Image-making with Midjourney, the ideas I steal, and why I don’t believe in intellectual property.
I always procrastinate, then finally get down to writing like half an hour before midnight/bedtime then get sucked into whatever nonsense I’m rambling on about then before I know it it’s 1:30 or 2:00 and I need to force myself to stop. Tonight is no different.
I started posting all these free-write speed blog entries to Medium.com. But I was like, scared or something, like scared of losing steam, or maybe of the criticism or something. So I scheduled them for a month out so I could go through and set all of them up, so now all of them are in a queue, one a day until late September. I figured that way I wouldn’t get discouraged when I either get little to no views or I get some nasty responses from people who think I shouldn’t be talking about how I feel on the internet.
I also went through and created images for all of them in midjourney. Not sure why I didn’t think of doing that before. I do really enjoy using midjourney and can create images that work for me really quickly. There is definitely an art to it, even if it’s nothing like being a quote-unquote “real artist”. It’s kind of like photography — I wonder if artists a hundred years ago when photography first came out were all mad at it, saying photos are stealing jobs from painters, saying photography takes no skill and it’s not really art. Like I remember a friend years ago going off on how DJ mixing isn’t real art, that it takes no skill. You have to make music from scratch to deserve any respect as a musician. I mean, sure, painting a realistic painting takes a hell of a lot more skill than pointing a camera, and making music with actual instruments I assume takes a whole lot more real skill than mixing and sampling does, but it’s still an art form. It’s just a much easier, more accessible art form. If you say that creating stuff in midjourney isn’t a form of art, then scrapbooking also isn’t a form of art.
But I think once I actually start making them right after writing the entry, it will make more sense to me, like, creating an image that fits to the journal entry and captures its emotion, well, that’s an enjoyable process for me, even if it doesn’t take any real “skill as an artist”, and it’s like, isn’t that enjoyment what art is all about?
Practically everything on Medium is behind a paywall. So strange. I don’t really have much interest in getting paid for writing–I mean, it would be nice for sure, but that’s certainly not why I do it, and I don’t feel as though I “own” the things that I create. The stories I write and the ideas that I communicate here, well they live in the minds of the readers. They’re the ones who truly own it.
Heard a quote the other day on that kids show Bluey, where the dad said something like “Once you create a piece of art and put it out into the world, it no longer belongs to you. It belongs to the people who experience it.” And I totally believe that. That’s why I just don’t get these people who say that ChatGPT and midjourney are “stealing”, and it bothers me that all these copyright laws might be applied to my work without my consent–like if someone wants to “steal” an idea from one of my books and make it their own, that’s flattering to me. I support that. But we’ve been trained to believe that’s wrong, and ultimately that stifles art. I mean, I got my start as a writer by stealing ideas and combining them in new ways, and by the time I was done they were often unrecognizable.
I’m currently listening to Hot Sky At Midnight by Robert Silverberg (it’s not available on Audible so I found a PDF and loaded it into my text-to-speech app), which was the second book of his that I read when I was sixteen. Much of that book I stole to create Austin Station, which was my first short story. If you read the two side by side, you can see the similarities, but at the same time, they diverged to the point where they wound up being two totally different stories with very different moods. Stealing ideas helped me find my voice.
And Daughter, the story I’m probably the most proud of, that I originally took from an episode of star trek the Next Generation, the one where Riker agrees to host some symbiotic creature in his stomach–the Host Season 4 Episode 23. I just remember watching that episode and thinking it had to be more complex than that–like I didn’t buy that two species form this perfect symbiosis and the host is just totally cool with being taken over and controlled by a creature in their belly. So I just thought about that scenario and made it what I thought would be more realistic and stole the idea for my book. Then I combined it with The Kingdoms of the Wall by Robert Silverberg, a story of 40 primitive people on an epic quest, having to figure out how to work as a team. I just combined those two stolen ideas and if you watch that episode and read that Silverberg book and compare them to my novel Daughter, well, you never would have known I stole the ideas if I hadn’t told you.
For Against a Rock, I remember I wanted to write something that was all action and violence, so I bought a Dean Koontz book and decided to copy his style as much as I could, but if you read my book, you wouldn’t really see much similarity between my writing and Koontz other than it’s full of action and violence. But I did use his voice as a guide.
This entry, as usual, is wandering off–I never intended to go on about stealing as a form of art.
In my collection book Stories of New Beginnings, I think in one of my intros, I think it was Austin Station, I admit that I stole some ideas from Hot Sky At Midnight, and I had a girlfriend who read that and kept insisting that I should downplay that, kept saying I needed to change it to “borrowed” or “inspired by”, as though Robert Silverberg is gonna come for me with a bunch of lawyers or something, like he wants his fair piece of the fifteen dollars a year I make off that book on Amazon.
Anyway, how do I get back to what I originally intended to talk about which was how I’m putting these entries out on Medium–I guess that’s kind of boring–like you don’t want to hear about how I’m debating which topic strategies I’m using and debating how much time I should spend formatting vs writing new entries.
But anyway, now any time I write a new entry, I’m gonna need to go into midjourney, create an image for it (something about thieving art I guess for this one), maybe asking ChatGPT what kind of images would work well for it, then asking it what topics would work well for it on medium– I think I should start using “freewrite” as a topic for most of them–which means I have to go back through all of them and update the topics for each. I figure “freewrite” is a good one for me, since these entries are haphazard and rambling compared to most stuff on Medium. It only has a couple other authors using it, which I guess is actually a good thing. Gotta find my niche. I think “spiritual atheism” will be my other niche topic, but I didn’t really think of that before entering and scheduling everything.
Anyway, it’s midnight thirty now and I should call it quits, since now I have a bunch of post-writing chores to do — fun chores, but chores.
