I'm so excited to announce my next speaker in the vlog series, Jonah Venegas!
Jonah is a senior in high school with plans to study Linguistics in college. He is also an avid writer, currently working on a full length novel that I'm sure will be glorious upon completion. He's written other short stories as well, one of which was published in Bethel University's literary magazine, Coeval. He's quite passionate about identity and being true to who you are, as you'll see down below in the video.
Also, to paraphrase Jonah himself in response to my very loose guidelines for this video: "Well, I'm not very good at unstructured things, so we'll see how this goes."
So, with no further ado, I present to you, behind the cardboard camera: don't be afraid.
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Just as an FYI, I'm in the middle of writing my next few blog posts, but I plan on occasionally posting more vlog episodes throughout 2014. So there's no real consistent schedule for their posting, but I will add more videos to the series, rest assured!
Before we get started, let me just throw it out there that if you have a passion for writing and you're at all interested in writing a guest post for my blog, definitely contact me and I'll be in touch. I love hearing different voices and different stories, and it's good for me to take a step back from the driver's seat sometimes. Also, I would greatly appreciate it if you would take five seconds (seriously, five seconds) to follow my blog (if you enjoy reading it, that is). I know it seems small, but it's just a way of staying in touch and cultivating a consistency that is rather helpful when it comes to keeping up a blog.
But onto the real news. I've decided to switch things up for the month of March. Rather than writing my normal occasional posts, I've decided to take a shot at vlogging (aka video blogging), an idea that was inspired after watching the rich art that is The Work of the People (please check it out, the videos truly are stunning). The first video down below is myself, talking about some of the main messages and purposes of my work-in-progress novel, Yellowtree! For the next few weeks, at least, and probably on and off throughout the year even after March, I will be posting videos of different people, all speaking about different things, but speaking from the heart about real life and real hearts and real journeys.
While I'm not making any strict parameters or guidelines for the other video participants, I am sticking with the running theme of "Identity." I realize this is a very broad word, so it's going to play out differently in each vlog episode, but I'm also excited to trace the similarities and to see glimpses of ourselves in the variety of voices we're going to hear.
Some of you may have seen the first cut of this vlog episode, which I ended up taking down several days ago. It took a few of my closest friends to inform me that I was trying too hard - that it wasn't really me, like I was hiding behind a mask or something. And that's just not acceptable, not for a series with its main focus on identity. So, this video down below is the final cut - the raw, unfiltered me that was very much missing from the first take. I want you to be able to be honest here, I want you to be yourself.
Because that's beautiful.
So, with no further ado, I present to you, Behind the Cardboard Camera.
Music: Easy Lemon Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
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Interested in reading Chapter 2 of Yellowtree? For a limited time, I'll have a Google Document open for whoever wants to take a look. It's only accessible by clicking the link down below, but if you're at all interested, I'll have it up for about a month or so. I'd love to hear your thoughts!
