Writing About Writing vol 20

 

(New WaW image, y'all!)

    Y'all know True Story© is a whole construction/production process and I am 90% of the crew?

It starts with a spark. I see something out in the world as I do my daily "life" thing. Something will happen in my field of view/hearing and--...

Wait...

Y'all DO know that there is always some element of something that happened in every story, right?

    Anyway, spark... I see something out in the world and I use that as an idea. I break out the ol' phone and start typing furiously in a Gmail draft that will auto-save as soon as I navigate to another app or out of that message:

(okay, so maybe not a REAL story forming)

I will continue to grind out that wall of words, really only concerned with the idea of the story, minding grammar and making sure to establish properly-formed sentences and paragraphs. I do this in my Gmail drafts because that automatically saves them right where it is until I get to the PC.

    Once at the PC, I copy and paste the text of the story into the Blogger WYSIWYG editor:

From here, I take that "wall of words," and turn it into what y'all will see on Thursdays. I clean up grammatical things, tighten up any story elements I may have rushed through while typing on the phone and then I do the aesthetic stuff. That includes indenting new paragraphs, italicizing spoken parts, centering back-and-forth dialog--...
... about that... I learned that reading Invisible Man, which is my favorite book.

    Anyway, once I have the physical formatting together, I run over to Gencraft and drop in a HIGH-level selection of words related to what happens in the story (or what WILL happen if I create the image ahead of time) and let it spit me out and image. Half the time I'on e'em remember what prompt I fed it by the time the story publishes:

(okay, so maybe I'll remember this one)

    I go back to Blogger and upload the pic as the top-of-the-story starter image. I have found that doing this helps readers WANT to stay and read more than just a bunch of words and no fun. This will also serve as the YouTube thumbnail.

Oh, YouTube!
Wait, no, hol'up...

    After all of the above, before I set a Thursday and click publish, I copy the whole thing; image and all and send it to a proofreader who will comb the story for any small mistakes I missed to screenshot and text me to fix before publishing. This has to be someone I trust to get on it ASAP and turn it over quickly.  This is important, if just to have another set of eyes on it.
Once they're done combing through it all, I pick what Thursday I want to publish, add some tags to it and schedule the publish.

    Now we can talk YouTube...
I start with a trip through Google AI Studio, I select the media generator and feed the story into the interface. Then I select a narrator -- my preferred one is named Sadachbia -- click go and pray:

"Pray," you ask?  The AI is not perfect, sometimes it misses words, sometimes it glitches and adds 5 minutes of dead air in a random spot, one time it got to a laugh in the story and just laughed for seven minutes. Sometimes the story is too long for the interface (anything over 10:55, somewhere around just under 2000 words) and I'd have to break it up into two pieces.  For future postings, I will try to keep it under 1800 words, lest I will really pour it on and y'all will see more multi-part stories.  Sometimes a story only half that length spits out a 10:55 file and I know to refresh and retry. So yeah, "pray." I am praying for a one shot one kill read that is as close to what I wrote to call it good.

Then I download and attach that sound file to a Gmail draft with the above-mentioned generated image.
Now I go back to the phone. I open the email draft and download the files and open YouCut:

(for example only, this will not become a video)

I attach the image first, then select "music" and add the sound file. I change the duration of the image display to match the length of the reading. If there are multiple images in a post like this one has, I add those images in sync with where they land in the reading. I play it back to make sure it is all three and properly synced and save.

Then it's off to YouTube Studio and not YouTube proper:

    I use Studio because that allows me to set a future date on a post or upload it as unlisted and regular YouTube doesn't allow that.
Every video gets uploaded as unlisted for about 24 hours. I do this to allow it time to "marinate" in the algorithm, giving YouTube time to run their continuous checks on it to decide who to suggest it to when it goes public.
While it is "unlisted," the video is private, only viewable to people who have the actual link. After about an hour, I share the link with a VERY select five people and my other YouTube channel. That precious five people are the ones who have been here for the whole ride and that is a token of my appreciation. They thank me by tossing a like and sometimes a comment before it hits the public algorithm because they wanna see me win too.
After 24 hours I g'head and assign the video its public date, moments before the text post goes live. That allows me time to embed the video on the text post for the 7:30a publish and add a link to the text post into my video description template.

    Now the text and video posts are public and I send a text with a link to the text post to about 25 people before posting on The Musings... Facebook page and my personal page.
Then I pray again, this time for views and engagement.

So yeah, it seems like a lot of work because it is but I'm mildly obsessed with processes and find this one to be kind of satisfying to see come together.