In a year, it will all be different. You, me, Jimothy. That is the only thing guaranteed. We all set goals and objectives. I tend to start after the new year, once I get back into a weekly productivity groove. By February, a plan is in place, and the year starts rolling along. This year’s plans were going along just fine until we had to say goodbye to my uncle. He passed in April, but we did not say our goodbyes until June, when the family was able to all get together. He was smart, loved sports, and, most importantly, genuinely cared about each and every one of us. He had this great trading card collection that we were all in awe of as kids. He would buy us cards, often complete sets, which we always enjoyed receiving and going through. He was beloved by all of us. Even though we have had to deal with his massive card collection, it has been both an honor and a privilege to do so. But...
As his eldest nephew, I decided to do the research that was needed in order to properly inventory the collection and prepare the family to deal with it all. It would have taken all year if I had not, and there are implications with a collection that large. Taking those steps sooner rather than later was only logical, especially with my need to work on my plan for the year. I have loved doing the research and getting things ready for the next steps, for the most part, but the toll it’s taken on my plans for the year over the past two months has set me back. I am close to the point where I need not be so involved in the process and can return most of my focus to my plans for the year.
When my uncle fell in 2021, it marked the end of his normal life. He kept having falls and other health issues that prevented him from returning to his home. The family went into overdrive to get him into a place where he might be able to have the care he needed and some autonomy. This marked the first time I ever laid eyes on the index cards for his collection. We were blown away by its breadth and substance. He had gifted us some cool cards back in the day, but his collection was a true legacy. It has been an honor to work on it. It has also had me looking into the trading card business to see what we are dealing with.
You may or may not be aware of how on fire the trading card business is right now, but it is. Some are even comparing it to the NASDAQ in terms of volume and volatility. I found out there is this place near me called Cards HQ and that there is essentially a stock market-like index that adults and kids follow as if they are day traders on Wall Street. I did not see that back in 2021, and after 2023, I certainly wasn’t aware of how hot the market had become because I had been focused on AI and not the cards, while my uncle had a few years of relatively good health.
This year, I have been able to use AI to help me with my uncle’s collection in several ways, which has really helped speed things up with document creation, research, and numerous other points of contact. Then things can slow to a crawl because there is still the human element to deal with. Some of these moments go smoothly, but others bring things to a crawl. This is one reason why I prefer to work alone at times. Me + AI = Amazing. Me + AI + Others = Still Amazing, but sometimes less so.
Working on the collection has also helped me get used to negotiating and dealing with people again, something I have had to do less of since I turned my attention to AI in 2023. There are times when an actual phone call to a person is worth so much more than an email or a text, especially when you are first communicating with someone. Then there are those who just are not as good at communicating. The less I say about that, the better, but it is an issue when disparate people are involved in a project. And I do treat my uncle’s collection as a project—one that I worked on from late 2021 through mid-2023 and then again from this April to the present. No one knows the collection like I do.
It will feel weird when it is gone. Not just because of the five years I have been truly aware of the collection in its entirety, but also because of a lifetime of having been in awe of it. My uncle and that collection were both quite incredible, so it is fitting, I suppose, that they should both leave the family in the same year. He may have stopped collecting in the late ’80s, but my uncle put his heart into that collection, and he shared his passion for cards with us. It is unbelievable to see where the trading card hobby is now.
Beyond all of that, I have made some good progress with my creative pipeline—not as much as I would have liked, but enough to still feel on track to begin, hopefully, a steady flow of creative content by year’s end. What do I mean by steady flow, and what is this pipeline I am talking about?
I spent the first three months of the year taking classes focused mainly on agents and deepening my journey with Claude while also continuing my work with OpenAI. I regret not starting to use Claude sooner, but I am glad I began when I did because using them both together is magic.
Around the beginning of the year, I all but abandoned work on the three apps I had been working on. I hit a snag with 1st Draft when I began incorporating real-time features because of the browsers on cell phones. I was reluctant to make it a full app because of that issue, but had I done so, the issue would have gone away once it was an app and no longer a web app. Live and learn. By December, it just didn’t make sense to keep my main focus on apps. Yes, I wanted to help people with the apps, but they had chewed up so much time last year that I needed a change.
Besides, what I believed would happen with apps and software last summer while working on the app happened. I, like many people, pride myself on being able to imagine how things might work out, and then sometimes they do track similarly to what I imagined. But I felt last summer, as I was knee-deep in creating the app, that it was all futile and that very soon everyone would be able to create the software they needed for specific situations. And sure enough, that is now possible.
In December of last year, the buzz over agents hit fever pitch, and I began to dream of the second part of STORiCORE that I wanted to create. It focuses on my own writing work and transforming my written work into other formats. I have several dozen unproduced and unpublished stories. I decided I would build what I dreamed of back in 2024, where I, with the help of AI, could create comics, graphic novels, podcasts, trading cards, video games, interactive content, movies, and TV shows.
I would have liked to use all these other tools that others had created, but they each cost a lot of money to use. And instead of doing that, I decided to create my own creative pipeline. What the hell does that mean, Pitters?
It means taking what I learned from those classes, from building and working on several apps, from writing in different formats for 30 years, and from all the other things that I have learned in a lifetime, and using all of that in tandem with Claude and OpenAI tools to create a pipeline that helps me create my stories in different media. I have built it to help with comics, trading cards, graphic novels, podcasts, games, movies, and TV shows. The last three are meant to be updated later, once the tech is good enough and I am ready, but they are wired into the pipeline and just awaiting my go-ahead. Once I decide it is time, I will begin work on those formats. But not yet. No. I want to get as good as I can get with comics, graphic novels, and trading cards so that I feel confident I can return to them later without missing a beat. That has been my objective with everything I have learned through the years, AI and storytelling alike.
My focus since I began testing things with the pipeline has been on comics, graphic novels, and trading cards. The comics are a way to serialize the stories in the graphic novels. Why? So I can release three, four, five, or more digital episodes or comics over the course of months before releasing the graphic novel in digital and physical form. I am also thinking about doing different versions of the trading cards: 1) a story-based version, 2) a character-based version, and 3) a possible game version. Most of the first stories I anticipate telling through the graphic novel process are part of larger story universes. Some of them are ideal for gamification in many forms, and I intend to explore that. Graphic novels and story gamification are both things I have wanted to do since I first started writing screenplays and began imagining these worlds.
So much of my work has been inspired by anthology movies like CREEPSHOW and TRICK ’R TREAT, which tell more than one story. It has been one of my favorite formats, and I always saw them as either movies, TV series, or graphic novels. I did not possess the ability to create them on my own. Years ago, I tried to get an artist friend of mine to help me create my first graphic novel. It never went anywhere, and I began to think that all those stories would just have to be told as books. So, my movement into writing books was largely because I did not think I would ever get to make these stories as movies, TV shows, or graphic novels, and definitely not as the games I imagined but had done so little to explore. Games are something that I never thought I would ever have a chance to create, but they are also one of the most exciting media I look forward to exploring. Why? Because I want to put viewers into the stories... literally. Back then, the best option I had available was to write my stories as books. I am glad that I had to take that path because I learned so much and gained confidence.
I think of my novel writing a lot like my app-making. I did both because I could not do what I really wanted to do, which was create movies, TV shows, graphic novels, and video games. Back in 2023, I began the process of learning how to create a graphic novel. My first step was to create an illustrated version of MICHAELMAS. The image generators were not good enough for me to create a graphic novel. Some people were doing some amazing things at the time, but I was not skilled enough to pull off a graphic novel, so I focused on doing what I could do. That’s a good way of doing things for me because I often try to bite off more than I can chew, and reality spits me back out. So, I adapt and do what I can.
Could I start off by focusing on video? Sure. Some of the models have gotten very, very good. But I have a lot of things I want to do, and time has become more valuable recently. So, I decided it was best to focus on comics, graphic novels, and trading cards. As you now know, my uncle, who passed earlier this year, was an avid collector of trading cards. What I did not mention is that another of my uncles, who passed over a decade ago, was an avid comic book collector. He lost his entire collection in a flood. I can only imagine how devastated he was by this. When we would visit in the summer, we would love looking at the collections of both uncles. It was part of the fun of visiting in the summer.
It seems appropriate that I am focused on creating both comics and trading cards. I have even found a way to honor them both by offering a version of the trading cards that will be called the Two Uncles Collection. I am a big fan of non-sports trading cards. My uncle collected a few of them, but the one that is the most important to what I am trying to do is the MARS ATTACKS set from 1962. The cards tell a story. I will likely create multiple sets for each full story I make into a comic series or graphic novel. I will probably keep the Two Uncles Collection strictly focused on the story, while other sets may focus mainly on the characters or some kind of game. There are options, but I really like the story version. That is the reason I am doing all of this: to tell stories.
I have been reflecting on the past three years since I started using AI. It is interesting how it took me a while to figure out what I was building toward. But with the Story Pipeline, I have finally created something that will help me do what I have always wanted to do—something I started to dream about when I first started writing, something that was reawakened in 2023: the desire to create comics, graphic novels, cards, podcasts, interactive content, games, TV, and movies.
Thirty years ago, the sky was the limit, and I dreamed of massive projects that I wanted to see on the big screen. But after two decades, I began to doubt that they would ever exist as I had imagined them. Eventually, I had all but given up hope that my favorite stories of all time would ever be read by people, let alone be seen on a screen. I spent so much time over the past thirty years trying to get others interested in my work, with little to no interest, that I even grew tired of trying. 2024 was the last straw.
I created this amazing TV series that I envisioned using AI in different ways after normal production had wrapped. I imagined all sorts of cool things that could have been created using AI in one way or another: choose-your-own-adventure experiences, podcasts, cards, games, and interactive environments meant to be used with the Apple Vision Pro, a product that showed promise but that very few people seemed to want. No matter. I was imagining ways to use AI that would be viable, and with the creative pipeline, I could create most of it, if not all of it, on my own. I am focused on comics, graphic novels, and trading cards for now so I can generate enough content to help get the ball rolling.
I won’t be satisfied until, in a single year, I can create the graphic novel package, the movie or TV series, the fictional podcast, and interactive media like games and Vision Pro-like experiences that I imagined with THOUSAND SPRINGS. It need not be that TV series, but that would be a hoot. In the summer of 2024, I envisioned where AI was going and how I could use it to create something like what I envisioned for THOUSAND SPRINGS, then deliver all of it using only my story, the pipeline I created, and the best AI tools available. Delivering all that I laid out back then would be freaking awesome.
Based on how things are and how AI is developing, when do I think I could run a single story through the pipeline within one year? If I wanted to do it sooner rather than later, it would probably have to be a single movie to do it in a year. I think that could be done now. But the cost is going to be insane, especially for the movie and game parts. The rest is far more cost-effective, which is one of the main reasons I am doing what I am doing. The education part is baked into this as well because I would have to learn more about the tools used for some of these media, especially gaming.
I will probably start small with video and gaming because of the cost and the additional time needed for learning. The cost could continue to go up, and that has a major effect on long-form storytelling with video. Plus, I can’t afford to spend a week on each and every scene. I want to be an efficient director and say, “Cut,” and move on within one or two takes. If it takes 50 takes for every scene, it will cost a fortune and take forever. Not ideal and therefore to be avoided. That means it may be a little while before I even venture to attempt video in the pipeline. I will continue to test the models, but actually venturing to create a movie might take a few more AI video updates before we take that step. I have been wanting this ever since 2023, but I have learned to throttle back on my expectations for AI video because of the scale I would be working on.
I could possibly try it with HOUSE FLY. It is part of a larger story universe, but it has always been meant to stand alone. If I were to try to put one story through the entire pipeline, it would be one of the best options. The story is conducive to a game as well. It is the story that I am starting with anyway. I might as well make it the guinea pig for the entire pipeline.
Huh, not a bad idea. Do I think I could run it through the pipeline and be finished with it all by this time next year? I would need to raise funds to even attempt to do it in that time frame. Otherwise, it may be unlikely to happen within a year. But it could still be the first to go through the entire pipeline and emerge with a graphic novel, a movie, a game, and more.
I can foresee running HOUSE FLY through the pipeline several times just for the graphic novel, creating different versions as I improve the pipeline in different ways. I’ve already had to do that in a fragmented way numerous times. So, I can 100% see myself wanting to come back and redo HOUSE FLY a year after releasing the graphic novel. Whether I do it or not will be something else altogether.
Needless to say, I am excited by the progress I have made this year. It has helped me put the past year, as well as the past three years, into perspective. There were times last year when I was questioning my choices as I worked on the apps. Was I wrong to focus on apps ahead of my own creative work? If you had asked me in December of last year, I might have said yes. But what I learned last year is more important than the apps I worked on. I had wanted to learn more about coding for a decade. The one coding class I took back in 2015 did nothing but tell me that I still had a lot to learn. And I had wanted to learn more even before I awakened to AI in 2023. So, the work I did over the past three years has allowed me to harness all that I learned over the past thirty years and shape that knowledge into something that will help me achieve what otherwise would never have been possible. And you cannot put a value on that. All I can do is put my head back down, get back to work, and wish you all well on your own creative journeys.
