As an indie-published author, there are certain things I have in common with other authors. We suffer from imposter syndrome. Most of us are perfectionists. We are too hard on ourselves. Procrastination is another word for writer’s block. I know I am not alone with these issues. What should we do when we feel these roadblocks get in our way?

Just keep writing.

I can finally say that I am writing my second book. I have talked about it a lot and I have thought about it way more than I talked about it. I signed up for NaNoWriMo to get this book started. I have not taken part in it every day. In fact, I came across a conundrum a few days ago.

I am writing my next book about a concept I created a few years ago. Tishspiration. I have defined it as the art of surprising yourself, and it is a word that has a lot of potential. I know it has grown bigger over time, and I know I need to write this book to move on to what will be next.

What happened?

Well… to explain this I will need to give a little background information. The concept came to me when I was creating a campaign to go with my dream of dancing with Janet Jackson. This is not a joke I sent in an audition. It was thirty seconds long, and I worked really hard to make it real.

She never called.

But I did it! I sent in the video I made, and I had a moment of pure JOY when I realized I was going to send in the audition. I wrote a blog post and created a few graphics in Canva to hype up my efforts. I teased about it on social media, and when I sent the audition in, that was the single most active thing in my social media history. My thirty-second audition video did not go viral, but it got viewed over 1.3K times.

I even created a YouTube channel to have a place for it.

Then I made a blooper reel, to show my progress and a bit from behind the scenes. It is also can be seen on my YouTube channel. As I started writing, I wanted to make sure I had the details right for the description of the audition. I went to my YouTube channel. The dashboard has changed, and I could see all of my videos at a glance. Something looked different, and it caught my attention. The blooper reel has a copyright claim against it, from the producers of Janet Jackson’s music.

There was a moment of panic crossing my mind when I saw this. I had to stop writing my book and find out what this meant right away.

With a bit of research, I found out it is not a copyright strike against my YouTube channel. This was an immense relief to me. I have not earned money from it, and I have no plans to earn money with the blooper video. As I researched, I found that I have actions I can take, and it lists them:

1. Trim out the segments which are flagged within the copyright claim.
2. Replace the music.
3. Mute the music.

The notice with the copyright claim states the video cannot be monetized, and if there is ad revenue generated in the flagged section, it will go to the copyright owner. Which I would not dispute, I have no copyright claim to the music in the video at all.

An interesting point to note is that the thirty-second audition video does not have a copyright claim, as it was done for the audition, and they granted permission to use the music for this purpose only. The time the music is in the audition video also is allowable within the fair use in terms of copyright.

I earned nothing from this, nor do I plan to earn from it.

With the mystery solved, I could go back to writing my book, but I still have to decide what to do about the claim. I am not in danger of being sued. Which was, of course, the biggest fear a person could face with this copyright claim. I have given it some thought, and I have decided to not only mute the section, but then to share it on my social media and create a challenge with it. I want people to play their own music while watching the video in the muted section and let me know if there are any songs that work to fill in the muted section. If I need to change it, then I am going to make something out of it to let people know why I had to make this change.

When I saw the claim, there was a bit of anxiety about my book, too. I went to several online writing communities to ask for advice on this. The consensus is that I can absolutely write about my experience, as long as I don’t use the lyrics of the song directly in my book.

Phew.

Now I can…

Just keep writing.