This is Story Over Everything episode 8, Back to Formula. So SOE 7 was quite a
while ago. What happened? Why the absence? Is the muse done? Who's going back to
formula? Here's the real truth. No one is going to make your dreams come true for
you. You have to put in the hard work. You will fail, fall, feel like you're dying
as you make your way, but it all comes down to a matter of choice. Will you
choose to make your future, or will you stand with the rest of the masses? I want
to be exceptional. I want to carve out my destiny as a storyteller. This is what I
was made for, and every day I don't work at it. I am doing something wrong, so I'm
making a plan. I am plotting and scheming to make my way how I want to. So if you
were around for the previous Story Over Everything episodes, which I hope you're
catching this from the audio podcast feed, and you were, and you'll listen to
them, and you're saying, hey what happened? Here's the explanation. I got too busy.
Too many things happened in my life. I think I was sick for about a week at one
point, and then like a month went by, and then I was sick again for a few days, and
I really have always had this dream of building a buffer for my content so I
can have a steady stream coming out. But the thing is, I got too distracted making
my other content. I think it's important for me to be analyzing stories because
that's part and parcel to me learning how to write better stories, but it's not
the whole kit and caboodle. There's more that matters to me, to my skill as an
author, than me analyzing things, and that's me actually making things.
Completed projects. Not half done or just barely started projects. Not concepts or
little sketches of things, but full-fledged projects I need to finish.
Whether that's short stories or children's picture books or whatever it is,
I need to finish more stories in order to build my skill as a writer, as an
artist, as an author, and that's something I'm working on. And I've had this idea in
mind to do for a while, and I even, to pull the curtain back a little bit, I
even prepped all of my stuff for this story over everything, everything eight
last week, and I decided, you know what? No. I'm gonna push it off because I need
a buffer. I need that space. I need to be able to focus on my creative work first
and on my documentation of and recording of my creative process afterwards, or
rather the creation needs to be the priority and the documentation needs to
be a secondary thought. It's a it's a tertiary secondary or tertiary matter,
and I did in doing story of everything come up with some great ideas, some great
series planning for my project that I'm still working on, my great work, my
magnum opus, if you will. And I think that's wonderful. I'm very pleased with
that, but I almost got myself to stra- I only was able to do that once I let go of
everything else that I wanted to do, my weekly analysis of stuff. Unfortunately, I
was trying to do two or three different shows at the same time, as well as other
things, and it's just it's for right now, for where I'm at, it's too much. I'm
working too much at my main job to take that much time, devote it, and have it not
distract me from doing my creative work. So in the meantime, I'm gonna again peel
back the curtain a little bit and say I've gone ahead and done scripts for I
think three more of my children's picture books. Actually, a Girl Bug Book 5
I'm working on right now, but the draft for three and four are done 100%, and I
basically made them the minimum viable product. I didn't get- let myself get
distracted. I went ahead and just- I made a premise, a theme, a beginning, middle, and
an end. I blurted all that stuff out as much as I could, as quickly as I could,
into my document, and then I went back over it, and I cycled through, and I said
okay, this is my theme, these are my ideas. I think this synopsis for the story
works, and then I went and I expanded that synopsis into 16 points roughly, and
I said okay, here's my synopsis, or yeah, here's my synopsis for page or spread one
of this 32 page children's picture book. Let me write the text for it. So there's
dialogue, there's description, there's you know a whole, you know, it's a whole
smear. And I went line by line, bit by bit, point by point, beat by beat, until I
created my third Grobuck story, and then I made my fourth, and then I worked on my
fifth, and it was a lot of fun, and it was hard, and it was a struggle, but I went
ahead and did it, and I'm satisfied, and I still need to go back on number five
and actually do my work for the manuscript, the raw text, the body of
the work, but honestly I have my beginning, middle, end, I have my theme, I have my
premise, and I expanded that premise into an outline for the 16 points of the story,
and hopefully tonight, maybe tomorrow night, I'm going to go back into it, and
into my document, and I'm going to keep working on that, and I'm going to expand it, and
then beyond that, I also made a plan for, the fact is, I want these to be children's
picture books that have, you know, lovely illustrations in them, professionally
done, and I don't have the skill to do the illustrations myself, so I'm not going
to try to do that, I'm going to focus on what I'm good at, on what my strengths are
for now, and if I want to develop things so that I'm the sole author and
illustrator at a later point, I'll do that, but for right now, I'm writing the
manuscripts, and I'm planning out, well, I did some, what do you call it, like
storyboards for some of the books, but I didn't stop myself and let
myself get bogged down on doing that for three, four, and five, I figured, no, I'm
just going to write three, four, and five, I don't need the storyboards right now,
because I don't have an artist to pay to do the work, so it doesn't make sense to
get caught up and distracted on doing the wrong thing, I need to do, put in the
least amount of work possible to have a solid product, and to be able to turn it
around and get a return on that investment, and that's what I'm doing, so
in addition to writing the pros for these five children's picture books, one
of them is, you know, according to industry standards, way too long, it's
2,000 words, which I might have to trim down, or I might not, because I'm
self-publishing these, but I also thought, okay, what can I do with these, I have
five stories here that I can craft into something more, and I can sell a Just
Pros picture book, and maybe I can, you know, commission an image, or you know, an
image with one figure, or multiple figures for a cover for this, and maybe
that'll be part of my crowdfunding campaign, and I can say, hey look, I've got
this whole big story of this, you know, sweeping fantasy adventure for kids, and
it touches on these things, it has these five, five or ten, however you want to
call it, you know, central, I'd say the kids are the central characters, it's got
these five central characters, and it have these, you know, little life lesson,
life lessons learned adventures that they go through, and they have these
adventures with these guardian angel magical bug things, and it's a cool thing,
and it exists in the form of a story that you can read in a chapter book
format for an older kid, and it's a bonus if you, you know, sign on to my campaign
for the, you know, you get a digital copy free for signing up and pledging to the
campaign to turn each of the five stories of these five kids into a full
fledged picture book fully illustrated by, you know, an author, or sorry, an
illustrator who I'm gonna hire, and like that's it, that's the plan, I'm planning
on, you know, using my writing and leveraging it to figure out how to get
these books published the way I want to have them published, and yeah, that means
I'll have to do after these manuscripts are done, and after I do a six
manuscript where I knit the five, you know, small children's stories together
into a larger children's story, chapter book story, with a narrative to it with,
you know, 12 to 15 chapters in total, I'm gonna have to figure out how to, you know,
put that together, I mean, it'll put me through my paces, I'll put together
the book through somebody who I can publish wide with, so I'll have, you know,
e-book version of it, I'll record an audiobook probably, I'll do a, you know,
not while I'm in a car though, and then I'll do, you know, having the e-book file
ready should enable me to very easily have the digital book, or sorry, the
physical print-on-demand book file ready, and that's something I can, you know, I
can create, and I've already got another product there, and it will be, you know,
value-added because I'm gonna take the core stories from these five children's
picture books I have and expand them, and you know, I came up with cool lore ideas
for one of the girl book books, I won't specify which because it'll turn into a
pedantic mess of me mumbling over myself, but I came up with a really cool idea
and I want to expand that, and I feel like, hey, I'm the author, I can expand
this however I want, I could make one of the characters conflicts or the enemies
that they face kind of the center point of the entire book and have it all, have
it all get to that point and have that be really cool, or I can give a similar
treatment to the other enemies, enemy forces that were faced, and the children
overcame with the help of these creatures, I can do a lot of stuff, but
basically that's the plan, I'm gonna do that, I'm gonna write, and I'm gonna make
all this stuff happen, so anyway, that was all off-the-cuff information I want to
share and things I wanted to say to just share what my progress has been on this,
and you know, why there's been a delay, and tell you that the plan is to let
there not be any more delays, but I'm gonna focus on the writing and the
creating of the actual main content that I want to sell, you know, sell and make of
my storytelling and the, you know, documentation and the vlog and podcast,
that kind of stuff is all gonna come afterwards, so, but that's how it is,
because I need to focus until I'm a more powerful creator or until I have more
time free for my regular job because I'm making money off of, you know, these other
things that I can devote to, you know, doing everything else that I want to do
as well without losing focus on my work as an author, and of course not
sacrificing anything with my family, so anyway, real quick, you know, I just
blurted all that stuff out, but I had some bullet points I wanted to go
over and just kind of share with you and make some inspiration and
encouragement for you to do the same, because if you're listening to this, I
bet it's not because you think I'm some wonderful person, I bet it's because
you're interested in storytelling as well, so here we go. What am I doing to
achieve my goal? I am finally working on building a buffer for my content. I am
constructing a social media drip feed. I am working on league magnet content to
find likely readers and build an email list. I still need to learn how to manage
an email list, but I have to start somewhere. I am working to define a niche
for myself. I'm developing and designing content that can be used and reused in
a variety of ways. I am figuring out the best yield for the least input so I can
work like my life depends on it, because it does. Most of all, I'm writing. What do
I have to say to you, my fellow author? Write when you can. Write what you can.
Write where you can. There is no perfect, there is no ideal you will ever reach
that will allow your craft. The craft is waiting on you to do it. It can wait
forever. It wants to be worked, but you have to do the work. Do it or don't. The
choice is yours and yours alone. It's all on you.
By the way, as a bonus, if you can tell me where the question back to formula
comes from, I will appreciate your refined taste and sparkling memory. But
anyway, that's it. I am MJ. I'm gonna go ahead and get out of here and I thank
you for your time and attention. Check out MJMunoz.com for all my other work
and check out the crowdfunding campaigns and the finished book I'll have in the
book section or somewhere on the main page when you go to MJMunoz.com at
some point pretty soon. Peace. I hope you enjoyed that. If you did, you can find
more at MJMUNOZ.COM as well as my entire library of analysis, art, and fiction.