On January 1 of 2024, I started a long-term exploration I call my “Year of Creativity.” As the first project, I launched “Todd the God,” a comic strip about an ancient god of hammers trapped in a rock and working customer support for an online tool retailer.
The “Year of Creativity” is about seeing how I can use digital tools to open up new avenues of creativity beyond my writing, such as visual art, filmmaking, and music. And as I have always encouraged others to learn in public, I’m doing so here.
When I started my first website in 1995, I was a couple weeks from turning 27. I turned 55 in 2023. I’ve reached a point where I can see retirement off in the distance, and it’s frightening because I have an important question to answer: “How do I not retire to the couch without needing a ‘job’ to keep me busy?” I realized I have to keep creating. So while I call this my “Year of Creativity,” it’s technically the first of ten (or more) where I make and share stuff to see where it leads me.
I have four areas of focus this year:
- “Todd the God” – my comic strip.
- The sequel to Hell on $5 a Day – my novel.
- Making short films.
- Writing and producing some songs.
None of these are completely new to me.
My adventures in cartooning
I published my first comic in the college newspaper in 1993. It was drawn in (and you’re going to laugh) Microsoft Word. I published one other that is lost to the annals of history. 20ish years later, I’d do a guest strip for “The Superfogeys,” where I took frames from prior strips and wove them together with a new storyline. I created Todd to allow me, with my rudimentary drawing skills, to have fun doing a comic. It’s inspired mostly by “Dinosaur Comics,” which uses the same sequence of images over and over, keeping it fresh and interesting with the writing. There are a couple of other comics like that, but Dinosaur really convinced me I could do it.
Todd is an unchanging rock, which I used Dall•E to help me create (and then embellished to make it mine), along with public domain clipart for the furniture and walls/carpet. I try to make it a bit more visually interesting by also having an easy chair (in addition to a couch) and changing the framing in each shot. What did I draw from scratch? Todd’s headset. All the Pebble Minions (the first of which was introduced in the January 15th “Todd’s Minion” strip), are variations on Todd, but they move, which already forced me to spend some time experimenting with adding that movement to the strip.
My adventures as a novelist
Hell on $5 a Day was actually started in my last quarter of college in a writing workshop. Almost nothing of that start remains except for the characters of Alain Beaudreaux and Vinnie Rinaldi. I fiddled with it for almost 28 years before finally releasing it. About halfway through I completely threw out and rewrote Alain’s entire origin story and more.
I’ve been working on the sequel since 2009. I’d prefer to take less time to finish it. One of the things I’ve been doing is researching not how AI can write it for me, but how AI can be a research assistant and advisor, helping me break through writing blocks.
I’ll mention in the next section how ChatGPT has already helped me with that in another area. Here. for example, I’ve set up my war between factions of angels and Alain deciding to go back to America after living out in the countryside with Marie. But that requires me to navigate postwar Paris, postwar Los Angeles (I grew up there, but decades later), and some of the specialized knowledge important characters have about stage magic and mentalism. With the new custom GPTs, I can feed ChatGPT a bunch of historical documents, books on stage magic and mentalism, and get it to give me useful answers I can translate into story.
My adventures as a filmmaker
I acted in student films for a few college friends who were studying fimmmaking, took a screenwriting class in college and a TV writing class at UCLA extension, and I’ve made multiple demo/instructional videos. I got an idea for a series of animated shorts about a fictional news channel whose fictional stories will be oddly relevant in an election year. Now I’m trying to figure out how, with minimal budget and minimal time, I can create those short films with AI assistance in designing the characters, doing the animation, and turning my voice into the voices of all the characters. This is probably the most familiar and unfamiliar territory simultaneously. While I know how to write it and mostly how to voice it, going from that to a polished video is where I’ll really have to stretch.
To help build my skills, I signed up for Curious Refuge‘s AI flimmaking bootcamp. It costs about as much as a 1 year subscription to Adobe Creative Cloud’s “all apps” package, which seems like a lot, but amortized together over the year, the combo of the AI flimmaking bootcamp, Adobe Creative Cloud, ChatGPT Pro, MidJourney Creator, and Elevenlabs Creator come out to around $50 a week. I’ve had more expensive hobbies and I’m lucky that, as a tech professional, that’s affordable.
It was during Curious Refuge’s lessons on using ChatGPT as a writing partner, that I learned the power of custom GPTs and realized how one could help me with my novel. I gathered 19 screenplays from some of my favorite films and fed it into ChatGPT and then asked it for ideas related to the plot I had come up with for my homework assignment. While I wasn’t a big fan of many of its suggestions, the character Valentin survived as did one gag. The best part was by giving me something to say no to, it helped me clarify in my own mind what I’d say yes to.
I don’t consider ChatGPT a replacement for a writer, but as a writing partner to bounce ideas off of and brainstorm with, it’s not bad.
Here’s my week 1 homework, a narrated pitch deck with images created in Midjourney and Dall•E:
My adventures in music
Back in college, I was a karaoke fiend. I not only made some money hosting Karaoke at bars, I made some money winning or placing in karaoke contests. I can sing. I just can’t read or write music. I’ve written lyrics for songs and have the music in my head, but getting it out into the real world has been a challenge.
Once again, this is where I hope AI can help, letting me hum or sing to generate the sequence of notes, possibly the right timing, and then helping to orchestrate the music and turning my voice into different lead singers plus multiple backing singers, allowing me to use a DAW (Digital Audio Workbench) to produce something I wouldn’t be ashamed to share with the world.
I’ve published a few of my early experiments with DAWs like LMMS and FL Studio to my Soundcloud, but I want to go far beyond that with the help of AI.
In Conclusion
I’m hoping in the next year to level up my skills as I branch out into art forms with which I’ve flirted but never committed to. This is my “side hustle,” and while I have plans to monetize it, the money (if this generates any) is mostly to help offset the costs for tools and classes… but I’m not hostile to it building into a full-time job within 4 or 5 years. In the meantime, I hope to create content that will entertain my friends and a handful of fans and potentially win me a few more of each.