I created my fifth “Vlog” for YouTube over the weekend, but hesitated to upload it because I couldn’t pick a song for the background. On my Monday morning commute to work, I heard a Ben Rector song that I love and knew it would fit perfectly. As I watched the little 4-minute video of highlights from my first week of January, I decided to hold off on posting to the internet. I’m a firm believer in Quality over Quantity, and I didn’t want to share something creative that I didn’t necessarily love or feel reflects was what I am capable of. I’ve decided to hold off until I can add some more content to it and fill it with more substantial footage than my usual coffee mug shots and glowing candles on my end tables 🙂

 

So instead of YouTubing, I’ve spent some time reading tips for beginners like me about video-making and editing. It’s a topic that has so much to learn about and experiment with! Luckily I get to put some of the tips I picked up to use right away because I’m going on a trip this weekend to somewhere new and beautiful! Stay tuned 🙂

As of now, my cell phone is my video camera. But my birthday is next month and I’m considering gifting myself a “beginner” handheld video camera. The lenses are so much more crystal clear and bright. Amazon is also suggesting I add a ring light and tripod to my cart. Does anyone have any suggestions? Any feedback on equipment would be helpful! I don’t know anyone in real life (as opposed to through the youtubes) who documents their life like I do so I’m looking for any recommendations.

Tonight was a lot of fun. My boyfriend Zeb and I met up with one of my very first friends I made after moving to Idaho in 2016. When I made the 1,000 mile leap from Southern California to Idaho, I knew 2 people in the whole state – my mom and my dad. Making friends as an adult after the convenience of college is pretty tricky. But I am so lucky to say that I have built the truest friendships here in the past 2.5 years!

After my workout, shower, and home-cooked dinner, I got myself in the blogging mood. I think that is 95% to blame on the fact that I am wearing snuggly slippers, my boyfriend’s flannel shirt, listening to Sugarland play on Spotify through my living room speakers, and basking in the aroma of three separate (and distinctly different) candles from Marshall’s.

Have you ever experienced the scent of cologne+cinnamon+lotus flowers? It’s surprisingly not nauseating, and apparently inspires blog writing. 😉

Okay, the actual inspiration likely struck from my (borderline-obsessive) nighttime reading from my archived Microsoft Word files from 2004-2011. Your girl was an amateur fiction writer back in the day and I’m still uncovering some literary gems…along with some literary mold and literary garbage.

I opened a document that was not fiction nor a journal entry. It was a letter to my future self, written when I was 17 years old. (I’m 25 years old now.)

(Throwbacks from high school Kenz)

Reading through the letter was a little mind-boggling to me, how I sound like the exact same person then as I am now, despite the whirlwind of things life has thrown at me in the past 8 years. I’ve moved to Arizona and to Idaho since then. I’ve started and graduated college, as well as 3 very different jobs. I’ve started and ended relationships. I’ve undergone 7 more facial surgeries in New York City. I’ve dabbled in photography and personal training, moved into 2 of my very own apartments, adopted and fostered animals and experienced the legal purchase of alcohol. 😋

Yet in 2010, I wrote a letter to my future self that is perfectly relevant to who I am today. So this blog post is a little bit of a cop-out because it’s based on something I wrote in high school. But since when was recycling a bad thing? Blogs didn’t even exist back then. A lot of my letter is personal, and probably isn’t relatable to the majority of you anyways. So I’ll spare you the teenage tirade.

But after reading the letter to myself, I realized that one of my strengths truly is writing. My job title is “analyst” for a major health care company. But even my director tells me that I need to be more analytical in my thinking and start producing technical reports with tangible suggestions for cost savings. I’m striving to meet his goals for me.

Yet when I come home and I open my laptop and open a word doc I haven’t looked at since freshman year of high school, it’s pretty obvious that my immediate sense of “I know what I’m doing” is something I don’t experience too often in corporate America as a creative millennial.

I started noticing that a lot of the fiction writing I have saved on my laptop (which is 100% unfinished. There are dozens of beginnings and middles of stories….there are no endings. Yet.) have common themes and tones. Dare I be bold enough to suggest that they could all be combined into one novel…? There’s still no ending and a lot of the plot and character development needs more depth. But it’s more than a start. That’s for sure.

I copied and pasted the beginning chapters I wrote to each of my creative fiction outlets when I was 11 to 18 years old and there is 152 PAGES SINGLE SPACED ALREADY.

So now I have an unofficial goal of completing a first draft of a publishable novel by the end of 2019. Based on my own preferences, it’ll be a teen fiction novel. It will most likely appeal to high school girls with a similar appreciation to Nicholas Sparks movies as I do 🙂

My vacation next week might also serve as an opportunity to work on this project! I’m traveling with my boyfriend, but he will be working the majority of the time and I’ll be occupying myself during the actual travel. I’ll let you know how many pages I add to my 152 total by this time next week.

Xo, Kenz