General Writing Archives - Live Out Loud Too

Merry Crisis and a happy new Fear!

Sometimes I looks around and I’m thankful for all I have. Its not the material stuff, it is a story of my achievements. On the wall, on my table, in the small memorabilia I acquired throughout the years. It all takes back to a time when I arrived in this country and all I had was my laptop, a few pieces of clothes and an air mattress.

This year it was the 10th anniversary of me arriving in the USA.

There was a long way and don’t take nothing for granted. My fridge full of food, gas in the car, a warm house and a loving husband. The small things in life should be appreciated. All the small victories should have never been taken for granted. America has changed me a lot.

As I look around the room, the small SheShad that I build, that I like to call my office/ studio, I can see all the progress I made in those years of sweat and tears. I might not have a higher CEO position in a company, I might not have bought a property, I don’t even have a bicycle, but you know what I have? Hope. Joy. Again, pride in my small victories.

Immigrants are ingrained with the moral and social responsibility of succeeding. So we can show our people, who stayed back home, we left for good a reason. We left for a better life, comfort and some more money. That makes them think we are rich. Because we are in America and have the newest IPhones, we are loaded with money.

The better life not always means more money.

Eventually it just means you have the safety you didn’t have in your own country, or that you feel safer to be who you are without being killed. By religion, by society standarts among other things. What people don’t see is, we are probably broken inside, and filled with guilt of leaving everything behind to start over. And most of the times, there are families who stayed back home, are guilt-tripping us into some madness, some psychological warfare. So we find our family members that we choose to put in our lives. Your support system.

We bond over our failures

Your support system are usually other people that has the same struggles as you. Mine are immigrants( and poc, who are indeed immigrants too). All my friends were bonkered (my word of choice for “screwed”) in a different way arriving in this country. We bond over our failures and our achievements. We sit at the bar and we cry because sometimes life sucks.

I look around in my office, full of stuff, I’m taken back to how much I had to get rid off, in order to accomplish everything that hangs on the wall. When my confidence is nowhere to be found, I stay quiet in my chair, look at my pictures, and share some gratitude. I manifest to the universe all the cool thinks that are still to come, how strong I was to get where I’m today and I ask you to do the same.

New year, new me. Not really.

Next week, we enter a new year, and with that all those promises to get better, the lists, the goals comes at you all at once. Keep it simple, I suggest. I’ve been doing it the past couple of years, with just a few items on the list. Going to Therapy is the one I keep dragging to another year. Since I don’t have insurance, the therapy podcasts are doing the dirty job. The second one is to write the script. I have it on a notebook, I wrote a little while I was at work, bored.So now I need to put it on Final Draft to accomplish the goal.

Again, keep it simple.

Want to eat healthier? Start by eating more fruits. Want to have a better and mindful attitude? Take long walks. Do something everyday that makes you happy. That’s been working for me. But there are also days when it doesn’t. So I give myself time and wait for the day to be over. I don’t write, edit, cook, or do anything. I just allowed myself to be away.

I let my mind wander.

My goal’s list are not up for next year yet. The past years the goals had been to intense, so 2023 I’m taking easier, way easier. Goals like citizenship, drivers license, create a youtube channel ( and actually post content) took a big part on my life during the previous years.

2023 I want to take even easier and maintain low expectations. Of course I want a lot, I’m just too scared to write it down.

Have you made your goals for next year yet? Let me know in the comments! Do you dream big, or do you keep on the down low like me? I’m going to work on mine resolutions now and post it here at the beginning of the year.

See you next week!

Stay healthy, Stay safe!

JS XXXX

Welcome to the new era.

We interrupt our normal programming to announce that this blogger just become a US Citizen.

I landed in this country 10 years ago, with 1500 dollars to my name and an extraordinary passion to win. At that point of my life, I didn’t belong anywhere. I hated living in Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro was never meant for me, and Fortaleza where my parents were living was a no go. I have tried before.

Home is where you heart is

When I arrived in Chicago, something hit different. I wanted to stay and grow roots for the first time in my life. Even during the worst moments, I could still see my future in it. For the first time, I felt like I belong somewhere. I was not afraid of anything, I just wanted to make it work. As I walked around town, I learned really fast that in America, you HAVE to act like you belong. Just like Anna Delvey, in Inventing Anna, if you pretend hard enough that you belong, they will believe you do. That’s what I did.

I never scammed anybody, but when it comes to Fake till you make it, she got a point.

The minorities like me knows what I’m talking about.

Within 6 months living in Chicago, I had it all. But I also had something my country never gave to me.Confidence. This country is made by people that take chances, that kick the entry door. We suffer, we cry in silence, but we also brush off the dust, every day at dawn, and start over. The minorities like me, knows exactly how to get over situations fast, in order to survive. It’s a jungle out here.

You become a citizen as soon as you leave your country behind and make your way into this place. The rest is just formalities.

The reason why I wrote all that, it’s because I just got my citizenship. I love Disney movies and I recently watched Pinnochio. It resonated with me so much.

Husband said “Hold on, there is one string attached. Its your wedding ring”

Well my bad 🤣 I meant no strings with immigration.

There are no strings to hold me down. To make me fret or make me frown.

After 10 years of having nightmares about visiting my family in Brazil and couldn’t go back in the US, I’m finally out of the lions’ dent. No more wake up sweating in the middle of the night. I’m here to stay. With all that being said, I will be focusing this blog in a less overdramatic line of writing.

As this blog has always been about my journey as an immigrant, which I will always be, I will continue to write about my experiences, but I will also be focusing in other projects. Now that the haze has lifted, I want to participate in some writing contests, with Coverfly, travel and dedicate more of my time to the youtube channel.

I’m moving forward to more of Film/producing/ editing line of work. Live out loud too will soon be Live out loud Too Productions. I waited for this moment for a long time. Three years to be exact. I like to think I just didn’t do it because I don’t have a garage. Or because of the Pandemic. I still don’t have a garage, but I will make it work.

Hopefully if you are still reading this, please my youtube channel! I’ve been posting shorts lately, as I couldn’t focus on writing or editing for the life of me. This is the latest short I posted!

“Yippee-Ki-Yay, Motherf*****.”

See you soon!

JS XXX

What is your WHY? And why?

The phone rang. I recognized the number and I don’t want to answer. The only number that can possibly call me from Florida is Full Sail University. After a few deep breath I answer. This very sweet lady from Full Sail wants to talk to me about my achievements since graduation, in 2019.

As she proceeds to question me about the ability of finding a job in Creative Writing, I have to be very careful in what I tell her. It’s not her fault what the school engulf of into thinking about our career prospects, she is just a messenger. I felt comfortable with her and I told her exactly how I feel about it.

Moving on the conversation, she gives me a few options about what could I do with my degree. I told her I tried everything I could, and did the best of my ability to find a job within a writing position, but all available placements in my area requires at least 5 years of experience, a portfolio, and a fresh angel’s wing feather.

I also told her some freelance job offers on Fiverr and Upwork requires a person to be born and raised American. Which means that a person born on the crusts of Tennessee, who barely can write or read, has more chance to get a job in my field, than me, born in Brazil, and soon to be naturalized American, who went to college here.

She sympathized with me, and at this point, she had stopped giving me ideas, like a therapist, the girl let me talk myself into my own ideas. We talked for almost an hour.

Moving on with the conversation, she went deeper and asked my Why.

Why I wanted to write in the first place? What were my interests and my goals? Again, the phone call was cheaper than therapy. Sometimes you need strangers or people who don’t know you in personally, to ask you why did you do certain things and hear yourself talking about your purposes out loud. It works for me, when I talk to my family about my goals, sometimes it backlashes, but most of the time I get something out of it, sometimes is tears, sometimes are ideas.

So me being me, I did I quick recap of the past 3 years. (pandemic included)

When I graduated I fully intend in working on movie productions. Pre-production, meaning, I would work with story development, research and scriptwriting. Before the pandemic, we flew to LA so I could see if I would like to take a film workshop for a few weeks. I visited NEW YORK FILM ACADEMY and talked with the Creative director about coming back for classes as soon as I could. Within 2 months the world shut down for 2 years and counting.

1 – I kept this blog up and running.

I can’t put as much content out as I would like to. during the pandemic, I had 7 posts in a month. They were all over the place, in many different aspects, but it kept the blog up and running. I wrote about tv shows, I wrote about success and failure, about immigration, about my future plans and the ongoing pandemic.

2- Participating in Nickelodeon TV Writing contest

The craziest and more neurotic writing I have ever done so far. I had 30 days to write 2 scripts and submit to the Nickelodeon tv writing contest. The requirements were: 1 original tv pilot and on spec script from the list. The Spec script was the most endearing one, because I wrote a spec of Hulu’s Pen15 and it had to take a lot of my own ideas of how was to be a teenage in the early 2000’s and squeeze from the first season. The original pilot took me two days to finish. I didn’t place it, but I felt accomplished.

3- Created/ in the works the concept of the “Shrubbery show”

If you ever watched Monty Python, you remember the Shrubbery scene. It’s genius. The Shrubbery Show would be a morning show, with different segments, full with the absurdities that only a morning show can provide. I watched those for many years as I always wanted to add a comedic side to it. I wrote the segments as Health ( a dad body trying to teach jazzersize classes), culinary, with a chef that is just pretty and rich, but cooks terrible food, finances, with a person addicted to shopping, among others (I’m always open to suggestions on the comments)

4- Launch my Youtube Travel Channel – TRVLS & Comida

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqGLGlPYM5ve0X5hADwvbSw

I always loved traveling and why not film it, edit it, work on the audio, put subtitles, music, graphics and upload on youtube, do the marketing, while having a full time job in a hotel? Easy. Excuse me, while I go scream in my pillow. I enjoy it so much, it has been giving me a purpose. I’ve been learning about film, edit, all that chaos of Adobe Creative platform. All those memes make sense now.

A short video from my channel. I have long format too.

To summarize my conversation with the lady from Full Sail is: I’m working, slowly but surely, and not yet getting paid for it. Eventually I will. I haven’t failed with my career choice, I was derailed by a two year pandemic. Me and the entire planet. I’m getting back on track now.

I guess we all are.

I refuse to let anyone butcher my dreams and you shouldn’t either! So, if your advisor or therapist for what it matters, call you today and asked you: are you doing what you want to do, or are you just getting by? Let me know in the comments!

And pls subscribe to my channel, if you want to 😊 It would be a great help!

XXX

JSnelly

How to write for a travel outlet

How to write for a travel outlet publication? I’m still trying to find out for the past 15 years.

During Tourism and hospitality college, I spent countless hours at the library reading Travel Magazines. At that point, while living in Brazil, my dream and life goals were to travel and write to one of those magazines. Not to be stuck in a hotel for the next 15 years, at the front desk, dealing with people traveling all over the world. I should be the one traveling!

I was never meant to get roots behind the desk.

How to write for a travel magazine? Asking for a friend

My favorite magazine at that time was Lonely Planet. It contained the travel guides, which I pretty much became obsessed with and promised myself, someday I would be one of those cool travel writers. I would write the article, take amazing photographs and leave like a Nomad. I just found out they have nomad visas now, since some people are working remotely full time!

At that time, I was also checking the possibility of being a photographer for the National Geo magazine. Little silly 20 years old me with big dreams, living in Brazil. That was way before we have internet access and all this cool things that the technology gave us.

One day I stared a blog to talk about my internship programs abroad, which I carefully and ruthlessly named “Where the hell is Joana?”

“Where the hell is Joana?”

The blog “Where The hell is Joana?” was to write about my experiences abroad, during the 3 months I was out of my country, for the first time ever, while living in North Carolina. My first mistake was: I decided to write in Portuguese, because my vocabulary at that time was rough and kept to a bare minimum.

When I wrote my first post and send it to my mom, she didn’t like it. She wrote me on msn messenger (yes, that long ago) and told me to not expose her or my dad. Nobody needed to know our personal life. I didn’t mean in any way to expose them, its not like they were celebrity rock starts and I was about to drop a major gossip on them.

I just wanted to write!

I would move on to my own adventures in short time. I just get drowned. I tried others posts, but my writing was confusing and random, as I focused more on the plugins and photos than my pieces I was writing itself. I tried again and reactivate the blog during the other internships, until I quit BlogSpot all together in 2009.

No shame on that. Years and years later, the writing got better. After all, this is my second language, I was born and raised and for my entirely life, Portuguese is my first language.

Life has a funny way to go around.

First I had to learn how to write fictional pieces, learn how to put a storyline, characters arc and development in perspective, until I could actually write non fiction with more confidence.

Again, I always wanted to write travel magazine articles, but for that I needed to learn how to tell a story. I still don’t have a magazine writing job, but I’m thankful we have blogs now. I’m also thankful for being able to document my travels on Youtube. It’s all taking place now.

Blogs and Youtube videos run on the same expectation of being heard and seen, but due to people’s lack of attention, my Youtube travel content is going much better than the blog has ever been. I’ve been learning a lot, especially about SEO and algorithm, so I will write a post about it, probably in the next week.

TRVLS & Comida – Youtube Channel

It’s all in the air now.

I’m working on some youtube shorts, since we are working full time and can travel all time

Maybe I had to go around for a few years or many years before I was able to pursue my long life dream of telling stories while traveling. Maybe some day I will get financed to write my web series, If I ever sit down to write it.

It’s all in the air now. Things actually work, you just have to be patient. And no, you are never too old to pursue your dream. Yes, I get that we can’t just drop everything and focus only on what we’d like doing it. We have bills to pay. (most of us has anyway. Trust fund kids, no)

Hang in there. It will get better.

See you next week!

XXX

The winds are shifting and that’s ok!

How and why will I be focusing on travel content instead of writing fiction? –

800 words.

My love for writing fictional content is still here, and it will still happen, but as for right now, I will try something that was there before. Something that has been in my mind for the past 15 years. Creating traveling content to move forward to fiction in the long run.

February was a busy month.

I’m trying to keep up with the blog posts, while also managing to work full time and survive the cold Colorado winter. This year has been a hard hit for us. We have snow every week and frigid temperatures that make us not want to leave the house. Not leaving the house makes me not want to write anything. I need to find a coffee shop to get less distracted.

Two weeks ago, even in sub temp cold weather, we decided to drive to a ski area and have lunch there. We needed to check the ski resorts area and why not do that online when you can drive two hours just to have lunch and make a few videos of it?

The GoPro can work some miracles.

I got a Gopro 9 for my birthday last October and that was the first time I used to film some content with it. Let me tell you, a GoPro makes an entire difference in video quality.

For someone who is a newbie like me, the Action Camera actually can work miracles. By the way, my next blog post will be about filming/editing gadgets for newbies.

One of the Youtube content creators I follow and make some awesome videos was talking about the gadgets he uses, as he has been working with photography for the past 15 years. That immediately took me back to the time I fell in love with Photography in 2004 and how different my life would be now.

What if I had followed what I wanted to work with? Would I be successful? Would I have a youtube channel talking about photography and videography? Would I be a pro at this point? It’s all in hindsight.

Life tripped me many times. I love writing fiction but I’m too insecure to write it. I’m very self-conscious and dramatic, and feeling like an outsider in this country doesn’t help me with my confidence. In my mind, I will wake up someday and write 300 pages and get published. My book will be chosen to be adapted to Netflix, Anna Delvey style.

The insecurity that comes from within.

Many times I ponder what is making me insecure? Why would I move mountains to live in the United States when I was younger and now that I’m here, I feel trapped?

When I was in Rio last year, my hometown, I felt like a winner. I could conquer the world, and as soon as I got back to America, my confidence was flushed and I was put back into my immigrant cave.

How does a person get out of this hamster wheel and get something done? That’s the reason why this blog exists, to share how I’m navigating life, as an immigrant trying to be happy, and getting things done.

Don’t be afraid to shift with the winds

By getting things done I mean, living my life to the fullest, while I do what makes me happy. I know what makes me truly happy. Traveling/Writing. That’s why I’m going to start filming some traveling content and posting it on social media. We will see what happens from that.

Don’t be afraid to shift the winds and adapt to whatever you are leaning to. Life is constantly changing and we are constantly evolving. I’m constantly in a spiral and I learn how to deal with my Brain giving me new ideas every day. I’m just happy I’m alive to try new things and make new plans.

Adapt.

This is not Toxic Positivity – It’s the positivity I have left to share.

I grew up with my mom saying “If you are not happy here, move.” We moved plenty of times and I had to adapt to different places and make new friends. So by my mom’s advice, if you are not happy, move. There is always a new day to try.

Change.

If what you are trying is not working, change the way you sail, or change where you are sailing. A couple of times in different pieces, I read that “You are not successful because you don’t stick with anything long enough.”

But what they never tell you is How long do you have to persist, before you start making some changes? It’s all so biased.

The video is a intro to the youtube channel I’m creating. I got some footage on Envato and the music I worked on Garage Band.

Like I said the word for this month is adapt. I’m going to New York for the first time in 15 years in two weeks. In summer we are going to hit the mountains with the trailer and create some content.

Let’s keep trying.