2024 Writing Log, Part Thirteen
Apr. 6th, 2024 08:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rynling- After a solid month of work, I finished Chapter 15 of Unfound Door. Finally! I also did another set of edits on Chapter 13. Even if this story never goes to print, the time I spent working on it will not have been wasted, because I’m really enjoying myself.
- I commissioned one of my favorite Final Fantasy fan artists, WhiteCatArts on Twitter, to create an illustration of Agnes from An Unfound Door. She posted the piece (here). This is a brilliant piece of work that wouldn’t look out of place on one of the iconic Agatha Christie paperback covers from the 1970s. I am incredibly honored and inspired.
- I also commissioned one of my favorite dark fantasy artists, IchiMakesArt on Tumblr, to draw an animated portrait of Ananth from The Demon King. (Here) he is! I’m looking forward to returning to this story so I can watch all sorts of terrible things happen to him.
- Since the beginning of the year, I’ve been working on a story about Hyrule’s creation myth called “An Elegy of Earth and Sky,” and I’m finally ready to let it go. The first half, which is about the three Triforce goddesses, is based on Hesiod’s Theogony. The second half, which is about Hylia and Demise, is based on one of the stories about Izanami and Izanagi from the Kojiki. This was a lot of work and research for a relatively short piece of writing that no one will read, but it’s something I wanted to create for a while now. The story is on AO3 (here).
- I wrote a mini-review of Premee Mohamed’s dark fantasy novella The Butcher of the Forest for an upcoming recommendation post on Women Write About Comics. I am all about dark forests filled with gods and monsters, and I love this book. I’ll link to the post when it’s live.
- I wrote a mini-review of Taiyō Matsumoto’s newest manga series, Tokyo These Days, for another upcoming recommendation post on WWAC. This is a hyper-realistic story about manga artists, the creative professionals who support them, and the creative industry that crushes everyone. It’s very bleak, but not without kindness, and also very beautifully drawn.
- I also wrote a mini-review for Hiromu Arakawa’s manga Silver Spoon as part of an SEO-boosting post for WWAC on the subject of “manga to read after Dungeon Meshi.” I have to admit that the Dungeon Meshi manga lost me in its most recent volumes, and I’m also going to admit that I could never make it more than halfway through Fullmetal Alchemist, but I really love Silver Spoon.
- I posted my essay about “Why You Will Always Write Better than ChatGPT” to my public blog (here). I’ve heard people say that objections to machine-generated art and writing shouldn’t take aesthetic concerns into consideration, and I totally understand where they’re coming from, but I disagree. If the people who work in research labs use ChatGPT to help summarize their work for publication in scientific journals, I honestly have no objection. But there’s no point to machine-generated creative writing, and hopefully I was able to explain why text produced by ChatGPT will never be interesting or pleasurable to read no matter how sophisticated the technology becomes.
- I posted the two Koroks that I contributed to the March of the Koroks collab event hosted by Zelda Creators. They’re on Tumblr (here) and (here).
- It’s good to have ready-made pieces to post this week, because I’m shifting my focus to a much larger illustration that I’ve been chipping away at for months. It’s a botanical still life that will get maybe twelve likes on Instagram if I’m lucky, but sometimes you just have to go “fuck it” and do a detail-oriented, balls-out banger job on a complicated project that’s just for you.
There are a lot of terrible things going on in the world right now, and it can feel almost schizophrenic to compartmentalize my life and creative work to such an extreme extent. Still, it’s good to be able to process the world through fiction and art sometimes, you know?
- I commissioned one of my favorite Final Fantasy fan artists, WhiteCatArts on Twitter, to create an illustration of Agnes from An Unfound Door. She posted the piece (here). This is a brilliant piece of work that wouldn’t look out of place on one of the iconic Agatha Christie paperback covers from the 1970s. I am incredibly honored and inspired.
- I also commissioned one of my favorite dark fantasy artists, IchiMakesArt on Tumblr, to draw an animated portrait of Ananth from The Demon King. (Here) he is! I’m looking forward to returning to this story so I can watch all sorts of terrible things happen to him.
- Since the beginning of the year, I’ve been working on a story about Hyrule’s creation myth called “An Elegy of Earth and Sky,” and I’m finally ready to let it go. The first half, which is about the three Triforce goddesses, is based on Hesiod’s Theogony. The second half, which is about Hylia and Demise, is based on one of the stories about Izanami and Izanagi from the Kojiki. This was a lot of work and research for a relatively short piece of writing that no one will read, but it’s something I wanted to create for a while now. The story is on AO3 (here).
- I wrote a mini-review of Premee Mohamed’s dark fantasy novella The Butcher of the Forest for an upcoming recommendation post on Women Write About Comics. I am all about dark forests filled with gods and monsters, and I love this book. I’ll link to the post when it’s live.
- I wrote a mini-review of Taiyō Matsumoto’s newest manga series, Tokyo These Days, for another upcoming recommendation post on WWAC. This is a hyper-realistic story about manga artists, the creative professionals who support them, and the creative industry that crushes everyone. It’s very bleak, but not without kindness, and also very beautifully drawn.
- I also wrote a mini-review for Hiromu Arakawa’s manga Silver Spoon as part of an SEO-boosting post for WWAC on the subject of “manga to read after Dungeon Meshi.” I have to admit that the Dungeon Meshi manga lost me in its most recent volumes, and I’m also going to admit that I could never make it more than halfway through Fullmetal Alchemist, but I really love Silver Spoon.
- I posted my essay about “Why You Will Always Write Better than ChatGPT” to my public blog (here). I’ve heard people say that objections to machine-generated art and writing shouldn’t take aesthetic concerns into consideration, and I totally understand where they’re coming from, but I disagree. If the people who work in research labs use ChatGPT to help summarize their work for publication in scientific journals, I honestly have no objection. But there’s no point to machine-generated creative writing, and hopefully I was able to explain why text produced by ChatGPT will never be interesting or pleasurable to read no matter how sophisticated the technology becomes.
- I posted the two Koroks that I contributed to the March of the Koroks collab event hosted by Zelda Creators. They’re on Tumblr (here) and (here).
- It’s good to have ready-made pieces to post this week, because I’m shifting my focus to a much larger illustration that I’ve been chipping away at for months. It’s a botanical still life that will get maybe twelve likes on Instagram if I’m lucky, but sometimes you just have to go “fuck it” and do a detail-oriented, balls-out banger job on a complicated project that’s just for you.
There are a lot of terrible things going on in the world right now, and it can feel almost schizophrenic to compartmentalize my life and creative work to such an extreme extent. Still, it’s good to be able to process the world through fiction and art sometimes, you know?
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