Writing My Military Autobiography (Updates 5 Feb 24)

Full Audio

Original Transcript

Okay, welcome to February 2024, and we’re already done with the first month of the year.

Two Brothers Talkin’ First Episode of 2024

And I just wanted to do a quick weekly update. Last week was hugely productive. Started out right hot out of the gate, releasing the first episode of my podcast, Two Brothers Talking with my brother, that was a lot of fun.

Making an evergreen newsletter

And then Tuesday, I forget what day it was, but I published the first official story and you newsletter, and I put a lot of work into that newsletter, because I wanted to not only talk about storytelling, but I’m trying to do, I’m trying to do a lot of things with this newsletter.

One of the things I hate about newsletters is that they tend to be so ephemeral, as soon as you send them out, they’re pretty much gone. I hate that. I’m trying to make my newsletters to where they can either become a book or a course or something, some type of reusable asset.

So that’s really tough.

That means I’ve got to do a lot more work on the upfront to make it to where it’s robust enough to stand alone. So I started Set the Story. I think that’s what I called it. And this is the first email in what will become an email course.

And I put that out in the newsletter. And I also wrote an original piece of microfiction, which was a lot of fun to write. Blazer to the Stars was so much fun. And I look forward to writing more of those microfiction because obviously they’re quicker to write and they’re a lot of fun.

“How I made an app”

Wednesday, I had to work. And so I didn’t have as much time to do creative stuff. But I recorded an episode of Makers Mirror, where I talked about completing the app. I did the week prior.

So the Military Game Tech Fiction Story Generator app that I made, I recorded an episode about how I made it and why I made it and turned out pretty good.

The First Novel Commander’s Call

The next day was, oh, I scheduled the first Novel Commander, which is my AI novel writing sort of guided course that I’m doing right now.

I’m excited about this course because pretty much it’s one of the first things in recent memory that I’ve gotten immediate traction on.

As soon as I sent it out, I immediately got two or three people to sign up for it. And I didn’t imagine there would be so many people who wanted to write a novel, let alone write it using AI or with AI assistance, I should say.

But there were a few people.

And on Friday, we had the first meet and greet session, which was fun, talking a little bit about the process.

And I sent out the first email talking about, yeah, how do you actually do this and walking through the process I’ve created of writing novels, which I plan to go through with writing Cereus & Limnic: Escape from Okinawa, I plan to go through that more.

Focus on the US military community

And while I was at work, I was able to read an entire book. I inhaled Nicholas Cole’s Premium Ghostwriting Blueprint.

And that set me off on this journey that I ended up going on at the end of the week of writing my first military memory book, is what I’m calling it, mainly because I saw what I was offering on my website.

And it’s pretty vague as far as, hey, just write any type of book. It could be any type of book that people want to write. And it’s not very, it wasn’t very specific enough.

And yeah, no wonder I didn’t get really any interest because it’s just too broad, it’s too broad of a net to cast. So I did something last week that I’ve been thinking about doing for years, but I’ve honestly been too afraid to do, which is just hyper niche down to just working with the U.S. military community.

And this is a community that I’ve been a part of pretty much my entire life. And for many reasons, I’ve been reluctant to engage exclusively with them, with my stuff, mainly because they’re just harder to find online.

They’re just too busy and they do online stuff, but it’s not the way I’ve been doing online stuff to where you find them regularly on LinkedIn or X or things like that all the time.

So yeah, I’ve been afraid to pretty much exclude all of the other people that I, that I interact with from working with me because that’s the audience I’ve been growing recently, not really a military specific audience.

My upcoming military autobiography

So I decided to say, fuck all that, I’m going to do this. I really enjoy working with us. I know it so well. And that got me writing my military autobiography, Hayden Brave, just did a bunch of work for that the last few days. That’s been my main focus, completed a mega prompt.

I started out just thinking about offering outlines, but as I got deeper into the process, I was like, I can put these books together relatively quickly.

And they can be, they can still be really high quality. And so that’s what I’m proving to myself. And since Thursday, since I started working on it, I’ve created a landing page, got two just awesome book covers, set out the vision for the Readware version of the book, which is basically an upgradable book that will allow readers to ask questions to me.

And then I will put those in the book and then they’ll get credit in the book for having contributed to the growth of it.

So I set the foundation for that. I, for the first time, I put a book on Amazon. I haven’t done that in years. And so, yeah, it was just, it was a lot of work, but it was relatively quick to what it used to be in the past.

So I’m really excited about this. This is going to be my focus this week.

This week, this first week, this full week of February, I should say, will be a shorter week. Got a trip coming up midweek, so won’t be at the desk.

But I plan to take maximum, make maximum use of the time.

So really that’s only the goal this week is to maybe finish, I don’t know, two or three chapters of the autobiography and get it done.

I could probably finish the whole thing, but I’m being conservative because I only have really two full days to do my standard work.

I think that’s going to do it for this week’s update. I hope you have a great week. See you later.

More information about my military autobiography: Hayden: Brave (haydenbravebook.carrd.co)