MandrakeMoorglade

As you may have noticed, most of my recent work has been AI generated art. I know this is a bit controversial, because a lot of people consider AI art to be plagiarism. I do understand and sympathize with their position. Imagine spending years developing your skills as an artist and hours creating a work of art you could be proud of while someone else simply spends a few minutes writing a prompt and generating an image that gets far more attention. There's just something wrong about that. Art that is created by real people should always be valued more than AI generated art.

This is why I don't claim ownership of any of the AI generated art I post here. Please feel free to copy, change, post, or use any thing I flag as AI generated. It's not mine. I didn't create it. I don't deserve the credit for it. The only thing I made was the prompt that generated it, and even that I'm fine with people using for their own purposes. AI art is not anyone's creation, I believe it belongs to the public for anyone to use freely.

However, I don't think AI art is plagiarism. I can see why people think it is, and I do think it can sometimes come very close to crossing the plagiarism line. But the way I think of it is this: every artist is inspired in some way by something someone else created before. We all have our influences whether it be conscious or subconscious. AI art functions in the same way. It draws on influences from all of the art has been trained on and uses it to create a new and unique image. But let me re-iterate. AI doesn't own the art, nor does the person who wrote the prompt that generated it. It belongs to the public.

As many of you know, I'm more of a writer than an artist. I've tried my hand at both traditional and digital art, but it's not really my thing. I have worked with better artists to illustrate my stories and now I'm experimenting with AI to see if it could get the job done quickly and accurately. But I don't think it's there yet. While it does produce some good individual results, it's not yet able to generate a series of images and characters that have any sort of consistency. Plus the content policy limits what it is able to create to such a high degree that you wind up spending a lot of time trying to reword your prompt in a way o as not to offend it. Time you could be spending actually doing your art.

But even if it does get good enough that it is able to generate exactly what you want with no restrictions, I still think human made art will always be better, simply because of the work and dedication that goes into it. The value comes not only from the product itself, but also from the effort that went into the creating the art. AI will always lack the heart and soul that we love about human made art and therefore will never be as good.

That being said, I'm still enjoying experimenting with AI and seeing what it could come up with. It could be I'll get bored with the novelty of AI and stop using it, and if it doesn't improve I probably will. But for now I'm just having fun with it and posting some of my results. I hope you enjoy it. By the way this journal post was NOT generated by AI, it's all my own words and opinions.

Dervland is finished! All chapters have been posted. Hard to believe I first came up with the idea for this story in 2005! Damn I'm old. This is by far my longest story, and the most complex. I'm probably never going to write anything this big again, but it was fun and very satisfying to have it finally completed.

As I mentioned before, I will probably take a long break now. I do have an illustrated chapter of "The Magic Bodystocking" in the works, so that will probably be next, but not for awhile. I have no plans, as of yet, beyond that. But I'm guessing I'll do some more short stories and comics as time permits. We shall see. For now, I just want to give people time to read Dervland and hear their thoughts on it. Please let me know what you think.

I know my page has been quiet lately but I've been busy. Since my last update I set up a system to work on Dervland a little bit each day so that I could finish writing the book within a year. Well, I couldn't stick to doing it every day so it took longer than that, but I managed to be pretty consistent and on November 19th I finished writing the last chapter!

Now this does not mean that it's finished. I still had to go through and read the whole thing to make my final edits and correct any errors or inconsistencies. As of today the first 18 chapters are complete, but there are 24 chapters in all. I'm hoping to have the rest edited within the week. But in the mean time I will be posting 1 chapter a day starting with chapter 8.

For people who have already read the first 7 chapters, you may want to go back and read them because I have updated them as well. Mostly they're just small corrections here and there, but there were some new whole sections added (namely more Attis Journals entries). I'm sorry about that, but I'm hoping these will be the last changes I make to the older chapters.

Anyway, let me know what you think. I know most people come here for my nylon tickling stories but although I tried to include at least one tickling scene per chapter, that wasn't the focus of this book. The main focus is the story, the characters and the themes of time travel, the soul and identity. The tickling scenes are just extra fan service to help draw people in (and for me to have fun with it).

This was definitely the most ambitious story I've ever written, and I don't think I'll ever do anything this big again. I still plan on getting parts of it illustrated since this was originally meant to be a manga series. But after this I will probably just stick to short stories.

BosArt finished illustrating part 2 of my 2010 story "The Interview". You can purchase it here:

Or you can join BosArt's website bosart.eu and read it there.

As for new stories, I have been working diligently on completing Dervland. Believe it or not, I think I will finish the whole thing before the year is over. I'm already 18 chapters in and I think there will only be a few more chapters before it's finished. I don't plan on posting anymore chapters until the whole thing's done though. It will be awhile, as my free time is scarce, but finishing this is a priority now so I don't think it will be long. When I'm done I will post one chapter a week. It's definitely my most ambitious story yet and is taking a lot of effort to complete so I hope you guys enjoy it.

I just posted chapter 7 of Dervland and I also updated all the previous chapters. The biggest change is in chapter 2 in which I added a significant section that wasn't there originally, but there were changes and additions made to all of the chapters so you might want to re-read the whole thing.

Why did I make the changes? Well, as I was writing the story there were times when I regretted not developing the characters and world more in the early chapters. I wanted to make sure all of the main characters were well developed and established in the early chapters before Angelica arrived in Dervland so that the audience would be able to recognize the parallels between the two worlds rather than relying on Angelica to point them out explicitly. For the major details, this had already been done, thanks to having outlined the whole story before hand. But the outline is only a broad summary and there was a long list of minor and more subtle details I wish I had fleshed a bit more early on. Plus I noticed that list was getting longer and longer with each additional chapter.

So I decided to just go through each chapter, fix any errors I can catch and added all the details I wished I had originally included. As a result the new versions of each chapter are longer than the original versions, especially chapter 2 which I always felt was too short, but is now twice as long. I realize now that releasing this story serially chapter by chapter is probably not a good idea, despite the fact that it's already been outlined. The longer the story gets, the longer it takes to re-read everything to refresh my memory, especially since it's taking me a year between chapters. Plus the editing and re-editing is also the most time consuming part of the writing process. If I'm going to be editing things I've already published on DA every time I write a new chapter, I'll be an old man by the time I'm finally finished.

So I think I'm going to try and finish the whole story before I release the next chapter. This may mean it will be an even longer wait for the next chapter but I'm hoping that if I save the editing process for the end rather than re-edit every time I release a new chapter, I will be able to finish it a lot more quickly. I'm also going to make more of an effort to write a little bit each day so that I don't have to re-read what I've written as much to refresh my memory. This is how most books are written after all, so hopefully it will work out. Wish me luck.