My divorce came with the sense of being excommunicated for falling from grace. There’s something romantic about that, as if I were the servant of a petty god who found disfavor with me and cast me out to tread upon mortal ground, and now here I am picking my way along a rocky hiking trail as a warm October wind smacks me in the nose with dead leaves. Not every moment can be cinematic.
I hiked until my fear of heights kicked in, and while I’m logically certain that my feet were solidly planted on the ground, I couldn’t stop the light-headed notion that every footstep was perpetually sliding towards the edge and my inevitable death, so I turned around and headed home, much to my dog’s relief. He’s not a fan of windy heights either.
The thing is …
My AI art set up was dependent on that grace from which I have fallen. Unfortunately, my posts about how to generate AI art are the most popular, go figure.
The depressing part is that it’s not like AI art even meaningfully existed until a couple of years ago, yet now I feel the loss of it deeply. No more character portraits. No more setting the scene. No more visual supplements for my writing. At least not the same way that I used to.
I could download Stable Diffusion et al, but at the moment it doesn’t feel right. I’m too busy relearning how to be mortal … free from the gaze of my petty god.
Perhaps instead I’ll go back to my roots. I’ll channel the energy of that 17-year-old who’s Creative Writing teacher advised her to express all of her emotions through writing, and all she needed was a gel pen and a notebook.
We can save the fancy technology for the editing phase.
Meanwhile, I’ll have to figure out how to draw traffic to my blog without all the fancy keywords and visuals.
By Autumn Rain 