Happy Easter · 2:56pm Apr 10th, 2023
Hope you've all had a good one.
Again I can't apologise enough for not updating more frequently, but law schooling has been particularly brutal and last week were my first examinations so yeah, there was no work getting done last week at all to put it lightly.
That said I am recovering and I am working on several projects including finally, finally getting off my ass and getting a patreon started up and an account on Royal Road to start somewhere where I can get good engagement with my readers with good patreon integration so I can upload non-pony fiction more easily and begin actually making some supplemental income.
Don't get too excited, I won't be putting any of my proper projects up on my royal road account at first, having studied the site for a bit and getting a feel for the sort of stuff that usually succeeds over there, I'll likely start off with a story I have in mind to use as a decent start to draw in readers before dropping my more esoteric and involved fiction ideas such as Starbreak, Dominion, or any of the other 25 book ideas I have on the backburner. It'd be a big ask to get the people who prefer shit like litRPGs, shitty isekais and first person perspective reading to buy into my kind of writing without at least getting my name known amongst them first.
As for Bad Mondays, surprise surprise I am still writing it and haven't given up yet. I really ought to have more done by now and my goal was to get at least one chapter a month at a bare minimum. Not counting the New-Years Uncanoned chapter recently I am still 3 chapters short of my current goalpost so I need to get cracking. Fortunately I know exactly what I am doing for the Crystal Empire arc and the immediate aftermath so thats not going to be a problem. I will also, eventually, redo the maps of the continent I used to have and expand upon them as people have increasingly been asking of me, so I guess you can look forward to that.
Not much else to say for now other than my warning of never indulge in AI art generation like I did, its extremely fun but its a gateway drug to gacha games.
DON'T MAKE MY MISTAKE.
Happy Easter to all, hope you're all doing great!
Now, Handyman, that potato fund you're putting up doesn't happen to have any relation to Saint quartz, would it? Speaking of Fgo, how the hell did AI-art lead to Gacha hell? Also do you just copy and paste the AI stylings online, or do you put in personalized touches?
Good luck on the rest of your examinations!
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Basically it started out fucking around and finding out. Then it lead to getting a hell of a 'gacha' where on a particular AI art generator (one where you put in real pictures and it animefies it) I got a fucking amazing result after putting in an image of an old man at a St.Patrick;s day parade in a ridiculous getup and got out what I can only describe as an aristocratic mage.
i.gyazo.com/3c5933b0122e3f208784c43313d03896.png
Specifically this amazingly beautiful bastard.
This started an avalanche of fucking around in AI art such as Midjourney learning the ropes and getting a lot of amazing AI gens of my new character, which through the shenanigans of fucking around with prompts and making mistakes quickly generated a few other characters who fit the same sort of style who I decided to opt to make family members. Keep in mind I was doing all this after getting roped into a Call of Cthulu homebrew system warped to play games of Fate, where I was playing a Cu Chulainn Servant in the rider class (had to justify it by appealing to a different legend of Cu but it really worked out) in short form campaign grail wars.
This led to a new grail war after the first ended where I opted to play as a master instead, so I used this character as a basis for my new Mage. And holy shit did things snowball from there. As you can already guess one of the AI gens of Aranastor Padraig Rafferty is now my new avatar so you can guess how much of a shine I've taken to this autistic water mage of mine.
But from there I guess its kind of easy to see how easily I just... fell into the gacha trap of Quartz and Craft Essences. It hasn't claimed complete hold of my wallet... Yet. But I still put it forward as an abject lesson of never trusting the AI generator bots, its essentially a diet gacha system where what you get out of it depends on what you put into it, but at the end of the day, you're still paying to play.
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Thank you, I'll certainly need it!
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Ah, but the difference is that paying for one of them is completely optional! Outside of time invested, of course. Who's your favorite servant? Outside of the Irish ones, I mean.
Mine was Archer of Shinjuku/James Moriarty.
Happy (belated) Easter to you too.
I do worry about what splitting your writing time will do given your current glacial pace, but if you wind up setting up shop on Royal Road I'll at least semi-track it, and may even set up an account over there (although I'm not giving patreon my money).
Also, if you want an idea for a shitty isekai to get them used to you, I understand the traditional opening is to have the protagonist get run over by something, so here's a plot bunny to get you started:
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Haven't settled on a favourite yet, though this max ascended Arthur Prototype is fucking CARRYING me right now. Got a lucky Max Ascension gimick after getting a hell of a roll on Arthur and maxed him out immediately.
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I already have a shitty isekai idea whose sole purpose is to draw an initial readerbase on Royal Road from which to build up from. Fortunately I didn't go with truck-kun because even when I am actively trying to be a hack, I just can't quite do it. Also shitty is probably not the proper word for it, 'tropey' is more accurate and its definitely going to be my lowest effort work to date which is why I'm not focusing on it too much right now, I want to get twelve chapters for Bad Mondays done this year at a minimum so thats currently my focus.
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That's great to hear, and I figured you already had something in mind so no worries. I just figured I'd throw out steamroller-kun because it was a silly idea I had a while back and it would be a very low effort way to draw attention. Just drop in the iconic image of that guy screaming at the steamroller as the cover picture and a ton of people will feel compelled to check it out. To make it worse, it would be trivially easy to clear copyrights by swapping names, letting you publish it for a low-effort cash grab that would almost certainly be embarrassingly successful.
YESSS finally
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Truck-Kun is iconic for a reason!
But good luck either way :)
Are you going to keep your royal road account a secret or are you going to share with the rest of the class?
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I'll share my crimes against literature when I am good and ready to be prosecuted in the court of public opinion, thank you very much.