Week 1 — The Game Plan
My father used to say that a rich artist is always a dead one.
He wasn’t being cruel. He was being accurate. And for most of my life I filed that away as just one of those things you know but don’t want to think about too hard.
Then AI arrived. And suddenly every artist I knew was thinking about it very hard indeed.
Here is the thing though — where most people see doom and gloom, I see opportunity. Not because I am naive about what AI is doing. It is decimating careers. It is crushing the cost of producing the kind of work that used to take years to learn. It is generating comic slop at a volume that is going to make attention the scarcest resource on earth. I know all of that.
But I also know this: I am not depending on art alone. I am not depending on writing alone. I am depending on IP. Intellectual property. Something I own, something I control, something I can protect, license, pass on, and build into an institution that outlasts me.
And that changes everything.
This diary exists because of AI. It forced me out of a cocoon I had been comfortable in for too long. I had been creating — mythic fiction, comics, philosophy, health journals — quietly, privately, without documenting a single step of the process. And in an AI world, that is a problem.
Because here is what I have come to understand: you need a digital provenance. A documented human authorship trail. Receipts. Proof that a real person, with a real body, spending real money, over real time, made this work. Not a prompt. Not a generation. A person.
I have also learned — the hard way, more than once — that people will take the piss if you let them. If there is no record, there is no proof. If there is no proof, there is no protection. This diary is partly creative. It is also partly armour.
So here I am. Recording the journey. Because that is what artists need to do now — not just show pretty pictures, but show the work behind the work.
WHY NOW
I am going to be honest with you about something that does not come up enough in creative spaces.
The average healthy life expectancy in the UK is around 60 years old. Not lifespan — healthy life. The years where your body, your mind, and your energy are all working together and you have the capacity to pursue something demanding.
I have watched what happens when health goes. I have seen it repeatedly in my line of work, which is why I have reduced my hours. Health eats your time. It eats your money. It eats your brain space. When your body stops cooperating, you do not have the luxury of thinking about anything except the body. Everything else — the dreams, the projects, the things you were going to get to eventually — goes on hold. Sometimes permanently.
Observing mortality changes a person. It creates a particular kind of urgency that does not leave you. Every morning you wake up able to continue is something. Nothing in life can be taken for granted. Nothing.
I have the time right now. I have the money right now. I have my health right now. So I am doing it now. Before it is too late is not a dramatic statement. It is just arithmetic.
And at the end of all of this — the training, the documentation, the IP structure — what I am really building toward is a woodland. A farm. A piece of land I own where things grow. That is the dream. Here is to seeing if I can realise it.
WHY FORCE
I am a systems person. I need to understand the laws before I can work with them. FORCE works with physics — it is concerned with the actual forces acting on a body, gravity, weight, momentum, the way energy moves through a figure. It is not just technique. It is thinking about the function of a thing. Everything has a function. The human body has a function. Understanding that function is what makes a drawing feel alive rather than just accurate.
I also chose it because it is not easily replicated by AI. Not yet. Maybe not ever in the same way. AI leans toward the algorithm. It smooths things out. It tends toward the average of everything it was trained on. FORCE drawing is idiosyncratic by nature — one person’s interpretation will always differ from another’s. That is not a feature AI can generate. That is a human thing.