Delayed College, YouTube, & The Book Cover

It's going to be a busy week - if I'm lucky.

Although last week was one of my worst in terms of being an author and creator, I hammered out a lot of details and took care of a lot of things in both my personal and professional life. So, I can’t really call it a fail. Essentially, I laid the groundwork for all of the things I’d like to achieve in the next few weeks.

As a creator and author, sometimes you need to take care of the homestead elements to reduce the stress in your life. Think of it like laying the footings of a home before the actual construction begins. Without that reinforced cement, the building could crumble. There is a lot of weight that is going to be placed on them for the long term. That means the footings themselves are the most important aspect of constructing any building. That’s what I’ve been doing for the last couple of weeks.

Not Starting College Today

Today, I was supposed to start the path to finish my bachelor’s degree. After careful consideration, though, I decided to wait until August and attend the University of Colorado. I’m somewhat disappointed that I didn’t stick with Southern New Hampshire, but the move is better for me all around.

I live about 10 to 15 minutes away from CU and can attend courses in person. For me, that is more ideal, considering I’ve been trying to get out of the house more often. But the real kicker is that the Creative Writing classes are $464 per credit hour instead of the $990 that SNHU was going to charge me. That means that the Pell Grant should cover the vast majority of my education.

But, I’m not one to put all of my eggs into any basket. In reality, I can afford $464 every eight weeks at the moment. So, should something happen and the Pell Grant falls through, I can still continue my education. That’s only $8.29 per day, which the YouTube channel and blogs should be able to generate by August.

*knocking violently on wood

On the upside, there are a lot of great classes at CU that I am extremely excited to take. I feel kind of foolish making such a big deal about going to SNHU, but I feel that this change is the best course of action for what I want to achieve.

Getting WriterSanctuary YouTube On Schedule

This week, I’m working on getting the WriterSanctuary YouTube channel on schedule. I recently worked on getting the blog back on a weekly routine, so now I’m going full-speed with the videos.

The idea is to publish three videos per week on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at about 9:30 am (MTN). That means I’ll make a new video every day this week and then schedule them ahead of time. By Friday, I should have all three videos up for this week and the next. Members of the YouTube channel will get access to them the moment I upload them, which is one of the perks of the membership. And it’ll be nice to have the blog and YouTube channel on a simultaneous routine schedule for once.

This is the second step of going all-in with WriterSanctuary. The first was getting the blog back on schedule. I also have future plans involving online courses for blogging and WordPress, setting up writing contests, creating writing retreats, and much more. However, I want to build up the brand’s reputation a bit. Not to mention that I want to hammer out all of the finer details before enacting some of these projects.

I don’t want to turn a writing retreat into a Fyre Fest.

Polishing Up the Book Cover

During the sporadic writing sprints this week, I am polishing up the final touches on the cover to Shadows of Atlantic City. I’m also waiting on feedback from the beta readers, so I have plenty of time.

Everyone here liked the concept behind the first draft of the cover, and I’m looking forward to finalizing it. If the betas have nothing more to add or feel that it’s a complete book, I’ll publish it here in the next couple of weeks.

I’m pretty excited, as Shadows is easily my best work to date, and I plan on advertising the piss out of it with paid ads and whatnot. I’m going hard on the marketing this time around, which is probably going to cost me a bit of money.

That’s another reason why I am going all-in with WriterSanctuary. Of all the brands I have under my belt, it’s the one with the most potential to help cover the costs of everything related to self-publishing my books.

Working On Fury This Week?

It shouldn’t take long to wrap up the final edits of the book cover. So, I’m expecting to work on Fury this week as well. And since I am 90k words into the first draft, it shouldn’t take me long to wrap it up this month. I’m estimating probably another two weeks’ worth of writing. Though, it might take longer since I have to re-read it as I haven’t worked on it for quite some time and don’t remember a lot of what’s in the book.

Besides, I’m probably going to polish up some of the writing as I read through it, as I’ve learned a lot since I started writing. I’m not going to full-on edit the manuscript, but tweaking things here and there may not be a bad idea.

At the rate things are going, I’m easily going to have three books published this year. But as I said before, all three were mostly written before the year even started.

Reworking and Rerecording Despair Soon

One of the things I’d like to do before the end of the month is to rework and rerecord the Despair series on YouTube. As with Fury, I’ve learned a lot since I began the audiobook and would love to give it a proper development.

The problem with working on Despair is the sheer amount of time it takes to write, record, and edit each episode. In some instances, it took more than six total hours for a 10-minute show. What takes the most time is getting the sound effects and then properly inserting them within the video.

Now that I put the other blogs on the back burner, I might have the time to finish what I started. That’s one of the reasons why I had to quit making them in the first place. I had spread myself so thin that I just couldn’t get the time together to keep the show going.

In any case, I’m not sure if I’ll be able to get back into Despair by the end of this month, but it looks like I’ll be able to pick it back up about the middle of June at the very latest. But who knows? I might be able to start much sooner than that, as long as everything else falls into place as it should.

But when has that ever happened?

Getting the Momentum Going

At first, I was disappointed that I had to put so many fun things on hold indefinitely. I loved working on CrossingColorado and Colorado Plays. But there is only so much I can do by myself. And until I can afford to hire help, I need to focus on fewer tasks so that I can build them up properly.

I have a much clearer path ahead of me now, between working on WriterSanctuary and publishing my books. All that’s left is to start generating enough income so that I can retire from freelancing and do all of this full-time.

It’s not something that is going to happen overnight, I’m afraid. However, I still have faith that I am doing what needs to be done to give myself and my writing platform the best chances for success.

With each step of the process completed, I’m building momentum to get myself and my writing career where I truly want them to be. The path gets dark here and there, but it’s still one that I quite enjoy traveling.