After going hard at Wattpad for a while I’ve somewhat lost interest in it. After the initial joy of re-writing some of the Grace story wore off I’m wondering what the point is. My only reader there is a fellow that came over from here. And there doesn’t seem to be a good way attract anyone’s attention on Wattpad.
I guess it did accomplish one thing, Wattpad gives you a one button “tweet this out” thing which I’ve been using, which has attracted me several fake new bot followers on twitter. So I got that going for me.
I’ve been thinking about the Grace blog/story/whatever in general. I have tons more ideas and things I want to write about. But, if we pretend for a second that the idea is to make it readable for anyone I’m wondering how to accomplish that. It’s already over 600 pages. If it just goes on forever on the off chance anyone wanted to figure out what was going on it would be improbable.
The best idea is probably to start cutting it up into individual stories – Grace the Demon Guy, Grace and the Evil Store Run By the Devil, Grace Punches A Sasscratch, etc. But that would require me to have stories in mind instead of just writing whatever.
The funny thing is the Grace blog/story/whatever is the only one that I didn’t start as a solo RPG thing and it’s the most like a sandbox RPG. There’s storylines, and callbacks, but overall it’s just a person in a world doing whatever. A world that’s eventually going to jump the shark and become unwieldy.
I’ve introduced two characters who are stage magicians into the Grace-world and I keep thinking of more. Apparently that’s an idea that I really like for some reason. Crime fighting stage magicians in a world where magic is real but they don’t have it.
One thing I’ve been mildly thinking about is starting a new superhero story about a chosen one/slayer/Buffy rip-off and a stage magician duo. The blog combination project lost me all my bots and a few real followers but it has done one good thing, broken the psychological whatever I was in where I only ever thought about the Ela and Grace stories.
I could start a new superhero story whenever I want. Or anything else.
I’m also thinking about trying out one of those AI art deals that everyone is mad about. I rarely add images to my posts, partly because I’m not a big image guy and partly because I can’t figure out how you’re supposed to give people credit and when it’s okay. If would be neat to see what the evil robot who’s ruining art forever would come up with.
I’ve absolved myself of any effort at attribution by using images from services like Pexels. Although maybe if someone uploads someone else’s work onto the service and I use it, I could still get caught out. And I do still feel like I ought to put forth the effort to acknowledge people’s work. Just…not enough to actually do it, you know?
I read a typically doomtastic Cory Doctorow thread recently where he talked about a new scourge of “Creative Commons trolls” who license their work under older CC licenses, then extort hundreds or thousands of dollars from people who use the work, but fail to include precisely correct license wording.
So I guess maybe your concern is justified? It’s not paranoia if they really are out to get you.
I do know, that’s my state about a lot of things