Hi there, it's Diane the nursing geek. Welcome back to my channel which has been very quiet for a while. I attempted to do July's Camp Nano Rhymo and even attempted to do some blogging. It is July 1st, first day of Camp Nano Rhymo. I'm in my Camp Nano Rhymo shirt and everything. But it is 3.45 in the afternoon and I have yet to write a single word that was not simply something I had to do for work. So as you may or may not remember, the track I used for Camp Nano Rhymo in April ended up looking like this. More and more numbers as the month went on and colored in lots of things. Let's take a look at July. There's no color here. And I don't know if you can actually see any of the numbers but they start with a whole 25 words on day 1. And that's still where we are on day 25. So that kind of fizzled and I learned a new phrase that I embraced which is Creative Hybernation. It wasn't that I was blocked. I really just needed everything to kind of marinate for a bit. And so that's kind of what's been going on with my writing. I've done some more vanish writing just to keep things going. But I don't really talk about the details of that too much on here so there wasn't a whole lot to vlog about. Now that we're into preptober and I definitely have every intention of doing Nano Rhymo. I figured it was time to jump back on the wagon with videos as well as prepping for Nano. I should say one other thing that I've been doing is I've been putting some of my creative energies into my gaming channel, which I'll link below for anybody who's so inclined, which is taught me actually quite a bit about editing and quality of your equipment, which mine is not really what it should be for that. But definitely I've learned a lot in the process and it's just fun. So kind of coming out of the Creative Hybernation and I've actually just come back from the New Jersey con salute to Supernatural. And that has me very charged up, revved up, even though my characters have diverged very much from the ones who inspired them at this point. That energy is still kind of moving things forward. And I've decided to kind of lean into something that I had been seeing as a weakness in my thinking about structure. When I started as an adult writing fanfiction, I started with book-based fandoms, namely the Borkosa Gonzaga and the Harry Potter books. When I was a kid, if you recall from way back, my fanfiction was actually me attempting to guest-write episodes for my favorite shows and thank goodness I never met them anywhere. 12-year-old me was just so... yeah. More recently, I've been writing TV-based fandoms. So Dr. Who, Torchwood and now Supernatural, Buffy to Buffy and Angel, Firefly. So I've gotten used to writing to the rhythm of a TV episode. I'm just going to lean into that. Instead of trying to make some other types of structures work, I'm thinking that what I'll do during this preptober is map out the story in terms of episodes and seasons, basically being chapters and seasons being books, which I think there will be four possibly five because this just keeps growing. That just seems to be how my mind works best now and I think that's going to help me contain some of the things that we're getting away from me and flesh out some of the things that we're escaping me. By just, like I said, leaning into this mindset of looking at it like a show, even though I'm going to write it like a book. And we'll see how that works when it comes time to actually do anything with it. But I think future videos for preptober may include things like how you can use tools like free text pyramid on that structure, on the on the five act TV show structure and on the overall season arc structure in order to locate individual episodes. In addition to also using it to structure the individual chapter slash episodes. Or at least my attempt to do so. I don't know if there's any sources out there that talk about doing this. If there are, please tell me about the main comments because I could use all the help I get. If I find any, I will gladly share them with you. One source that I have returned to is, let me pull it out and get the title right creating character arcs. There's some really good prompting questions to help kind of get at what's going on with the character. And I found that really helpful kind of delving into my main character, vice psyche. And kind of upping the ante on things, you know, what is the lie that she believes? Well, the first one I came up with was kind of superficial. So how to dig deeper. What what is actually driving her behavior? What lie is driving her behavior that she's going to have to learn better than. And things like that, I highly recommend this book, whether in audiobook or paper format. If it exists in paper format, I've only ever looked for audio book version. So I don't know. So that's one of the sources I've been using and have returned to that I've listened to before, left before. Now I'm really digging in a little more with some of the exercises to get some more depth in my character development, which will help drive the plot forward. Because you can't have plot if you don't have characters doing the plot. So that's it for now. Short and sweet. Basically, yes, I'm still here. I haven't completely gone away. Yes, I'm doing that. Oh, this year. And yes, it will be some more videos this month. I'm not sure how many are how often. But there will be at least a couple, I think. And I look forward to going along this nano journey with any of you who are still watching. Until next time, I hope you have a wonderful day. Bye.