Does a ‘first draft’ video reflect badly on my published fiction?

Since undertaking my desk time audit earlier this summer, I’m hyper-conscious of time spent away from fiction. It’s especially pertinent right now as I’m on a roll with yet another draft of my currently nameless WIP, about a brother and sister separated for fifty years. But with an event to prepare for recently, I thought it would be a good opportunity to make some videos about my novels. Was it?

Well, I’m not a natural in front of the camera, nor behind it unfortunately, so it took time to remember how to set up and use the equipment. Then there was preparing the scripts. Then the camera ran out of juice midway through the second video and I had to recharge the battery and start again, by which time the light was fading. Still, I got them done, even edited out the switching the camera on/off at the beginning/end, and uploaded to YouTube. They’re not great, but are they better or worse than nothing?

My concern is that publishing ‘first draft’ videos (apart from those filmed live at events) might suggest I similarly don’t take care to revise my writing. Or perhaps I shouldn’t worry, given they’re unlikely to be found among the multitudes online?

Thanks for reading (and possibly even watching). This is my 100th post this year. I’m now off to watch videos of choirs before a workshop on Handel and Mozart this weekend. A break from my desk I’ve no qualms about taking.

December’s challenge to write a 99-word story featuring a performance brought me back to this post. I thought I’d write about my own performance anxieties until I recalled a short story I wrote some years ago ”Yoko Sits Silently Onstage While the Audience Snips off Her Clothes”. However, when I went back to this, it wasn’t how I’d remembered it. Which is fine, affording me to approach the same material from another angle, incorporating the theme of another recent post on the ubiquity of misogyny.

Yoko’s performance deconstructs the male gaze

Come, you know you want to! Haven’t you done this a thousand times in your mind? Forget it’s me up here, under the lights, with the power of my reputation. My name. Imagine a moonless night, a drunken stagger in a too-short skirt; she can’t remember where she left her friends, her bank card, her phone. She’s asking for it, can’t you see? As I am, now. Look how easy I’ve made it for you with the scissors. No need for savage clawing with your hands. I won’t struggle. I won’t protest. Won’t speak. Come, cut away my clothes!