Writing for NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) kept me from writing for my blog last week. To hit the 50,000-word goal for the month, I need to write an average of 1,667 words each day. Depending on how focused I am, that takes me anywhere between 1 hour and 2 hours. Lately, it’s been closer to 1 hour than 2 hours because I’m getting better at getting started.

I’ve been enjoying this process of writing every day. The first few days went by fast because I wrote an introduction to my book and did a quick recap of my life in a few different sections like bipolar, technology, and spirituality. Once that was done I thought I’d just jump into each topic and… that didn’t happen. I’d sit down with something in mind to write and the words wouldn’t come. I brute-forced my way through a few writing sessions like that, but it wasn’t fun. Then one day I had the idea of doing a little free writing at the start with no real focus on what I would write about. After a paragraph or so of free writing, I found a topic and the words started flying. I tried again the next day and got the same results. Now that’s my habit. I pull up a blank document, I start rambling about whatever’s on my mind and then I find a topic and I’m on my way. There’s been a couple of interesting times when I started writing about one thing but ended up spending all of my time writing about a specific detail of something.

Something else I’ve been doing is leaving my writing unfinished. I didn’t do that with the introduction. I kept writing that until I was done, but everything else I write until I hit my goal for the day (usually a little more) and I stop even if there’s a lot more to write. I like doing this because I’ll be getting the maximum number of stories started during this challenge instead of going deep on a few stories.

I will, without a doubt, keep this writing habit going after November. The first few times I tried this challenge I thought I was going to finish a book in a month and then be able to edit and publish it shortly after. I also never successfully finished the challenge. This time I see a mountain of writing ahead of me before I can even think about a book. I have 5 different books in mind and I’m writing content for all of them. The more I write the clearer the picture gets about what one of the books will look like, but they’re all very fuzzy pictures right now.

How’s Life Been The Last Two Weeks?

Life has been good! I think I talked about it a bit in my last video/post but going through my old journals was interesting. I wanted to get them organized before NaNoWriMo and that ended up being a waste of time (for now). I’m not looking at any of my old stuff to write. I just sit down and write. That said it was really interesting to see how much my journaling style has evolved from the first journal to what I’m doing now.

An owner of a beer garden was celebrating his birthday two weeks ago. I ended up SLAMMING some beers while talking to friends. That was a super good time. I can’t remember the last time I drank like that. While it was fun it made the next two days less fun. I didn’t regret it, but I did make a mental note about not doing that too often.

There was a typhoon a couple weeks ago which gave everyone a day off. That typhoon actually hit our area pretty hard. Lots of trees got knocked over or uprooted. The path behind the house had lots of trees blocking the path that we had to climb over or through.

I’ve been playing this game called Ghostrunner (1&2) for the past two weeks. I beat the first and I’m working on the second right now. It’s fun. You’re this cybernetic ninja that runs on walls, jumps and grapples around, and kills enemies. There’s no health bar. If you get hit once you die.

Last week I was primarily getting used to the writing habit. It was kind of hard to work into my routine at first. I also forgot to take my meds two Sundays ago which totally destroyed my sleep and made the next two days kind of terrible. This week I’m more on top of my habits and the writing habit is going much more smoothly.

Notes From My Journal

After going through all my YouTube videos two weeks ago I observed that what miltownkid evolved into was ultimately unhealthy. That’s not a persona I’ll be revisiting again.

I questioned my current persona which is focused on Flowism, Flow to Your Dream, and Way of the 108 asking myself if it’s really what I’m about or if I’m stuck in another persona loop I created. Maybe this is true, but I had a nice quote about the Way of the 108.

The 108 isn’t a cult or religion and if it is it’s a religion of self-actualization through deliberate and consistent trial and error.

I’m not sure if I’m sold on the word “self-actualization”, but I like “deliberate and consistent trial and error”. I’m sold on Way of the 108 in it’s most basic form of having a cycle of reflection, planning, and action.

I really like everything that’s going on with the regular writing and reflecting via these blogs and videos. NaNoWriMo is basically super charging the writing and reflecting I do in my pen and paper journals.

Blog AI Image

The first thing I did was copy and paste everything above into ChatGPT and this is what it spit out:

I asked it to make it photorealistic and got this:

Then I asked it to make it in cyberpunk style and got this:

Then I decided to try Google Gemini and posted the full blog post and it told me it couldn’t do it for some reason. Then I used less and less of my blog post and it still wouldn’t work. The prompt got all the way down to this:

Make an image for my blog post. The blog is focus on writing and the process I’ve been going through to get better at writing each day.

It still said it couldn’t do it! Finally I wrote this “Generate an image for my blog post about writing,” and got the most generic image ever:

I decided to try the cyberpunk thing and got this:

That looked pretty cool so I decided to describe myself and see how it looked.

Pretty nice! Then I had this idea to have a bunch of the different things I’ve written about in the photo and gave it this prompt:

This is great. Instead of cyberpunk in the background, could you make it all of the different parts of life he’s thinking about? Things like his experience with technology from 1989 to now, his battle with bipolar 1, his experience with martial arts (tai chi and BJJ), his travels in Taiwan where he now lives, his experience being an activist for Black Lives Matter, his love of video games, etc.

I have written about Black Lives Matter, but I honestly only added that because I thought Gemini would say no. It didn’t say on and made this:

I thought that was pretty cool. Then I tried to get it to add 108 and Guanyin, it wouldn’t do Guanyin so I just asked it for a 108.

Then I asked it to throw in the Monkey King to see what would happen and it put in a little too much Monkey King. I kept the image above for the post.

I ended up throwing in the prompt above about adding different parts of my life into ChatGPT and it made this.

This is kind of interesting, but I think Gemini did a much better job. It’s interesting because Gemini started with much less information and building up from less seems to have worked better than starting with an entire blog post.

As a side note, while it couldn’t make me an image of Guanyin, it could make me an image of “a bodhisattava of compassion”. Guanyin is the bodhisattava of compassion. Asking that way basically gave me an image of Guanyin.