nothing.

It's been pretty interesting to gauge my capabilities over the past year and a half since I started Gaywatch. I've learned about myself more than I thought I would, surprised myself more than I thought I would, and disappointed myself less than I thought I would. And all of that without a single actual burnout!

Having done everything from putting out one video a week to a video every single weekday, I now have a pretty good idea of how much is too much, how much is doable but not for long, the perfect balance, and what feels like 'not enough.' 

It takes around five hours of active work to produce one reaction video (if the reaction is for a single 'one hour' episode). Add an hour if copyright wants to fight me. The amount of output that feels best most of the time is three videos a week, aka 15 hours. And if I wanna host a livestream or a movie comes along, I've got two spare days every week to work with.

There was a while there where I put out five videos a week, working 25-30 hours. While technically capable of that, I can't sustain it for very long. I needed like a month of only putting out two videos a week just to recover, and largely attribute that higher functioning period to my current low energy phase. No, three videos a week with the occasional fourth video thrown in seems to be the best of all possible worlds.

So, then, how do I go about writing the first draft of a book while maintaining Gaywatch?

Fortunately, writing taps an entirely different energy for me. I should be able to write twice a week, on the days I don't film, and be fine. Ideally, I'd like for those writing sessions to be three hours long. Considering how I clocked only half an hour of writing today, with previous scheduled days amounting to less or even zero, it feels like I'll never get there. I'll be happy to hit a two hour average at this rate. 

But--and this is the trade secret to my success--I'll just have to be okay with that. 

Sure, I want the 35-40 hour a week output. I've always wanted that. If I had time to film five videos a week and write for ten or fifteen hours on top of that, I'd be on fire. But that was the trap I used to get caught in: if I couldn't go as fast as I wanted to, then I may as well not even bother. (There was also the not insignificant factor of a deeply held misbelief that I had no right to try for things, which I had to heal before going slowly even became an option.) The truth is that going slowly still gets you somewhere, while doing nothing obviously doesn't.

Anyway. <3

Fridays will continue to be a wildcard for Gaywatch, though not quite in the way I thought. The surprise series starts this week, but after that I hope to use them as extra writing days until the new year. Whatever the long series winds up being will take a break in late December/early January for season two of The Witcher. After that, Fridays will likely go to Untamed/MDZS related things like the donghua, audio drama, and official translation. The book's first draft will get written whenever it gets written, and twice a week Twitch streams will start immediately after. How Gaywatch, Twitch, and writing intersect from then on is gonna be a bridge I cross when I get to it. 

I don't talk about it much, but in case you didn't know: I'm a writer first and foremost. I've been writing since first grade, when a possible activity during free time was taking these little blank books with like five blank pages and making a story with words and/or drawings. I had a pile of them. In third grade, we read the kids' version of Aida and were given the assignment to re-write the ending (lol fanfic) in half a page (of gigantic third grader margin paper). I wrote three pages, front and back, and there was at least one declaration of love somewhere in there. At twelve I was starting books, though I never finished any despite making good headway on a few. Even through my teens and early twenties when I thought I wanted to be an actress, I never entirely gave up on writing. And after theater college in 2009, when I had the astoundingly late realization that I was supposed to be a writer, I didn't finish my first book until 2014. My second completed work didn't happen until early 2019. I'm hoping to finish this third book next year, and keep whittling away at my refractory period until I'm writing a book a year. I have enough ideas, most of them queer, so it's fine.   

This latest book is called The Whore Prince, the first in a medieval fantasy trilogy for adults. It's centered on the developing love story between a wayward prince and the upstanding knight who becomes his personal bodyguard. If you'd like to know more, I posted a full introduction on my writing blog. 

I hope to have it traditionally published one day, but if it doesn't find a publisher or even an agent I have loose plans to crowdfund the self-publishing costs. I also plan on asking Patrons first when it comes to alpha/beta/sensitivity readers in the future.

Okay, so that was a lot. It turned into more than I planned for this update. But even if you just skimmed, I hope you take away these two things: sometimes going slow is the only way to go anywhere, and damn her book sounds fantastic.

Until next time,

Brittany <3