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AlysaTaladay

Secret Agent Magic Space Dinos
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Shapeshifting semi-magical dinosaur space agents. 1990s Southeast USA. A series of science-fantasy fiction that uploads around 2 chapters per month. A writer/artist's sketches and editorial process. Patreon is LIVE. $3USD Tier will also post to Ko-Fi as often as possible. Please understand that I will be doing what I can to minimize the amount of additional work I need to do outside of writing, due to work/life constraints. I'm trying to make this as easy as possible for myself but still entertaining for the rest of you (which means I will probably minimize my time on Twitter except to continue using it as night shift entertainment). www.patreon.com/ryozaealliance


ALL MATERIAL FOR FIRST THREE CHAPTERS is CURRENTLY UNLOCKED!

Check it out now! Sign up today to support the project!

Ko-Fi contributions are also welcome!

Your support will help contribute towards future perks, professional editing, publication, and the goal of seeing the whole series come to fruition. <3


* * * * *


DeviantArt users, you've been with me the longest. For you, I'll repost the Saga of Phases (From my "About" section on Patreon):


I am in the 5th phase of a project I started in 2010.

I didn't know what I was getting myself into, in those early years. The idle worldbuilding and feverish handwritten storytelling slowly snowballed into an entire series of books, before I even knew what I had done.


It quickly became apparent that I had created a monster, and I needed to decide what to do with it.


Phase 2 began. After typing up my first arc into a complete book, I put it through its paces, thoroughly analyzing its many flaws. Most notably, two major characters were deleted, after deciding that both were creating more problems than solutions, only to disappear and never return - not in my draft, outlines, or even notes.


Phase 3 was a nearly-complete rewrite of the book. Characters who had been developing in the background early on were now brought to the fore, filling in the gaps where the troublesome duo had been removed.


Phase 4 is complicated. We'll call it the Study Phase.

I am intensely grateful to the folks who workshopped my Frankensteined alpha draft (an alpha draft is one that is mostly finished, but not yet ready for beta readers).


The workshop was followed by a period of intense revision, deep frustration, and an attempt to get into an MFA (Master of Fine Arts) program. Ultimately, my application was not accepted, but I learned a lot from both those experiences - yes, just from the application process, which in itself fundamentally changed the way I edit.


I did an independent craft study instead, which should answer the question of where I vanished to in 2022. I've gotten better at managing this project, thanks to that effort, and better at understanding how to structure a novel - especially one connected to a longer series. I will discuss the books I used in a later post.


Phase 5 is a third and far more confident rewrite of the entire book, alternated with deeper studies of my characters and overall series (this last so I can keep track of where this is heading).


* * * * *


It's been such a long, crazy journey! To say nothing of the mental health issues I've had along the way, which I think I've been at least somewhat more transparent about here on DA, since I've been here the longest.


I cannot begin to tell you how much I appreciate everyone who has stuck with me throughout the years, and everyone who's gotten on board since. I'd really appreciate any contribution y'all can make to the success of this series. Stick around, buy me a coffee, subscribe to Patreon, tell me what you think, and tell your friends to get on board!


Together, we can turn this project into a finished series!

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Anti-AI Rant #2

1 min read

As artists we often argue over what art is or should be, splitting hairs over fine lines between form, color, composition, and especially content, but by God we can all agree: AI is not art. It doesn't even inspire conversations about art. It's just infuriating to realize that all the thought you imagined going into a piece is all a lie and never happened, and was just cooked up by a computer trained on art by real humans who worked hard to learn how it was done in the first place. Brush strokes? Fake. Light, Shadow, Form, Color, Texture? Fake. Composition? Fake, because the "artist" never took it into consideration. The computer made it, and the user said, "That's pretty. I'll save that one."


(Rant #1 is on my blog. I keep forgetting to actually post it because I kept hoping it would become an irrelevant tirade. It has not.)

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People seem to like my Marasuchus reference model, and that thing was so rough. 😅 Y'all. I'm gonna make a new one with updated source material. My model frankly does little to contribute to the paleoart community - nor was it meant to do more than show how I was using Photoshop to work around my frustration at the time.


Finding information on that particular animal is quite tricky and requires keeping up with the latest studies, as not a whole lot is really known about it, so I'll include some of that information and my latest thoughts in the new model. I'm already somewhat at odds with statements I made in the old one.


-- Disclaimer: I am not a paleontologist or paleoartist in any way. I've been out of the science world for a long time (for almost as long as I was in it ... God. Where is time going....). I'm just a fan and fiction writer who wanted to build a better Marasuchus. I also don’t draw skeletons particularly well, so I will also link to folks who did it better.


Stay tuned!

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Barring life's insanities, I will be uploading CHAPTERS to PATREON 10.31.2022.


From the website blog: "I’ve tried to start up Patreon once before, and it didn’t go well. In my defense, there was a lot less going on in my life, and I had overly-lofty goals because I was under the mistaken impression that Patreon is about offering lots of stuff. I don’t exactly have time to keep up with a whole lot of subscription tiers and fancy rewards, as I’m already stretching the limits of my available time and energy. But really, that’s not what it’s all about, is it? If you’re here, it’s because of the book. And that’s what ultimately matters.


"What I do have is a solid 1/3 of a book — that is to say my current edits lie somewhere around the 1/3 mark and I feel relatively confident with the present iteration, at least to the point where I’m not having to explain myself (as much*) when other people read it. That’s really what this is about, after all, isn’t it?"


[...]


"October 31st is the date I have in mind. I’m thinking of perhaps starting with an entry-level tier where you can just read the book, and a second tier where you can see some of the behind-the-scenes sort of stuff I do. Maybe get a closer look at the progress being done on parts 2 and 3. I’ve done a number of sketches to aid the development process, and wouldn’t mind doing a few more. I’ve also taken a number of pictures that I use for reference.


"I also want to do some videos about my editing process, as virtually all of it is done on paper, and it can get pretty chaotic at times. I spent 8 years learning to give and take feedback in arts settings, and I’ve had some thoughts about what my editing process has become over the years, and ways to overcome the fear of one’s own perceived failures. Ideas on what to do when you have a finished draft, and it feels like nothing is working properly. I find myself using a lot of art-related analogies when I talk about writing.


"I’d also like to spend a little time talking about the art of critique, and hopefully finding others to join in that conversation." [FULL POST]


Also, I have uploaded an excerpt of my work (it's already on DeviantArt, but this one is slightly modified because of Silver, and comes with some extra information and various thoughts about prologues).


Silver.


I feel I've at least partially explained him within the post, so I won't reinvent the wheel:


"2022 marks 30 years since his earliest iteration came about, and for 30 years I’ve been hearing proverbial records scratch to a halt whenever I’ve attempted to explain to him to anyone. At this point in his evolution as a character, not only am I tired of dancing around the subject of his identity, but doing so does him no justice (I apply the pronoun loosely, chiefly for lack of an available alternative in the English language of the 1990s, and also because for 30 years I’ve never called him anything else, although the term has been tenuously ambiguous for longer than I can remember)."


What is he? I'm not actually sure. Being that he's an animal in a human body, the Internet has not been helpful. I've used the terms hermaphrodite (biologically appropriate for an animal able to act as either reproductive sex, which I currently have written he can do, but I'm willing to change that) and intersex (which could be applied to his human form), and it is also possible that the term "gynandromorph" may be applied to him (which does not occur in humans, but has occurred in birds, and Silver is a dinosaur). Leaning heavily toward using the second and third term interchangeably, based on which body he's in.


A headache is probably also a good word for him, and many of my characters would agree. :)


If you'd like to follow along, I also post to Twitter with relative consistency and Facebook* and Ko-Fi less often than I'd like. I've basically dropped Tumblr. There's just no reason for me to be there. And stick around for Patreon on October 31st!


*I dropped Facebook off my phone because I was getting too drawn into the toxic threads. Many have argued that Twitter is just as bad, but here's the thing: Facebook is about evoking your emotions. It doesn't care if those are negative emotions. It just wants you to click on stuff and feel things. The "favorites" option is a joke. All my family members are "favorites," and it just wants to show me the latest drama going down in some clickbait news thread. I also got sick of the memes. The ones that people use to TELL each other as loudly as possible how they feel about stuff, passing judgement blindly and, again, using people's emotions to evoke their engagement and get more clicks. I swear I think the anger emoji was the worst thing they could have done (I still need one for "I'm confused as hell by this.").


I have lost more hours of my life staring at Facebook because I was hopelessly scrolling past the negativity to find something pleasant to click on. "Doom-scrolling," a good friend of mine calls it. I feel bad, because I have friends who follow my writing on Facebook, and I don't really post there much anymore, but it was really poisoning my life. It was also starting to affect my writing. I found myself spending more time writing in reaction to things I saw on Facebook and less time devoting myself to my actual characters and their world -- which has enough of its own internal issues without Facebook's help, thank you!


YES, Twitter can be awful. But it also has much more powerful features for getting rid of content you don't want to see, ESPECIALLY ON THE APP, and most of the content I engage with is based on whether I found it INTERESTING, not on emotional feedback. Most of the content I engage with is creative, and so I see a lot of art, artists, writers, and filmmakers. I follow celebrities based on whether they post things I want to see, not just because I like their work, and I'm rewarded with a fun, entertaining feed. When it starts to show me things I don't want to see, or I'm seeing too much of a certain topic, I tell it I don't want to see it anymore AND IT GOES AWAY.


You are what you read. If all you read is toxic, negative social media threads, you eventually fill up your world with negative ideas. But it turns out the REAL WORLD isn't like that. The people I see every day are generally much more easy-going, and some are certainly more interesting to listen to. Putting down Facebook allowed me to liberate myself. Reading actual literature is much more helpful to me as a writer.


Case in point: if you spend all your time engaged with toxic content online, you might even turn into JK Rowling and push out a badly written book that's mostly fictional Twitter threads. (What the hell, even???)

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Let me begin by noting how reassuring it is that every writer's journey is fundamentally different, and how normal it has become for us to struggle with the pressures of working day jobs, especially in places like the US where cost of living is soaring next to stagnating wages -- and yes I know mine are on par, but I recognize what a mixed blessing is to have the rare job that keeps up with the markets. Mixed because it's hard to leave a job like that. Ya feel me?


That said, halfway through Draft 7, something happened to the story, and I had to make a few fundamental changes at the beginning, and STILL have not fixed the second half from Draft 6 or figured out how to make the ending work (I wrote the whole series almost at once, in 2 amazing years of feverish, frenzied, handwritten stream-of-consciousness, THEN split it into individual books.).


Why the changes?


Because I was trying to write at least three different stories at once, and it worked elegantly in my head at the time, but as things edge closer to a form of completion, some things just had to go. The entire plot of using a multiverse/parallel reality in place of everyday linear time travel had to go.


I'm still keeping aspects of the parallel timeline, and it's still out there af, but I think it's going to work much better.


The thing is, EVERYONE was telling me to drop the multiverse story, but everyone had ideas on how to do that.


Well.


I am the one who wrote the orginial 1200pg+ draft, so the only person who was going to be able to make this work was always me, because I wrote the first 4 arcs in particular based on the assumption of the multiverse story.


I had a few crash courses in story organization, going BACK to working on the complete series and the first book at the same time.


A lot of details were modified.


A lot was ironed out.


Much remains to be seen down the road.


And there remains the issue of HOW TO PUBLISH.


My hope has been that a project this ambitious would be seen as promising in the eyes of an agent. My understanding is that it will likely be seen as a risk.


I have looked into hiring an editor, looking for an agent, re-workshopping the book (which will be very difficult to do at my current job, since I can tell you I started this job during my last workshop, and I barely kept up).


Options have narrowed down to Patreon and Substack. I like Patreon better because I do have some sketchwork which accompanies this project, and additional content, including advice I've learned over the years and various extra scenes I write on occasion. Who knows? My profile needs to be rebooted, so bear with me! It's coming!!


I will offer a few chapters for free, before asking readers to pay. Every dime supports this project and helps towards the dream of hiring a professional editor and perhaps even doing this full-time. In addition, some of my content can get quite dark, so I will not be able to post it publicly, anyway.


To those who want to call this a hobby, or ask that I provide everything for free (more of an issue, perhaps, on WordPress than DeviantArt): Art is a hobby for me. Music is a hobby. Theater is an interest. This is not a hobby. I'ma kill that here. This is 12 years of work, not including 4 years of semi(?)-formal education in Creative Writing (arts high school major), 4 years of formal fine arts education, the 2020 workshop, countless hours spent in online communities, and the past year spent in the effort of self-education after choosing a pair of workshop books that proved immensely helpful.


This is not a hobby. My time is not free. I quite literally cannot afford to make it free. This is my passion, but as any artist these days will readily tell you, that doesn't mean it should go unpaid.


(My understanding is that this is a weird thing to have to explain in some countries. In short, we have this totally sickening corporate-driven cultural mindset in the USofA that it's not work if you're not miserable and struggling, and if someone else makes it look effortless, either you're not doing enough to earn your keep or the job's too simple to be worth your pay, and you should both be doing more. And if you want to argue this concept and tell me I'm a "lazy Millennial," then really this series isn't going to be your thing, anyway. And if you haven't already heard 10,000 other iterations of these and similar sentiments on social media, then I really don’t know where you've been.)


That said, I really can't wait to share my creations with you all. I'm very excited to see this shaping up. The first chapters are a mere glance from completion, so I hope everyone enjoys them!


Until then,

A. Taladay 🦖🦕🦚🪶🦅

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