Motivation and Direction

It's been a while since I added anything to the blog portion of my website. A lot of time has passed, so you would think a lot of progress has been made. Sadly I don't think a lot has progressed, surely not as much as I'd hoped for. Besides Zenarok, I've also been working on other smaller things here and there. My hope with the other projects is that they somehow translate well into adding onto Zenarok or becoming other projects I can divert to if I get unmotivated with Zenarok. I'm going to outline my deepest thoughts and my going-ons here, even if I know no one cares. The first thing I began pondering was art. I myself am a good graphic designer (self-taught) and have been screwing around in photo editing programs for years. However, no amount of photo editing can make me an artist (without stealing assets of course). But I have a strong desire to make my book more appealing to my peers, and it's sad to say, but I think a good majority of people who begin to read my book, get bored of it. I've been working on this book for nearly 2 years and no one has gotten past Chapter 3 (as far as I know) except my girlfriend, who only is currently caught up on my latest chapters because I read them to her. With the rise of AI art lately, I decided to venture into that front. At first I tried to make friends with people who made AI art (still might be viable) to see if they could generate some baseline characters from my book for me to work with. I only managed to get 2 people to help me with this, and they both gave me pretty scuffed images. I didn't give up though, and eventually I myself learned how to get Stable Diffusion working. I started experimenting at first, but eventually I managed to get some decent images that somewhat matched my vision for the characters in my book. The problem with what I ended up making though, was that there's something about the way AI anime characters look that makes them seem very cookie-cutter and uninspired. Not only that, but if I wanted to go into specifics, like generating a scene from my book, the AI had a large deal of trouble trying to figure out my vision. Even now with a good amount of knowledge and about a year of practice on Stable Diffusion, I feel AI art isn't good enough for what I'm seeking. In all fairness to AI, it does some things very well, and as a photo editor, I may be able to incorporate real art and AI art together somehow.

Instead of focusing on AI, I more recently have dabbled in actually making digital art. Half my motivation for anything is sexual desire and my need to be lewd and horrible, so naturally I started drawing explicit art. The problem arises though that as a novice, I'm clueless when it comes to how to color/shade, how to make linework look good, and most importantly, I lack the know-how to make poses or positions look correct while maintaining proper scaling and proportions. But I haven't given up, I still continue to experiment and doodle here and there. I have a particular style in mind I'd like to do the art in, and it will take a large amount of time to get to the point where I'm even comfortable showing my art. So don't hold your breath for that quite yet. It's a shame my venture into writing doesn't make me money or anything because I'd much rather hire a talented individual to make the art for my work. Another aspect I've been dabbling in lately has been music. Why does a book need music you might ask? While on the one hand, it doesn't at all, on another, wouldn't it be nice to have music while you read? I'm certain I'm not the first to come up with the idea that maybe online readers could click somewhere on my website and listen to some original compositions related to my book. It's an ambitious idea, but it hasn't stopped me from screwing around in FL Studio and bandlab.com to try and make something. Again, like with art how I'm sadly no good at art, I can make graphics and do photo editing, I struggle with melodies, harmonies, and basslines. Even though, I used to be a percussionist back in school. I can make beats and I know how to make a decent-sounding lo-fi track or easy-listening type of music, but what I want is far more ambitious. I want a theme song, I want a catchy melody, a memorable motif, and something that even long after hearing it will stick in the minds of the listener. My motivation for the tracks I'm trying to create comes from video games like The Legend of Zelda and Fire Emblem. In my head, I think memorable tracks like 'The Song of Healing' and 'Together We Ride' convey strong emotions that I want others to feel when reading my book.

Lastly, the writing itself. While I feel like the more I write, the more I improve, the more words I learn from digging around in a thesaurus/dictionary, and the more work I put in correlates with the quality of the reading material. However, maybe it was a mistake to do so, but I've installed Grammarly on my browser for when I write. I feel like Grammarly does a pretty good job at seeing the weird way I voice/talk/write and corrects it to make more sense. But in that same sense, I don't want to stray too far from my writing having it's original voice unique to me. Even now as I type this blog, Grammarly wants to make changes here and there to what I say, even if I would normally never present my words in such a way. So I'm really on the fence about it, but part of me thinks the reason why Grammarly hasn't impressed me much is simply because there is a better version of it hiding behind a paywall. If I simply had a full version or a subscription or whatever, I could make a better decision if it's worth my time, but as it sits, the software kind of teases at the idea that it can help make my writing less cliche, less wordy, and less my voice, and more proper. If the full version of the software were free or if I owned it, I could make that choice, but right now it's tough to say. (I felt the same way about Novel AI and paying for that service.)

Another small venture I tried recently was learning Unity for making games. I've always wanted to get into making RPG games, and part of writing for me has always been conceptualizing interesting, unique, and fun game ideas. I got through some tutorials and managed to make a top-down game in Unity, but I know I will run into issues later when it comes to assets. The very things I just mentioned I've been trying to get into, art, graphics, music, and code. Making a game is way harder than writing a book, but my need for quality is what makes all of it hard no matter what. I refuse to push out some half-assed game with a terrible plot or badly balanced mechanics. But from what I've been told/seen, the best way to get more into making games is to start by making simple dumb games like what you'd see in mobile games, or the old Flash games.

Whatever path I take, it will help Zenarok in the end. I assure you that. I've debated in my head hundreds of times if a book is the best way of conveying the story of Zenarok, and I've considered making it a visual novel, a game, or even a mix of both. However, I'm just one person, and no one will ever have the motivation I have for my passion projects that I have. Even more so if I'm not motivated to work on my own projects. So for that reason, I have to continue to search for motivation and inspiration. That or find someone who shares my passion for these projects. Even my girlfriend who normally shares much of the same enthusiasm for my projects, I have serious doubts she will want to help much unless I twist her arm. Anyway, that's all for now. If you actually read this, you have no idea how much that means to me. I would also of course implore you to give me ANY kind of feedback on Zenarok that you may have. I'm beginning to get desperate for readers at this point. Also, here's a short survey I made about adult content: https://forms.gle/M98vsciscX9TvoYx8 Please fill it out if you have the time, it's very short and you can remain anonymous. I simply want to gauge the norm of what people like when it comes to adult media.