Every Book I've Ever Written | My Writing Journey

everyone it's shaylen and I'm here today with another writing video today I'm gonna be doing a video where I just talk about everything I've ever written not everything but every book I've ever written every manuscript length book there are nine of them ten including the novel I'm currently drafting eleven including the one book that I abandoned mid draft I got the idea to do this video from my friend Rachel I will leave her video in the cards it's a really fun video she's super cool part of the reason I also want to do this is to show why I shelved the project because most of these projects are shelved probably one of my most common questions which is why don't you just publish your books or self publish your books not really of the mindset that I want work I'm not proud of to be available for the general public to read not good that would embarrass me I do want to talk about shelving projects and why I decided to shelve these because I think shelving projects it's just something that is like a new writer I think you have to learn how to do for each book I'll talk a little bit about what my writing process was like what I struggled with what I was proud of why I shelf oh and also just quick side note I meant to do this video when I got printed copies of my books I procrastinated getting printed copies of my books so long that crate space used to exist just imagine that I did that and that I'm not garbage and if I do put covers up most of them I made myself I know I'm not a cover designer I don't think my covers are that great so you don't have to tell me the first book that I ever wrote was called silver bird and I wrote this book when I was 13 and 14 I had started books beforehand quite a few but I'd never finished any I started this book in October of 2010 and I finished it in November of 2011 I did NaNoWriMo both years I honestly don't remember much of the drafting process for this book well the book is around 92 or 93 thousand words the book follows this girl named Ellie and basically she gets in a plane crash and gets stranded on an island I had a really big property occupation with like the plotline of getting stranded on an idle when I was younger like that was like the most interesting plotline to me I think I tried to make there a plot but I just didn't really understand how writing books worked basically she just kind of wanders around this island aimlessly for like a ninety thousand words it's a disaster but what do you expect well what was difficult was just that I didn't know how to write a book it was a huge task it requires a lot of you know time management and mental organization that I didn't have any experience with I think probably writer's block was a struggle I probably a lot of points didn't know what happened next and just like threw in some random stuff what am i proud of in this book nothing I'm not proud of any like of the crafts aspect of this I think the only thing I'm proud of in this book is just like that it exists you know like I did that finally why shelve the book so pretty much everything I've ever written at the time of writing it I was intending to publish I wasn't smart enough to be like this is just for me to learns I really thought I was gonna publish this I actually had two sequels planned never titled them I know and I was kind of getting ready to write the sequel I think I basically just got kind of distracted by another project and just kind of flowed it away from this one and decided it wasn't gonna be for me anymore it wasn't really much of an event to it so my second book was called the winter run and if you were reading Y dystopian in 2012 this book is one of those this is one that you're gonna see recurring throughout this video there's like a plot thread of this book I wrote the winter run in 2012 I would have been 15 when I wrote this but I believe it took me around nine months to draft I think I started in the spring and I ended it in like the fall something has happened we don't really know what and the environment is Wow it's almost like that's really happening the world had kind of turned into this like wasteland of like eternal winter was a pretty kind of like a gritty rugged world a lot of the dystopian books I was reading at the time had like a government system that was very overbearing and that's really what the book was centering around taking down this government and the government would put you through tests or control do whatever the world was very like cuz the state of like Anarchy towns were all very like ice people didn't speak the same language the government and the military had access to like more advanced technology so it was like a fusion kind of I don't really remember but anyway so we followed the main character Caixa she is imprisoned for killing people she's an assassin in this world there's no like legal system if you were accused of a crime like you just go to prison and you're just there until you die it's almost like a trial by combat in every cell there's like a button that you can press and like run for your life and like if you get to a very very distant safe zone then you're granted like immunity of your crime starts with her in prison it was just like her journey being hunted by the military as she's trying to like run like make it through this like danger zone I literally think was just called the zone wow I was so creative what I liked about this book was um the main character Caixa she was a very fun character to write she was my first time writing a character who was like an antihero compared to silver bird where I don't even know what like the internal conflict of that book was it was so sporadic here there was like a very clear internal conflict with the main character's guilt Caixa as a character like she has a personality she has internal conflict and she has an arc which I don't think Ellie from silver Burt had any of those things I think I'm a really big problem with this book is that it got very very repetitive Caixa would be you know attacked by people and she would get away somehow or defeat them somehow she cut her another problem and the thing is that these problems were kind of inconsequential to each other you could have put them into any order and it was very repetitive it was very just like alone for a bit problem alone for a bit problem over and over until the end before I get to my next book I do want to talk about the one book I abandoned midway through the book because I've only ever done this once and that was with the sequel to a winter run which I hate the title is called the winter hunt which like Rachel who I mentioned in this video because she kind of inspired me to this video hurt why I dystopian series that she wrote the second book I remember her saying in the video that she hates the title is called hunted I feel you girl Here I am with my book the winter hunt what even happens in the winter hunt I don't remember she like makes it to the safe zone in the end she's trying to find her brother she's still being pursued by the government Ian's covered a big conspiracy they're still trying to find her I don't really remember exactly I wrote this book for NaNoWriMo of 2012 the same year that I wrote the winter run I wrote 50,000 words and then I wrote 10k more in the night and in the book so all in all I spent you know two months working on this and the thing that happened when I got 60 K in was I realized that I don't have story beyond this I had planned this to be three books the third book was called the winter war look at that title symmetry though I don't really remember what detailed what my thought process was you know at this age I was young and my brain and what I was interested in was changing very quickly I was constantly getting new ideas and so whenever I finished a book I would kind of just go okay well that's bad I need to write a different one and now I can make it better so I kind of just moved on from that it wasn't too eventful then I got to my third book which is called the definition of impossible this marks the first book in this video that I still would like to do something with someday I don't really plan to write it in the near future or know what I want to write it it's kind of like half shelved you know the drawer is still like ajar and I could reopen it if I want to is that I wrote it in 2013 I started it in around February finished it in November finished the book for NaNoWriMo I didn't know what genre this book was for a million years and I know now when I first wrote the book was it still this is still why a the protagonist was 17 when I first wrote the book I didn't know what John wrote us but I called it paranormal even though it's like not paranormal I know it is now it's dark academia is so hard to talk about because I think when I describe it it's so familiar in cliche but it's actually like one of the weirder books that I've written the winter run is like you know like run-of-the-mill 2012 why dystopian it was in with the trend the definition possible in there and it's a weird ass book but it doesn't sound that talk about it this book follows the main character Alice after some events in her life that we're not really given access to at the start she goes to boarding school weird starts happening but the focused is more on her existential crisis that's happening as a result of some like mild like supernatural paranormal element you never really know in the book at any point if it's actually happening if it's just happening in Alice's much she's a pretty unhinged narrator so she's very unreliable but like she knows she's unreliable like she doesn't trust her own narration of the events it's a very like weird kind of claustrophobic book the whole book takes place in just like a couple rooms basically I don't want to try to describe this book because it's a pain to describe the winter run was also around was around ninety one thousand words this book the first draft was around ninety four thousand words this was a step up from the things I've written before it's still not good I still read it back and I'm like you can see in the old pros here the very beginnings of what turns into my writing style now this was also my first time writing something that really was very character-driven this was also my first time playing with form so this was the first time I'd done anything a little funky a little quirky sections of the book that were written in like an omniscient verse kind of whereas the rest of the book was written in like first-person wasn't it what was difficult about this book I don't have a lot of memories of writing this is the issue this was my first time writing romance there was a romantic subplot in the book very underdeveloped relationship because it was something that I'd never written for and I was never drawn to writing I was way too in my head and I was like I'm gonna be so bad at writing this romance it's gonna be so cringy and embarrassing it wasn't anything that was gay like they kissed like one time how could I ever show anyone that I had conceptualized such scandalous material I finished writing the book and as soon as I finish it I was like I could do this way better I hadn't outlined this book you can tell that I didn't know what I was doing there's a lot of stumbling around but I didn't really up until like maybe 3/4 mark really what I was wanted from the story after that was chain reaction chain reaction is adult first of all first time writing something that wasn't why a and it's like a I would say like it's like a psychological thriller it's set in the present day but there is like a pretty important sci-fi aspect I wrote this book for NaNoWriMo of 2014 I was 17 at the time of writing it I wrote this book in just one NaNoWriMo entirely it was fifty-three thousand words so the entire first draft in 23 days follows our main character Jemma she's just a wee bit sociopathic he's a forensic science University senior she gets into kind of like it's manipulation triangle with one of her professors and a fellow student as she's working with over this research they've been doing that's really dangerous that's like it's her brainchild that she kind of conceptualize content-wise the most difficult book I ever wrote because it's about science and I am just a big dum-dum with my BFA the characters in this book are a lot smarter than me or at least they are smart in ways that I am dumb I think I wrote this because when I was in high school I was like a big nerd for science actually there was a period of time where I wanted to go into Sciences I was like top of my class in grade 11 chemistry so yeah I was totally qualified to write this book about complex experimental particle physics because I knew that the content was way over my head I kind of knew that I wouldn't be publishing it anytime soon when I wrote it I was kind of like I'm writing this for me right now and I'm gonna have to revisit this at a much later date so like obviously the hardest thing about this book was the science my favorite thing about this book Gemma's character for sure she was my next step after Caixa into writing anti-heroes but she was a step farther writing for her first-person perspective from the point of view of someone who is just a psychopath but like really charismatic and like just so different from me the most different character for myself of any character I've ever written probably even though I wouldn't want to meet in real life and I don't condone her actions at all someday I would be interested in revisiting yet I have to consider that the science is really beyond me I did write it as a TV pilot which I made an entire video on but I worked pretty well as a TV show Breaking Bad meets killing Eve kind of guys I just realized that Gemma is like villanelle meets Walter White that is how I'm pitching her from now I do think it works well as a show that's the thing it fits that style really well when am I ever gonna be a showrunner never so it feels kind of pointless to write as a show should that we meet up with our old friend the winter run and we get to my next book which is called don't underestimate the wolf a dumb title you heard it here first folks so this book is the winter run redone took me so long to write I started this book before chain-reaction July of 2014 and I finished it in May of 2015 I took a break in the middle to write chain reaction I don't know what why I did this this is one of my biggest regrets as a writer I think that this was just very bad time management one day I started thinking about my book the winter run I had never really left me you know I'd always continued to think about it I was still very fond of it and the character Christ especially was like a really important character to me so much of that story I never got to write because I didn't I realized I just didn't have enough to Pat out a book and a half worth of content yes I know I probably could just made it a duology but I wasn't thinking that at the time on a whim I decided to just start it over but condense what I originally planned to be a trilogy to be one book and I was thinking you know this was a disaster the first time but now I'm a better writer I can make it good this time spoiler alert I didn't make it good that time it ended up being around a hundred thousand words there was another point of view that I didn't actually name Sahana I forget that she is in that book I changed the world also as well and I basically removed the futuristic elements they'd never really meshed well with the world my main character had like a sword and like a bow and arrow with the futuristic elements it just made no sense that she would survive they had computers like they were able to track her that's the biggest plot hole of the first version of this book is that it's just statistically impossible that this one girl would have survived the entire military chasing her over the course of like five months through extremely harsh weather conditions after I wrote chain reaction and I came back to this book I was just like I don't want to do this but I was stubborn and I kept writing it the quality was so bad because I was legitimately not trying like I was just trying to write it as fast as possible have it done as fast as possible and that's that's no way to write like you're not gonna learn like what is there to be proud of when literally your only goal is just to be done this book as fast as you you min Li possibly can so that you can move on from my forever what I'm proud of in this book god I don't know there's another step towards me finding my writing style and it's still pretty juvenile especially near the end because I was legitimately like anti trying but there start to be a couple points where the language is starting to veer towards how I write now starting to write more descriptively and yeah what was difficult by writing this book was just that I hate it so my next book that I wrote was cold I'm fine we're gonna get into a very different kind of story you want the entire story if I'm fine you can check it out in a video in the cards where I talked about my whole journey with the book and what I ended up doing to fix it basically I wrote this book as therapy for myself this would have been 2015 I planned this book right quickly I actually outlined the whole thing in three days it just came to me in a sudden vision shows a huge leap in quality actually from what came before starting to get a step closer to like the quality of a book that you could give someone is it good still not good but it definitely showed a huge progression in my writing style I think it starts to really sound like me it's very like unrefined but it reads like me I got a good feedback on it I did do a beta round for that book quite a lot of positive feedback on the book I'm not really proud of it I think it's pretty cringed so this is why contemporary follows this teenager named Andy her mom died before the book start Hertz and she is just a sad beam she's really depressed she finds this gravestone in the graveyard where Mama's buried it's like a broken gravestone so like the names gone and she sets out to find who's buried there so there's like a little bit of a mystery but it's primarily her dealing with her family big focus on the sibling relationships with her younger brother and younger sister even though there's a lot that I think is a disaster about this book like that it's so melodramatic I just took the emotions and I dialed them up to 20 on the 10 scales I really thought that the most feeling you could pack into a scene was what made it good it took me one summer to write I would have started it right after I got out of school so like very end of June beginning of July and I finished it the very end of September so not too long the first draft was I think around I was around 60,000 words I believe it was a pretty short book and then I added more doing revision I kind of had one foot in the door of finding my writing style when I wrote this but I wasn't quite there yet so it's this very weird clash between how I wrote when I was young and how I write now it was starting to have the elements of my current writing style where like I could handle some characters with more complexity and with more nuance and the more I could write like more floral language but it was really dragged down by how I wrote when I was a child which or where things were very melodramatic so it's just this very weird clash between my mature writing style and my immature writing style both coexisting in this one story I struggled with this book for a very long time again I have a whole video on so I won't get into it but I really did not want to shelve this really really wanted to publish this book this was like a passion project for me like I did a beta round I got feedback I spent months doing rewrites doing so much editing like I really put a lot of time into trying to get this to be better I reached a point where I realized I can fix up the writing I can fix the structure I can do all the things that you can do to make a book better you can only do so much with this plotline that I'm no longer that interested in I kind of was just like you know what I'm gonna change everything about this and I'm gonna take it and turn it into what I want to right that's what happens unfortunately when you have a book that you're working on and you find your voice as a writer while working in the book like what are you gonna do with the book now you know your options are keep writing in even though it's not what you're interested in anymore you can show that or you can change it and I decided to change it and turn it into a very different story it's now like adult it's literary fiction the side characters in the book are all different Andy is basically the only character who's still there if I'm to set in the present the the new version which is called holding a ghost is set in like 1996 then we have the dragon tear this book okay I wrote this in 2016 from January until I think I finished it on April 2nd it's oddly specific but I remember that book was 118 thousand words this book is a high fantasy it's like I'm in Salma novel follows various characters and this fantasy world and their magical and political shenanigans I had planned this out to be a five book series initially and I started planning this a few years before I started writing it what was difficult about this book was pacing there were you know five no there were six point-of-view characters the pacing of that was very difficult and I did a very bad job also just it was a fantasy novel which I don't really have experience with what I'm proud of in this book would be some aspects of the world building and some of the characters I did do pretty detailed rebuilding that I spent a lot of time on so I'm proud of that could I have done it better yeah I had a very tumultuous experience with this book I agree the book it was a huge time investment order to fix all the problems that I had from the first draft was gonna require quite a lot of work I didn't feel excited to write it and that's sad because I normally feel very excited to write my books so I made the tough choice to shelve this one having done it it feels like 100% the right choice it was a big weight off my shoulder it's sad because I did have pretty cool plans for like the series development and like the series are some of the issues of the first book were coming from there were a lot of things that I was gonna subvert it was gonna take four books from that to pay off and it was just there in the first book like not really working the first book is really disastrous I really really don't like that draft moving on from that is the last novel that I completed and that is someone will save you so someone will save you I wrote also in 2016 I wrote it from September to the beginning or mid-december so also a fairly quick drafting process this book is again why a contemporary I've talked about this one pretty heavily on my channel this one is not shelved I am right rewriting it currently we got to book number what book is this this is book number eight finally we have one that's not show this point in my life I'm not too interested in running young adult I still really like this specific book so it's fine will I take on other wife projects probably not but this one I have a lot of investment in this book follows our main character her name's Luna her mom is like into the a bit wacky into the occult and Luna has a birthmark a large birthmark on her face and her mom has always read it as like a bad omen and it starts very sad I wouldn't say that it's an extremely sad book but it does start very sad when Luna finds her childhood friend Evan's body when he commits suicide and she finds this postcard one day and it says like send me a letter if you need help and I will save you Finn she thinks is kind of dumb but eventually she's just like it I have no one so she replies and starts off this correspondence with this person named Finn while things are happening her life there's like things going on with her boyfriend and her mom thinking that Evans spirit is like haunting her her correspondence with Finn is kind of happening in the background but it's like very gasps lady and bad I really like this book um the first draft was I think around like 62 thousand words the hardest part was writing the scenes with Finn it's pretty hard when like a central character of the book one we don't know anything about like we don't know if Finn's real name we don't know their gender we don't know their job we don't know their age we don't know what they look like literally all we know is that their pseudonym is Finn and they live in Australia so it's very tricky to write seams where like Luna and Finn are talking Finn's not even present we can't see their body language so it's literally just like then texting that's very hard to write it's not very visually interesting it's pretty hard to write like that level of manipulation this is the first book that I consider good when I read the old draft no I don't stand by it as my best quality there's a reason I'm rewriting it right now but I can still read the old draft and be like this sounds like me it has my writing style the characters are here and they're developed for the most part for a first draft I can stand by it as something that I like I really love the characters they're still very close to my heart I think this book is kind of funny which I don't really write a lot of humor I really like the atmosphere of the setting I don't really have any grievances of this one I'm not salty at it so that's the last novel that I completed but then is my short story collection so my collection is called pareidolia so pareidolia is of course different because it's a short story collection started it in the fall of 2016 I consider the first draft done because I wrote the 12 stories that was my goal and I reached 60 K words which was around my goal it's hard with short story collections because you know that at some point you're gonna write new stories and your public gonna take old ones out as a complete work is probably the thing I'm most proud of that I've ever created in my life I've written 14 stories for it I can't promise that all 14 will be in there I'm having some issues at the moment I would say about half the stories are pretty clean and about half the stories need revision I just put a lot of work into all of the stories it's the book that showed me what I want to write it's the book that taught me how to write it's the book that revealed my real writing style and all of the stories I think they're very different from each other that was my goal was for my stories to have a lot of variety I put so much into this two of the pieces have been published from and most recently my story I will never tell you this in the puritan a lot of the writing in some of the stories is some of my best that I've ever done so pretty proud of it what was hardest about it it not written short stories before I didn't know how to write short stories I started this book so the older stories are a little rocky at the moment not why a friend's there is some content in that book oh boy and just like a lot of like messed up anyways most of the stories are like contemporary but some of them have like surrealism or like magical realism elements in them and then finally a zine honey vinegar that I'm currently drafting I'm currently around 50,000 words into this draft so about halfway through the draft and even occur it's also in the adalat category it's also literary fiction it is the love of my life so this book follows the main character Sybil it is 1955 and she lives in a remote logging town in British Columbia she is reunited with her half-sister Freya and her mother and then her sister gets struck by lightning and the story follows their town basically mythologizing them a coming-of-age novel with folkloric elements following a girl trying to grow up in a place where she has become a legend like during her lifetime my favorite thing about it Sybil we came so far with all of these previous anti heroes who paved the way and finally we got to Sybil she is like my true antihero gal so thank you guys so much for watching I hope this video was somehow interesting if you have any questions you can always send me an ask on tumblr and I will see you in the next video bye Eve [Music]

Channel: ShaelinWrites

Views: 27,347

Rating: 4.951807 out of 5

Keywords: writer, writing, author, novelist, creative writing, writetube, writetuber, writing advice, how to write a book, how to write a novel, writing vlog, creative writing degree, books, nanowrimo, authortube, writing tip, every book i've written, all about my novel, my writing, writing journey

Id: yK2gj60Bd8o

Length: 27min 50sec (1670 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 14 2019