Shutdown

Hey everyone, those who follow me on social media, this won’t be a surprise, but I’m making a public announcement anyway.

On Saturday, 7/6, most of this website is going to be shut down. Nuzlocke stories, Rise of the Lunar Champion, the reviews, all of those are no longer going to be publicly available. The only public information will be my bio, which will be rewritten, my current projects, and my existing publication. I will leave the existing Swan Maidens info up because it is likely helpful for the artist and I don’t want to take that resource from them.

Alright, now that the announcement part is over, I’m sure you are wondering why this change. The short answer: AI. Here’s the longer answer.

I don’t absolutely hate AI. I think it can serve specific purposes, though the technology isn’t there yet and I don’t approve of anything that wastes water the way AI does. However, that purpose is not to replace art, be that actual artwork or writing. And every scrap of my writing that is up on WordPress is that much easier to use to train AI, and that bothers me deeply. I know of people plugging in fanfiction to get finished stories. I know of publishers trying to argue that they can upload writer’s manuscripts. I’m deeply unhappy about all of this.

There are arguments to be made that the only person I’m hurting is myself. I won’t be updating the blog enough to get traffic, experts will say, and with that, it’s that much harder to get recognition.

The age of the blog is already past us. You can google for me and I won’t come up because, yet again, AI. My tentative plan is to try an SM blitz and follow Amazon’s algorithm with my Flowers for an Empire series, to see if that nets me better results. (This means all six books have to be finished first though.) Would it be smarter to have a long history? Not in today’s age. Having a history doesn’t seem to help you anymore, just hurt when people go looking for ways to hurt you or make you out to be somebody or something you aren’t by taking things out of context.

The publishing industry wants people who have built in audiences now, but I’m a writer, not an aspiring celebrity. I just can’t do it. This blog was already pushing how much of my private life I felt comfortable with sharing.