Double Stream Days, Preptember plans, & more 100KQ4 (or 100K with Kate!) chat

Helloooooo!

Tomorrow is our first Double Stream Day of August. :) You can find the link to the stream here and it'll be at 3:30pm CDT.

Our second Double Stream Day will be on Saturday at 10:30am CDT and you can find that link here!

I'm always so excited to write and chat with y'all, but I'm especially excited because I can't wait to workshop a bit more of our 100KQ4 challenge! (Or 100KwithKate? What should we name this?? Lolol. One of the many things we can brainstorm together!)

My heart soared reading all of your responses to that post! It's so funny how many of us were feeling the same way about searching for and yearning for a Fall/Q4 challenge we could feel good participating in. I can't wait to go on this journey with y'all!

Already I have a vague plan for my Preptember. (Which begins in just a few days - ACK!)

I've split things up by week and for the first week, I think I'm going to focus on researching some fun comp titles, maybe even reading a couple, and drafting a pretend query letter. (In the past, this has really helped me narrow in on what my story is about and what its major "selling points" would be! Something useful to keep in mind while drafting for the first time.)

The week after will be all about character "bios." I haven't utilized character bios for a story in a while, but because I'm going to be following multiple, I think it'll help tremendously.

And then for the final half of Preptember, I'm going to use a little hack I've already learned from our Crafts & Drafts book club pick for September & October! When it comes to outlining, I'm going to start from the Beginning to Midpoint (like usual), but then skip to the Final Scene and work my way backwards to the Midpoint again. I'm really excited to test this out and see how it works for me!!

By the time all that's done, it'll be October! And the start of our challenge!!!!!! :)

A couple questions I still have for y'all (and we can discuss these in the comments or on the livestreams tomorrow and Saturday!):

Besides a weekly check-in on Discord, I thought it would also be fun to have a weekly livestream. Something like this scheduled:

Each day that has AN EVENT in capital letters would be a stream. So a few scatted ones during Preptember, a more weekly, Friday check-in during the 100K challenge, and then random "start," "halfway," and "end" streams.

Now for our usual Patreon streams, I try to vary the dates and times so that more people can participate live in at least one each month or every other month. Would we rather weekly streams be on one day at a specific time (like on the "schedule" above) or more like our typical Double Stream Days? Let me know your thoughts!

One of the other requests I saw a lot was a shared tracker of some sort. So huge shout out to Candace for sharing Pacemaker Planner!

I'm playing around with it right now for my A Closet Full of Cauldrons revision and REALLY enjoyed setting it up as a goal.

It's like a lot of trackers, but specifically tailored toward writing and publishing. (You can use it for other stuff, they do have those features, but you can tell it's been made with writers and creators at the forefront!)

For the Group Challenges feature, I'll need to pay the (very small) monthly fee, but to my understanding, we would then ALL be able to contribute this way without fear of accidentally messing up someone else's tracker, like in a Google Sheets example. Otherwise it's free to use for everyone up to 2 or 3 projects, I think.

I'll keep playing around with things the next few days and see if this works for us!

If it does, the question is then: would we want to open this challenge up to other people? (Like talking about this on the main YouTube channel or in Twitch chats more openly and sharing the link to join.) Y'all let me know what you think! I hate making people feel excluded, but some aspects (like the weekly streams and Discord) would just be too much otherwise. If we find that this tracker doesn't work, and we want to just use Google Sheets, then that answers the question as well.

Okay, okay, I think that's it for now! Again, feel free to comment your thoughts down below or chat about it during the upcoming streams. If you've already come up with a rough Preptember plan, I'd love to hear about it as well!

See y'all soon and happy writing!! <3