My Heart Burns There Too

Some serious 'honeymoon' energy.

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Prompt: How Hawaiian

Holy Hell

The Empty Wake

Storm Drain

Under Her Spell

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Second piece in my Supernatural × Norwegian Folklore series!

This one is inspired by the Huldra, a beautiful yet dangerous figure from Norwegian folklore, said to lure unsuspecting people away with her charm. Depending on the story, meeting her can lead to fortune… or to never finding your way home.

I’m honestly really proud of this one. It’s only my second fully painted illustration, and I think Castiel’s face is the best face I’ve painted so far. 🥹 Painting still feels a little intimidating to me, so every piece is a learning experience, and this one feels like a genuine step forward.

I don't have a great imagination—I don't get a lot of genius ideas that come to me in wholecloth. I also don't come up with plots very easily, and my eyes are bigger than my stomach a lot of the time—I'll want to write about, idk, a heist, but I won't know how to come up with a heist to write about.

When I was a baby writer? Even an intermediate writer? I totally would have used AI to get around that stuff. I would have used it to help me come up with ideas and prompts, I would have used it to help me come up with heists and backstory and evil villain schemes, and all sorts of stuff. I know I would have, because I'm inclined towards laziness and impatience, which is why I'm a decent cook but a bad baker. I would have skipped the messy boring steps of figuring out what I wanted to write about—and how to do it—so that I could tell the kind of story that I wanted to tell.

And so I never would have learned that I don't get genius ideas that come to me out of nowhere, because imagination for me happens on the page, not in a daydream. I have to sit down and start writing in a character's voice, and then the idea unfolds itself (or it doesn't! and that's instructive too!). I never would have learned how to write my way through topics I find intimidatingly complicated—sometimes that means learning to write an actual heist story, and sometimes there's ways to tighten the focus on the parts of the story I'm actually interested in. Learning what to put in soft focus and what to keep in the foreground and what you can leave in impressionist watercolor and what has to be photorealistic is part of the craft. Realizing you don't have the skill to do something yet, or don't have the skill to do something easily yet, and figuring out how to do it anyway is how you become a better writer.

I don't know that there's a solution yet. I can't even blame the baby writers making these choices, because again, I 100% would have done the same thing.

But it makes me so sad, because there's all these young artists who aren't learning the things they should be learning, and that means they're not going to get better. Maybe the art they're making right now will seem better than what they could have made without AI, but it's not going to improve. And the thing about AI is that it can't innovate, it can only repeat and remix. So what's going to happen to those writers in ten years, when their skills haven't grown from where they are now, ie baby-intermediate big-eyed and small-stomached writers? They're not gonna level up. There are so many stories that won't get told.

idk. I'm really glad I'm not a baby writer right now. I'm glad I have a foundation of skill that I can keep building on, so in ten years I won't be the same writer I am now.

if you're a baby writer, and you've used AI, I get it, and it's okay—but it's not good for you. it's not good for your art. it's false nutrients. I want you to grow. That's not going to help you grow.

It makes a ton of sense to me that you could be legitimately writing good stuff right now with the assistance of AI. I think if I fired up Claude or Chatgpt or whatever, right now, and asked it to give me a plot, or to give me a scaffold, or to add a complicating element, I could write something really good. Because I'm a decently good writer, and more than that, I'm a decently good fanfic writer—I'm used to folding in ideas and plots and story elements that aren't original to me, and doing something fun with the result. I think I could use AI to make something, in this moment, that was 1) inclusive of sincere artistic labor on my part, and 2) a really fucking good story.

I bet there are a lot of writers who are doing exactly that, and who feel angry that people are treating the whole work like it came from nowhere, instead of something that they made themselves, when they DID make it themselves—most of it, or part of it, or the seams of it, or something. That really makes emotional sense to me. I would absolutely, ABSOLUTELY be doing this if I were nineteen. I cannot stress how much I would be doing this, and feeling happy and proud of the output—and I wouldn't even be wrong, because I WOULD have put real work into it, and it WOULD be good.

but aside from all the other reasons I find genAI repulsive—the climate damage, the theft of time and labor and expertise, the damage it's doing to literacy and truth and the foundations of what it means to communicate with another person across time and space—I'm a big enough age to know empty calories when I see them.

that story would be good!!!

but it wouldn't help me with the NEXT story. what it would teach me as an artist is how to write a story with AI, and that's naturally the skill I'd keep leveling up, because whenever I hit a weak spot, I'd use the AI to help me, and my other creative skills would atrophy and atrophy and I wouldn't be learning how to do anything NEW, and eventually, you bet your ass my taste would atrophy too, because that is how palates work. it's olestra for the brain. it feels like it's filling you up, but it's not. it might taste like a real potato chip on the tongue, but you'll die of malnutrition if you tried to live off it (and you'll have a really bad time in the bathroom later.)

POV: Your Eldritch husband thinks you go on too many business trips