I've always liked starting work at this time. It's early enough to not feel late and late enough to not feel early. A sweet spot if you will. I'm going to try and capture my thoughts as they come now. Sometimes it can take a moment to get into the flow. But when I get going, it feels wonderful. I like writing with coffee and for some reason I've started smoking cigarettes along with it. Maybe I'm trying to be like the movies. The influence of movies is incredible, I used to watch them all the time. I'd bunk off school a lot and just watch them. I remember going through a phase of only watching movies about getting rich, which transpired into all manner of material on the subject. It eventually led to YouTube tutorials on how to make money, which led to my first enterprise - selling sweets. I wasn't very good at it, and I'm still not. Perhaps I was just using them as some sort of vicarious experience. I did gleem a lot from the stuff I watched though and my enterprise eventually left the school playground to the internet. I struggled for months to make my first website, but eventually got it up and running. The first website was a shop selling sweets, though that idea was from a friend of mine who eventually became my partner in business. His influence was heavy. My original idea was to sell vapes, they didn't even have flavoured ones back then and the product was strictly for people trying to quit cigarettes. I sometimes wonder what that enterprise would have become with the way vape sales has gone through the roof in the last decade. It would have been one hell of a wave to ride. In all likelyhood, I think a vape enterprise would have made me a very rich man. But I didn't listen to my intuition back then, as I was full of self-doubt.
In a way though, I'm glad I didn't taste success back then. My life since has featured a bunch of humbling failures which have led to me no longer being a complete prick. I've had jobs that would be considered bottom of the barrell, at least I personally viewed them as such. I've worked with some of the thickest people on the planet, and come to the conclusion they're no different to me. When I first worked these kind of jobs I thought I was somehow above it, which is a ridiculous notion. I'm not above anything of anyone. If you think that you are, you have a sickness. Society is a system, and each human is a cog within it. To say that any one cog is unecessary is to fundamentally misunderstand how systems work. Sure, some parts may be less crucial, but they're all necessary. So called 'bad jobs' are a great teacher. They taught me the importance of mentality. Within months of me shifting from hating my job to liking it, doors seemed to open for me. I suppose I cannot prove that this is anything other than coincidence, but at the time it felt as though the change in mentality was in some way linked to receiving new oppurtunites.
Now I work remotely, in a slightly better job. It's still very boring to me though and I don't make as much money as I'd like to. I'm not even sure how much money I'd like to make. Currently I earn minimum wage, which works for now. The problem is I have a boss, and I'd like to change that. I've developed a fair few skills over the past decade that I would like to utilise in my next enterprise. Namely, drawing, writing, and video production. Among a few other ancillary skills like animation, marketing, design, and various other creative areas. I do believe I can do it on my own, I'm just in a bit of a desperate position. Over the past three years I've posted stuff I've made on the internet under various accounts and websites with varying degrees of success. Now for the first time, I'm releasing projects as myself. Or at least under my actual name. It's been liberating. These very words are part of it. This is where things usually start for me. I write until I come across an idea that sparks something. I can't exactly describe what I'm talking about and I think that fact is inherent so I no longer attempt to - I just do it.
Recently, my work has took the form of comics. Which is to say some sort of visual sequence, sometimes accompanied with words and other times not. I have been trying to shoe-horn videos into the work but it's hard and I haven't seen much success in that realm as of yet. Images would work, but for virality videos are seeming more and more necessary in going viral. Don't get me wrong, I don't want to be famous. I just want to make enough money so that I can do this full time. Instead of my current job which consists of crawling through repetitive CV's and having calls with indivuals that stand out to me as worthy. What an awful position. Judging other humans for a living. I'd imagine this could develop a god complex in some individuals that call themselves 'recruiters', but not me. I refuse to believe I am worthy of the position. I have no idea what I'm talking about for the most part, especially in the industry I'm in. Perhaps I know slightly more than the layman. But when I'm in the room with someone actually in the industry, it must be startlingly obvious.
Anyway, the reason I'm writing is to find some sort of honest narrative. It's easier said than done, perhaps it'll get easier the more I do it (as with most things). I'm trying to split my time into chunks of writing, drawing, and production. I'm starting with an equaly split of one hour of each (three hours in total), each day. I'm in the last fifteen minutes of the writing phase so I'd better forge some semblance of a narrative now. Let's start on easy mode by getting AI to turn what I've written into a four part story.
My prompt is: Turn this md document into a four part narrative (one short prose sentence per part) that begins with scene setting/exposition (part one) then a begining (part two), middle (part three), and end (part four). Add them to the numbered list below:
- A young man sits in his front garden at nine in the morning, wondering if there is still time to become the person from his dreams of yesterday.
- Memories of half-built websites, abandoned schemes and a never-launched business' drift past like ghosts of timelines where he should have listened to his intuition instead of his doubt.
- Years spent in bottom of the barrel jobs, shoulder to shoulder with people he once thought he was better than, quietly sand down his arrogance until all that's left is a stubborn belief that the only honest way forward is to make something of his own.
- As the clock runs down on another morning, he sketches a fragile plan. Piece by piece, the story he is writing will replace the job that is slowly but surely taking his soul.
Now, let's review what we've got seeing as there are ten minutes left on my timer. It's quite dull let's be honest, and not exactly what I was looking for. I didn't want a re-write of what I was looking for, more for the AI to use it as inspiration to tell a new story. Now we seem to be getting somewhere. My hour is up, so it looks like we're going with this one. I think I'm going to keep this one simple - four pictures on equally sized rectangles fitting tightly on an A4 sheet. Ink and colour pencils only. The text will be verbatim what I've had written above, in rectangles.