Here we go again. Time and time again, we get knocked down, but we get back up and keep it moving. Keep it moving. And write everything down.
I owe you all a huge apology for abandoning my blog and my faithful readers. It was not intentional. One thing led to another and before I knew it, months had passed since my last post. During the spring I was contacted on LinkedIn, my a producer who wanted to work with me.
GREAT! Right?
Not really. Three months later, after I tossed a completed screenplay their way, they wanted me to produce the film myself with them as my partners. In other words, raise the money, get a 200k loan and we will connect you with all the right people and tadda...you made a movie.
It sounded too good to be true. And it was.
By summer, I had to tell the financing team that up to this point got $1500 out of us to fix our credit so we could get a loan, that we were moving on. I don't hate the experience, because it showed me what I should have known all along. If I want my movies made and made right. I can do it myself.
I am on a mission now to build my career as a storyteller and filmmaker. However, I am starting out slow and on the small screen. YouTube, here I come. Yep, I am a YouTuber. I create read-along videos for kids. During my recovery, I wrote a book for my niece about her experiences as a kid growing up in Japan as a half Japanese, half Black young girl. She was nine, maybe 10, when she moved from spending most of her life in California back to her mother's homeland in Okinawa.
It was a tough assimilation for her. Sakura takes after her father externally and her mother, internally, and the opposite can be said for her brother, Yamato. The school of hard knocks, as they say, exists everywhere.
So, after a year of job hunting, I am still looking by the way, (YouTube doesn't pay right away and building a new superhero for kids to admire and adore takes time.) after my attempt to burst into the movie-making business, I am writing bits and pieces of Sakura's story via read-along storytelling for kids. I love it. It is so much fun and really feels like I am making a movie for kids. If I could get the AI down pat, maybe they would look more like cartoons than 2D animation, but I am a work in progress.
One step at a time.
I am not abandoning my health and wellness lifestyle blogs. I will post more about my ongoing recovery when I can. For now, I am focusing on building a great channel for kids to come and learn about other kids in another country. Where they can do and see fun stuff, like make Japanese cookies and visiting a shrine. I have tons of ideas that would have this channel lasting years, yet, the YouTube experts say, "Hey, if you want subscribers, you need to do videos about this and about that."
Lord!
The good news is some of those video ideas are better than my own and fun to create. The Cookie video is outdoing any of the videos, except the trailer, that came up with on my own. In the end, it is not such a bad idea to follow the advice of experts.
Just a heads up, this is where the website
is going. In the near future, I hope to return to Okinawa to add some travel videos and more exciting content to Sakura's World on my WeeZee's Kids channel. Lets go VIRAL people or just go 'BOOM'! That would be nice and fun. It would be nice for a change to get paid to do what you love.
For 2024, I hope to bring some of my short stories to life and then we shall see where life and God leads me... out of the trenches; I have know doubt.
Merry Christmas and Best Wishes to you all.