Don’t be afraid to create what you’ve always desired to make

Hello everyone!

This month, an important topic of conversation is inspiration. Specifically, how I came up with my unqiue and controversial ideas of the somatic harness, and integrating the concept of ‘Bikini Armor’ into my lore, which has been a heavy topic of discussion and stress in my head recently.

When it comes to creative writing, I believe that you shouldn’t limit yourself to what the community thinks is a good story vs. a bad one. Any story with the right components can be successful.

For me, this was my concept of the ‘Bikini Armor’ and ‘Half Nakedness’ in my lore and character designs. To be completely truthful, at first, I wasn’t really looking to create a meaningful story when I first started using AI to create these pieces of art 😂.

This was one of the first pieces of concept art I designed of Sahara. You can see flaws everywhere! 😂

But as I began to see myself for who I was at the time, and what I struggled with, the vision became clear.

I didn’t want to be like everyone else. I wanted to create something unique that had rarely ever been done before. So I made my characters out of my own reality at the time, both Raelin and Sahara bred with traits about myself and ideals I wished to obtain at the time that I created the World of Arthelia.

So instead of stripping away what the community thought embarressing, I integrated it further. I created the two laws of Arthelian Magic. What makes them different from other content and worlds out there is that both laws of magic collide at once.

A Sandorian character forced to go into battle with exposed flesh cannot rely on armor to stop an arrow, but tapping into magic to survive that arrow immediately triggers agonizing physical pain from within and scars from outside.

The difference is, you have to make the reason for a controversial topic legitament. It cannot be cliche, it cannot be easily disproven. It must be ingrained in the stories lore, history, and even the writing itself.

I hadn’t spent a lot of time on writing communities or even engaged with others back then. I was only around 17! So back then, I wasn’t really aware of the backlash I would receive because of the way I designed my characters. But not only that, AI was just kicking off, and I was getting hit from both sides. I don’t know if this is true of other Indie Authors out there, and frankly, I don’t want to know. But I’d used AI frequently in the organizational processes and aspects of the creative writing process. Not only that, I was creating image, after image, after image of AI Art.

I was obsessed.

So knowing that I was now serious about my ambitions to become a #1 bestseller, I began to strip away all the bad influence in my life. The AI that had almost entirely taken over my workflow, I lessened the creation of AI Concept Art, and I started researching what I should have from the beginning.

At this point, it was to late to go back. My characters were already made. My lore was already set in stone. A quarter of my first draft was completed.

I am not ashamed to report that this is an well-made depiction of Sahara. Her sexually aggressive nature makes this very accurate to how she actually looks in my head 🥵

So, I continued writing. Until I met someone that completely changed how I view the internet.

See, in the past, my views were somewhat lopsided in how the world worked and who I should vs. shouldn’t trust. My dad famously said, “I’m confused. You’re not trusting of people on the street, but people online—who you in fact can’t actually see—you trust them automatically.”

Maybe it wasn’t exactly like that, but the point is—he said this after I explained an incident that happened online with a local reddit user as I was looking for critique partners.

When I met them, they greeted me with friendly remarks about how they liked the idea of my characters and wanted to know more about my story (It was a pretty long conversation so I won’t get into details).

As we talked, they started getting more and more personal and begun comparing my story to my own personal life and even went as far to try and ask me if I was single! He asked me this on account to try and get me to do something evil to my non-existent partner (Evil of one of my characters was the topic of conversation).

Before that, I even summoned up the courage to drop some of my designs for my characters, which he laughed at.

After I told my dad about the situation, I began to ponder what good actually did come from it. And that’s when I realized, I was able to see the value of how opinions can shape stories online! He gave me the idea that manipulation said from the right person can be just as dangerous as a knife to the throat can be. With the correct circumstances, any threat, no matter how insignificant, can be dangerous.

Anyways, the point of all this is to show you that you cannot be afraid to write what you want. Everyone always says write what you want to write, not what you believe will be succesful.

This is the motivation behind why I keep pursuing this story. I refuse to fall to the level of others. To cower in the darkness of what is and isn’t okay to write.

As long as you can imagine it, anything is possible.